Slashdot Log In
$25M Bounty Offered for Global Warming Fix
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Feb 09, 2007 04:39 PM
from the bring-me-the-head-of-global-warming dept.
from the bring-me-the-head-of-global-warming dept.
SaDan writes "Richard Branson is offering $25M as a bounty for a fix to global warming. The person or organization that can devise a method to remove at least a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere will be able to claim the bounty. There are a few catches, of course. There can't be any negative impact on the environment, and the payment will come in chunks. A 5 million dollar payout will be paid when the system is put into place with the remainder of the bounty to be paid after 10 years of continuous use."
Related Stories
[+]
Science: Geo-Engineering to stop Climate Change 551 comments
MattSparkes writes "Following the latest report of the United Nations climate change panel, there has been a flurry of renewed interest in so-called geo-engineering. This is the theory of using technological schemes to stop climate change. These can range from sun-shades orbiting the Earth, to pumping millions of tonnes of sulfur into the atmosphere to the bizarre idea of painting the ground white to reflect more light. Let's reduce our emissions now, before I have to go and paint my roof bright white." Thanks to jamie for pointing out another potential solution of seeding the southern oceans with iron to spur plankton growth.
[+]
IT: $16,000 Bounty for Sendmail, Apache Zero-Day Flaws 173 comments
Famestay writes "Verisign's iDefense is putting up a $16,000 prize for any hacker who can find a remotely exploitable vulnerability in six critical Internet infrastructure applications. The bounty is for a zero-day code execution hole on the following Internet infrastructure technologies: Apache httpd, Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) daemon, Sendmail SMTP daemon, OpenSSH sshd, Microsoft Internet Information (IIS) Server and Microsoft Exchange Server. 'Immunity founder Dave Aitel, who also purchases flaws and exploits for use in the CANVAS pen testing tool, says its doubtful iDefense will get any submissions from hackers. "It's very hard to exploit [those listed applications]," Aitel said. "IIS 6 hasn't had a public remotely exploitable bug in it. Ever." Several other hackers I spoke to had very much the same message, arguing that $16,000 can never equate to the amount of work/expertise required to find and exploit a hole in the six targeted technologies.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Plant Respiration (Score:5, Insightful)
Either that or find a way to build large scale air scrubbers that simulate plant respiration (stripping the carbon atom off a CO2 molecule and releasing O2), then compress the pure carbon into bricks for use in industry. If it could be done cheaply enough it might not just be eco-friendly, but profitable as well, with the $25 million payment as a bonus.
- Greg
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Insightful)
We cannot possible reserve all of the arable land necessary to plant enough trees to scrub the carbon dioxide we are throwing into the atmosphere, because we need that land for other purposes. As the human population continues to grow, the need for developed land increases. This trend is not likely to reverse itself.
A carbon scrubbing solution that would actually be workable would have to take up much less space than trees would to produce the same result.
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:4, Insightful)
algae.
It's been suggested that some of our simplest consumers of CO2 are also the most efficient. A modified algae that would flourish in parts of the ocean where it is sparse today would tie up a lot of lose carbon and ultimately send it sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ideally, you'd run the process on solar energy I suppose. Hmm... an air scrubber that runs on solar energy.
Sounds suspiciously like a tree!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How much carbon dioxide does a single tree consume in a year of respiration and how many trees could be planted for $25 million?
- Depends on the trees. I'm no expert but I'll bet $25 million worth of any plant is going to consume far far less than a billion metric tonnes of CO2. Plus you don't plant wholly grown trees so you've got to wait however many years for them to mature before getting the real benefit - time we don't have. Also, planting $25 million worth of trees would most likely be considered eco-unfriendly since you'd need to find a pretty huge amount of space that isn't already developed - meaning that presumably you'd
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Insightful)
C'mon, $25 million is nothing compared to something like global warming. If global warming could really be solved for $25 million someone would have done it by now. Al Gore spent more than $25 million on his presidential campaign. You think maybe he would have gotten more publicity if he instead chose to spend the money solving global warming? The petroleum industry probably spends way more than $25 million a year lobbying against Kyoto. Surely if they could make Kyoto moot by solving the problem of global warming they'd do that instead. There are probably single beachfront homes that are worth $25 million. If the problem could be solved that cheaply, surely one of those homeowners would have made it happen. There are hundreds of billionaires in the United States. $25 million would be a drop in the bucket to solve one of the biggest problems of our lifetime.
