Energy transition businesses have been urged to step up and fight for laws that benefit themselves after decades of "ferocious" mining and resources bosses getting the upper hand.
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Business executive and philanthropist Alan Schwartz has announced a climate initiative called the Transition Accelerator to push for change.
In a keynote address at an investor forum in Melbourne, the chair of Trawalla Group said the carbon-fuelled economy was built on thousands of laws, regulations and practices.
"These are the rules of the game that need to change," he said on Wednesday.
Mr Schwartz said he was "an accidental activist".
"To be blunt, I don't really understand politics. In my bones, I am a businessman."
But he said recent decades had eroded his youthful confidence about following the rules of the economic system that were meant to create wider benefits as well as profits.
"Like many in this room I have grown alarmed - I might say repulsed - by the ferocious PR campaigns and behind-the-scenes lobbying of the coal and oil companies to safeguard their profits, even at the expense of the health of our planet," he said.
In 2010, the Minerals Council got a "particularly big bang for their buck" when they invested $25 million in a 54-day campaign against a mining tax, which saved Australian mining companies $28 billion in taxes, he said.
Businesspeople troubled by the state of the world cannot simply sit in the boardroom, he said.
"On some issues that are vital to the health of our society, we must get political, and seek to change the rules of the game."
The Transition Accelerator will provide support to any company or investor seeking to understand any barriers to net zero projects and to take the commercial and political steps needed to overcome those obstacles.
It will be a membership-based organisation, funded initially by philanthropy, whose members are businesses and climate groups or other non-government organisations.
He said electric vehicles, anerobic digesters that make biogas, green buildings and ending subsidies that still go to fossil fuel companies while clean initiatives struggle for support are among the opportunities.
"Let us kit up together and enter this game," he said.
"The winners, I am sure, will be our society, our planet, and the generations to come."
Australian Associated Press
