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Virgin Airlines boss Sir Richard Branson has announced a multi-million pound prize for the best way of removing thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The prize - around £10 million ($28.5 million) - will go to the most convincing invention for actively absorbing and storing the globally warming gas in the atmosphere.
Sir Richard has drawn up a distinguished panel of judges to oversee the prize, including James Lovelock, the inventor of the Gaia theory; James Hansen, the Nasa researcher who first warned the US Government of climate change; and Tim Flannery, the acclaimed Australian zoologist and explorer.
Last September, Sir Richard announced at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York that he would invest all his profits from his five airlines and train companies - which he estimated to be US$3 billion over 10 years - into ways of developing energy sources that do not contribute to global warming.
"Our generation has inherited an incredibly beautiful world from our parents and they from their parents. It is in our hands whether our children and their children inherit the same world. We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment," Sir Richard said at the time.
Sources close to the new environment prize say Sir Richard is serious about trying to encourage ideas that bring down concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or at least slow down the rate of growth expected over the coming century.
The technology is called "carbon capture and sequestration" and it involves absorbing carbon dioxide gas by, for example, chemically combining it with minerals to produce an inert substance that could then be buried either underground or in deep-sea deposits where it would remain for 1000 years or more.
The idea is already being used to develop ways of capturing carbon dioxide emitted from power stations but Sir Richard's prize will concentrate on stimulating ways of capturing carbon dioxide from the general atmosphere, a much harder task because the gas will be in lower concentrations compared with the emissions from a power station chimney.
Sir Richard is known to have compared the idea of his technology prize to the famous prize established in the 17th century for the first person to devise a method of estimating longitude accurately to prevent ships getting lost at sea.
The longitude problem was eventually solved by John Harrison, a self-taught Yorkshire clockmaker.
- INDEPENDENT