$25 million, to solve global warming, is a joke.
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason this process works so well in plants is that frankly, that's not how it works in plants at all. While photosynthesis involves the net breakdown of carbon dioxide and water to form oxygen and glucose, it's a complex set of separate, but connected reactions, rather than just using sunlight to blast oxygen atoms off carbon dioxide. For instance, the oxygen produced doesn't come from carbon dioxide- it comes from water split by sunlight, with the help of an enzyme. The carbon dioxide that enters plants is never actually split apart- it's simply fixed into an organic molecule, and used to generate a glucose precursor. Breaking down carbon dioxide to its component elements is simply too energy intensive.
I suppose that's an idea though- if there were a catalyst that could fix carbon dioxide into an organic molecule, and do so at reasonable conditions of temperature and pressure, it might provide a useful way of recycling carbon. For example, if you could react carbon dioxide with methane to produce acetic acid, you could pull two greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and use them to make an industrial product (and one which could be conceivably then be used as a feedstock for plastics and fuels). Currently, this process uses carbon monoxide and methanol (made from steam reforming of methane, actually), in the presence of a metal catalyst- it seems like it could be done with CO2 and methane instead. Even if the economics might not be as favorable, the benefit in sequestering greenhouse gases might be worth it.
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Funny)
1) Eating carbon won't reduce carbon dioxide
2) The folks at DeBeers will come for you in the dead of night.
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Plant also produce carbondioxide at night.
Plants produce carbon dioxide during the day and at night. However, they produce far more oxygen during the day than CO2 produced during a 24-hour period.
That's why we have oxygen in our atmosphere at all. Plants produced it.
I'm sure we could (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I'm sure we could (Score:5, Interesting)
Install wind generators up and down the coast, and similarly replace coal.
Use some of this energy to create hydrogen from coal, and use that to power automotive fuel cells.
Mandate (and pay for) bicycle lanes on every thoroughfare in every city. Offer health insurance discounts to people who bike to work most of the time. Make biking a safe, cheap, and convenient way to travel and people will use it.
Implement modern, safer nuclear technology. Rocket the waste into the Sun, or maybe dump it on the Moon or a passing asteroid.
Create solar powered ozone production plants with 5-mile-high smokestacks to replenish the earth's O3 layer.
How do we pay for all this? Halt the war in Iraq, and use the hundreds of billions we save from that. Also, exploit space; send robot mining ships to obtain 10000-ton platinum and gold asteroids and the like; one or two of these will pay for everything.
Parent
Re:I'm sure we could (Score:4, Insightful)
It is NOT a political problem. It is a Greed problem.
Tell Exxon Mobil it can't make over $35 billion a year in profit.
Humanity is screwing up the plant. To avoid messing it up to the point where we can't exist on it anymore will require that we fundamentally change the way we live and work. Good luck in making that happen.
Parent
Re:I'm sure we could (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me go through all the wars since WWII (which I concede was a serious threat):
1) Korea. No threat there.
2) Vietnam. Definitely no threat there either; some VC with AK-47s weren't going to come over on boats and invade the US.
At least for these you can make some kind of case for the mentality people had during the Cold War, which is now long since over. That brings us to...
3) Iraq. No threat there either, unless you're one of the few idiots left who still believe Saddam had WMD and was going to use them against the US. (No, a few canisters of ancient chemical gas which was far beyond its useful lifespan doesn't count.)
As for "last couple centuries", no one's debating the necessity of WWII, or whether the Civil War should have been fought, or the Phillipines War, or whatever. That's ancient history; what's important is the wars being fought right now or in the recent past.
