Sir Richard Branson launches US$25 million climate prize

Millions of dollars are on offer for the scientist who comes up with the best way of removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson launched the competition today alongside former US vice-president Al Gore.

A panel of judges will oversee the prize, including environmentalist James Lovelock and Nasa scientist James Hansen. Sir Richard said humankind must realise the scale of the crisis it faced.

"The Earth cannot wait 60 years. Unless we can devise a way of removing CO2 from the earth's atmosphere we will lose half of all species on earth, all the coral reefs, 100 million people will be displaced, farmlands will become deserts and rain forests wastelands. [...] We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today. [...] I want a future for my children and my children's children. The clock is ticking." --Sir Richard Branson.

Branson said if the planet was to survive, it was vital to find a way of getting rid of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. He said he believed offering the US$25/€19.2 million "Earth Challenge Prize" was the best way of finding a solution.

Top scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due to human activities like burning fossil fuels, putting millions at risk from rising sea levels, floods, famines and storms.

Overseeing the innovations triggered by the Prize are James Hansen, a noted climate scientist and head of the Nasa Institute for Space Studies; the inventor of "Gaia theory" James Lovelock; UK environmentalist Sir Crispin Tickell; and Australian mammologist and palaeontologist Tim Flannery. They are looking for a method that will remove at least one billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere.

'Moral challenge'
Al Gore, the former presidential candidate turned environmental campaigner, joined the Virgin boss. He said: "Up until now, what has not been asked seriously on a systematic basis is, is there some way that some of that extra carbon dioxide may be scavenged effectively out of the atmosphere? And no one knows the answer to that." Gore added that it is a challenge to the moral imagination of humankind to actually accept the reality of the situation we are now facing:
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"We're not used to thinking of a planetary emergency, and there's nothing in our prior history as a species that equips us to imagine that we, as human beings, could actually be in the process of destroying the habitability of the planet for ourselves."

His recent film, An Inconvenient Truth, focused on global warming. Carbon capture and storage is already a key area of research.

Carbon sequestration
Scientists have been looking into removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and storing it in oil and gas fields, injecting it deep into the ocean, or chemically transforming it into solids or liquids that are thermodynamically stable.

However, these methods have raised concerns, notably because of the possibility of leakage from the storage sites and fears that C02 dissolved in large quantities in the ocean might harm marine ecosystems.

Other scientists are also looking at schemes that might "scrub" the air of CO2, collecting the gas for safe storage; but many critics say the energy required to achieve this would make such an approach self-defeating.

Sir Richard Branson has already pledged to invest US$3/€2.3 billion in profits from his travel firms, such as airline Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, towards research into renewable energy technologies.