The Abrams Clean Tech Report

 

Branson and Gore: $25M for Cleaner Air – The “Earth Challenge”

Saturday, February 10th, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/business/worldbusiness/10climate.html?ref=business.  THIS is great.  I’ve gathered as much info as I’ve found this a.m. on this, from CBS to Canada.com, so this is all that I’ve got at the moment on it, but pass it on…we know enough bright minds amongst us all…someone one of us knows can surely come up with something!

A couple of points:

-The project must be different from technologies currently under development that capture and store large amounts of carbon dioxide from heavy emitters like coal-fired electric plants.

-The prize will initially only be open for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges including Branson, Gore and Tickell as well as U.S. climate scientist James Hansen, Briton James Lovelock and Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery.

-The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion tonnes of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years — with US$5 million of the prize being paid at the start and the remaining US$20 million at the end.

-If no winner is identified after five years the judges can decide to extend the period.

“This is the world’s first deliberate attempt at planetary engineering,” Flannery said via videolink from Sydney. “We are at the last moment. Once we reach the tipping point it will have been taken out of our hands.

-He said 200 gigatonnes of carbon had accumulated in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, raising concentrations by 100 parts per million. The challenge was to find ways of bringing that back down again.  http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=b327a867-37b5-45fa-9f22-2d255fed4a2c
Branson, chairman of the wildly successful Virgin Group, said the prize will go to whoever comes up with the most innovative way of sucking harmful greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.  To quote Richard Branson, as per an article by CBS”The Earth cannot wait 60 years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today,” Branson said at the news conference. “The Earth cannot wait 60 years.”  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/09/tech/main2452384.shtml

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