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Branson Offers $25m Climate Prize

Sir Richard Branson has teamed up with Al Gore to offer a $25 million (£12.5 million) prize to tackle climate change. The prize will be awarded to the first person or group to come up with a workable solution for removing large amounts of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are the main gasses responsible for climate change. The Virgin Earth Challenge Prize has been designed to offer an incentive for inventing a way of removing significant amounts of these gasses from the atmosphere.

The winning design must remove at least 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere every year, for at least 10 years, without major side effects and must be commercially viable. The removal must be long-term and have tangibly benefits to the Earth's climate. It is hoped that governments will match the prize fund.

Presently, there are several methods for extracting and storing carbon dioxide from exhaust gasses. However, no proven method yet exists for removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for about 20 years before it is eventually re-absorbed by plant life or dissolved into the oceans. This means that even if we totally ceased emitting carbon dioxide from tomorrow, carbon dioxide emitted today will continue to warm the planet for the next two decades. A system for removing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would have the potential of reducing this delay, buying us valuable time.

A panel of judges, including NASA scientist James Hansen, British scientist James Lovelock, British Diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell and scientist Tim Flannery, will join Branson and Gore every year to decide if a design has been made that fits the bill.

Prizes have been effective in the past for motivating individuals and groups to develop solutions to difficult problems. In recent years, a prize was shared by two American companies who were the first to map the Human Genome. Branson compared his challenge to a similar one launched by King George III in 1675 to come up with a way of accurately measuring longitude. 60 years passed before a winning design was made, by English clockmaker John Harrison.

"The Earth cannot wait 60 years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today," said Branson. "I want a future for my children and my children's children. The clock is ticking."

Speaking about the ideas behind the challenge, Branson went on to say, "How could we get every young, creative, innovative thinker, every inventor and every scientist to put their minds to it? Could it be possible to find someone on Earth who could devise a way of removing the lethal amount of CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere? The challenge we are laying down to the world's brightest brains is to devise a way of removing greenhouse gases - at least the equivalent of one billion tonnes of carbon per year, and hopefully much more. (The winner) will have the satisfaction of saving thousands of species and possibly even mankind itself. (They would) also be awarded the largest prize ever offered - the Virgin Earth prize and the $25m that comes with it."

Al Gore said, "There are some research teams that have begun to look at possible avenues for solving this problem but it is right at the beginning. This is right at the cutting edge. It's a challenge to the moral imagination of humankind to actually accept the reality of the situation we are now facing. 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. 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."

Al Gore, ex-US presidential candidate for the Democrats, is the creator of the critically acclaimed documentary-film "An Inconvenient Truth", which shows the dangers posed by climate change. Gore and Branson also teamed up last year to provide $3 billion for research into climate change and renewable fuels.