John O'Brien (businessman)

O'Brien previously led Deloitte's work on climate in Australia.^[3] Before that, he was the managing director of Australian CleanTech, which acted as the Australian representative for the Global CleanTech Cluster Association. He was also a non-executive director of Novarise Ltd, an ASX listed company which recycles polypropylene waste in China.^[4][5] O'Brien entered the Australian energy sector in the 1990s and worked for Origin Energy for nine years.^[6] He had previously worked in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and Canada, where he held various roles in the oil and gas industries and engineering consultancy.^[4] O'Brien lectured in leadership and entrepreneurship at the University of Adelaide and was a member of the Premier’s Climate Change Council in South Australia.^[7] He has been a member of the board of several CleanTech companies involved in wind farm development, biosensors and plastic recycling. He has served on the board of Renewables SA and as a member of the Clean Technology Innovation Program Committee at Innovation Australia.

O'Brien is the author and editor of the book Opportunities Beyond Carbon - Looking Forward to a Sustainable World, which was published in 2009 by Melbourne University Press.^[8] He has since published two further books, Visions 2100: Stories from Your Future in 2015 and Stories from 2030: Disruption-Acceleration-Transformation in 2021,^[9] on the topic of effectively communicating environmental challenges through positive storytelling. Since 2012, O'Brien has written frequently about the cleantech sector for the website, Renew Economy.^[10]