Parent
Re:I'm sure we could (Score:5, Informative)
Unless you have some calculations to back that up, I call BS. According to http://rredc.nrel.gov/tidbits.html [nrel.gov], "Every day, more energy falls on the U.S. than we use in an entire year." Since solar panels are more than 3% efficient (quick googling tells us the most advanced ones are over 35%), you fail it. Saying this is not possible is simply foolish, and it undermines your larger argument of whether it is advisable.
Parent
Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:3, Interesting)
My point isn't that there aren't energy alternatives, it's that there's not a real reason to do the CO2 -> C + O2 thing.
Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:5, Insightful)
If we went to fission with waste reprocessing, we could be in good shape...It'll provide more power and vastly reduce the amount of waste produced. We could even reprocess the waste we have now. The paranoia over radiation is so overblown, and has been hyped for so long that people just sort of accept that all nuclear power is going to lead to three eyed fish and crap like that.
Parent
Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:5, Funny)
</hahaonlykidding>
Parent
Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Plant Respiration (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't think we haven't thought of this....
signed,
The Developing World
Parent
Good News, Everyone! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's already been solved (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, Martha, I'm fully aware that the Carnot cycle shows that air conditioners cause a net heating of the environment when the heat dump and the cold reservoir are summed. That is to say the above is a joke.
only a billion tons/year? (Score:5, Insightful)
Global Warming Fix (Score:3, Funny)
Easy but hard. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is, all these solutions are geologically short term, and they're not as space-efficient as say, coal. Forests catch fire, algae blooms sink to the bottom (which is good) but are bad bad bad for the water ecosystem in which they're created, and everything else gets used and processed.
Basically, we're screwed on a quick fix until someone bio-engineers us some quick growing trees that sequester so much carbon that they're shiny. The best solution is to reduce our output of carbon, and allow the carbon cycle to re-balance itself.
In the meantime, if you're wondering whether to take up snow skiing or water skiing, might want to go water.
Thats simple, Plant marijuana (Score:5, Interesting)
We can make cloths, shoes, rope, cardboard, paper, and other goods from the fibers.
We can make bread, cooking oil, ethanol, bio diesel, and bird food from the seeds.
We can smoke the buds to relax.
Problem solved! We just plant it everywhere! Along the roads, in the unused fields, around the government buildings, just everywhere. No more global warming!
Interesting how the CO2 levels started to rise just after the government banned growing it!
We can also reduce the "War on Drugs" budget and redirect it to research on global warming. There is an instant $6,000,000,000 per year to find alternate energy sources.
Problem solved, now take that $25,000,000 prize and give it to the Marc Emery defiance fund. [cannabisculture.com]
Irony of it all (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course if he pulls out of the market then others take his place.
Re:Irony of it all (Score:5, Insightful)
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=286
FTA:
As part of that pledge, he launched a new Virgin Fuels business, which is to invest up to $400 million in green energy projects over the next three years.
Parent
Pah! Trivial! (Score:5, Funny)
Solve global Warming and more (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Solve global Warming and more (Score:5, Interesting)
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html [art-bin.com]
(Read it through. It's worth it)
Parent
No impact on the environment? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like asking a baker to take all that unhealthy fat out of a doughnut, but not have it have any impact on the taste. It would be foolish of Branson to think that you can make a dramatic change to the chemical makeup of our atmosphere, but not have any "negative" consequences. Plants need CO2, so removing it from the atmosphere might harm plant life. Temperatures will decrease (probably), and I'm sure that there's at least some species of wildlife that's now thriving with the warmer temperatures. Wind paterns will change. Climate patterns will change. To expect absolutely no "negative impact" on the environment is foolhardy.
How about just running out of oil? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about just running out of oil? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
My method... (Score:4, Funny)
Defined his way out of paying. (Score:3, Insightful)
It has to do something, thereby increasing entropy, and at the same not create adverse affects. What constitutes an adverse affect? Does contributing to the heat death of the universe?
