Branson offers a $25 million prize for reducing global warming
Pastor Dale Morgan
Branson offers a $25 million prize for reducing global warming*
By James Kanter
Friday, February 9, 2007
Imagine, if you will, a giant vacuum cleaner for the atmosphere.
That is what the British billionaire Richard Branson and the former U.S.
Vice President Al Gore seemed to appeal for on Friday, when they
announced a $25 million prize to overcome what could be the biggest
challenge faced by humankind: To reduce the huge quantities of planet-
warming gases that have collected in the atmosphere since the dawn of
the industrial revolution.
"We are now facing a planetary emergency," said Gore, the author of "An
Inconvenient Truth," a book and the subject of an Oscar-nominated
documentary film about global warming. "Things which would never
otherwise have been entertained as possibilities now must be explored,
that's really the reality," Gore said at a news conference in London.
Branson called on governments to match the money he had offered for the
prize, which he likened to previous efforts by governments and
benefactors to encourage great leaps forward in technologies, like a
competition from the British government that led to a method of
estimating longitude accurately, saving thousands of lives at sea.
Gore, who with Branson, will be one of six judges, said the prize was
intended for a project that would be entirely different from
technologies currently under development that capture and store large
amounts of carbon dioxide from heavy emitters like coal- fired
electricity stations.
Gore also said the prize-winner would have to develop a project that
would be more than a stop-gap step against climate change. "This is a
very new and different way of thinking," Gore said, referring to the
removal of carbon dioxide already loose in the atmosphere. Gore had
emphasized in his film that personal and political will were the only
missing factors in limiting smokestack and tailpipe emissions linked to
rising temperatures. But on Friday, Gore also made plain that big
technological gaps needed filling, too.
Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Gore, said in an e-mail message,
"There's no shift in thinking." Kreider added, "There's just only so
much you can put in a 90-minute film!"
Even so, experts in climate change said the prize money might be better
spent on projects with more of a chance of success, like building
cleaner engines for cars, and ensuring that other far more plausible
technologies eventually reached the marketplace.
"This project may hold particular appeal in the aviation industry as
there really are no other viable, cleaner fuels in the pipeline," said
Steve Rayner, a professor of science and civilization at Oxford
University. "I think that's why Branson has latched onto this."
Rayner said plans for a vast extraction device to clean carbon from the
air — a so-called synthetic tree — had been developed by Klaus Lackner,
a professor at Columbia University. But Lackner's project had never left
the drawing board, said Rayner, who added that one of the only existing
technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air was on nuclear
submarines, where the crews sometimes spent months underneath the ocean.
Steve Howard of the Climate Group, a nonprofit organization that Branson
said would help judges with their deliberations, acknowledged there were
currently few technologies on the horizon, but he hoped that innovators
and entrepreneurs would now come forward to compete for the prize.
Branson denied any hypocrisy in announcing the prize because of the role
that his airlines, which include Virgin Atlantic, play in contributing
to carbon dioxide emissions. Branson, however, vowed to keep his
airlines in the skies because his competitors would simply snap up the
business and prevent him from pursuing cleaner aviation initiatives like
towing jets to runways, and from reinvesting his profits into developing
renewable sources of energy.
Air transport represented about 3.5 percent of global greenhouse gas
emissions in 1990 but that figure could grow rapidly to about 15 percent
by 2050, according to the Aviation Environment Federation, based in
London, citing United Nations figures. Cars currently represent a far
larger problem but many environmentalists say that aircraft release more
harmful pollutants.
Branson's judges would award the "Virgin Earth Challenge" prize money to
any individual or group developing a commercially viable technology
capable of removing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at the
rate of at least one billion tons a year over a 10-year period. The
prize, which could be divided, would be open for five years, and judges
would meet annually to determine whether any projects merited the award.
After five years, if no prize had yet been awarded, the judges would
decide whether to extend the competition.
The other judges are: James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies; James Lovelock, a British environmentalist
and developer of a way of understanding earth science called Gaia
theory; Crispin Tickell, a director at the James Martin Institute for
Science and Civilization at Oxford; and Tim Flannery, an Australian
scientist and conservationist.
Virgin officials said that the money for the $25-million prize would
come from Branson's personal wealth.
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