Link: Technology Review: Billionaire Offers $25 Million to Save Earth!.
Billionaire Richard Branson is on a tear these days. Last year at Bill Clinton's Global Initiative meeting in New York, Branson announced that he would spend $3 billion of his Virgin profits to research and develop renewable-energy technologies. Now he has announced a $25 million prize for anyone who creates a system that removes at least one ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in each of ten years.
Removing carbon dioxide is key here. Anyone who has read global-warming studies or seen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth knows that even if we stop increasing greenhouse gases and level off carbon dioxide, much damage has already been done. Nearly every scientist in the field agrees that human consumption of fossil fuels has already caused global temperatures to climb and ancient ice in Greenland and Antarctica to melt as seas slowly begin to rise.
A panel of environmentalist heavyweights will judge Branson's prize: former vice president Al "Inconvenient Truth" Gore; Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute; James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory; Australian conservationist Tim Flannery; and Crispin Tickell, director of the Policy Foresight Programme at Oxford University, UK.One contender might be Craig Venter, cosequencer of the human genome and the man Time magazine once called the "bad boy of science." Venter has been working with Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith to build from scratch a synthetic organism they want to program at the DNA level to consume carbon dioxide. Venter and Smith have been quiet about the project recently, suggesting that they are having a tough time.
As interesting as the prize is this burgeoning age of billionaires doing the work that nations used to.