Ok, perhaps just looking at entropy is a little extreme. I'm sure that's not actually written in the rules, and apparently there actually is some sort of judging involved here (oh look, Al Gore is a judge. Big surprise. "I took the initiative in solving global warming..."), but Branson's asking for a miracle here. Any work is going to require energy. If you don't just want to suck that billion tons CO2 out and store it somewhere, but actually break it down into more containable form, like graphite or useful hydrocarbons, it will take a lot more energy. This is effectively the same energy issue we've been flogging death for years, but in the guise of removing CO2, instead of avoiding creating it or just plain getting energy in the first place.
As Slashdot has been debating since...um, forever...every energy source we can come up with has adverse affects, not the least of which is cost. I don't know how much energy it takes per ton to filter CO2 out of the air and bury it in an abandoned gas well, but I would bet we're talking several orders of magnitude above the prize level just in energy costs. Not such concerns means much compared to "saving the planet" (TM), but that effectively makes the prize only a formality.
Beyond cost, there's also environmental affects with energy generation. Be it birds struck by wind turbine blades or disposal of the composites they're made out of at end-of-life, the chemicals used in making solar cells, nuclear waste, disrupted fish runs with hydroplants, altered ocean habitats for tidal solutions, possibly altered fault activity and limited supply from geothermal, and of course that practically irrelevant but still amusing increase of entropy problem from all of the above, they are there.
I'm not sure if the story should be flagged Catch-22, vaporware, or inthishouseweobeythelawsofthermodynamics.
Ridiculous PR Stunt (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't pay anyone already producing lots of oxygen with their undeveloped lands, why would anyone buy the earth-saving properties of the as-yet unmade device?
Not only is the bounty $6.2 million, but the innovator doesn't appear to have any kind of way to sustain the earth-saving properities of this device.
This is an example of why we are in what most indicators suggest is a global warming scenario of our own making.
Despite what the popular political opinion attempts to have us believe, So-called "Free-markets" do not accomodate the health and general well-being of humans or their environment.
Discuss amongst yourselves
Dump iron dust in the ocean to feed the plankton (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/ecohackin
"Ecohacker Michael Markels claims he has a megafix for global warming: Supercharge the growth of ocean plankton with vitamin Fe and let a zillion CO2 scrubbers bloom."
Re:Mother Nature (Score:5, Insightful)
Mother nature's solution to global warming operates on a geologic timescale and will not help us. In fact since if we leave the situation unchecked things will get worse before they get better, the earth will probably demonstrate its lack of use for us in the meantime.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
global warming fear mongers
Don't despise the Americans who believe in the propaganda from their government and media, like the parent. They are in the same situation as they were in the months before the Iraq war. Before the Iraq war the whole world knew about and debated the inevitable catastrophic chaos in Iraq, the skyrocketing terrorist recruitment, the extreme difficulties in preventing civil war when pulling out, the lack of exit strategy, and so on. This was considered obvious practically everywhere in the world. The only maj
Re:Yawn, Eco-Nazi talking about spending money... (Score:5, Insightful)
By SUV, I assume you are implying that they get poor gas mileage, and therefore produce more greenhouse gases. Not all do, of course. That said, someone who drives a Yukon is a hypocrite if they claim to be an environmentalist.
6) End Socialism. Economic prosperity will allow people to adjust to the changing climate better. More socialism is more death and misery.
The US, one of the least socialist countries in the world (I saw a picture of a cardboard shanty town in Florida earlier this week that definitely made me think of death and misery) produces a huge amount of greenhouse gas (per person).
Developing communist countries do as well, but compare the CO2 production per person from the US to China shows that capitalism generates more (using your logic). Canada is more socialist than the US, and Canadians generate more greenhouse gas than Americans do. Is it because of socialism? No, it's because it's colder and not as densely populated.
The western industrial democracies are quite capitalist, and we generate per-person more greenhouse gases than many of the poorer, "socialist" countries. Making more like us will make solve the problem? If we are relatively so much wealthier, then why aren't we willing to clean up our act, seeing as you claim the willingness to fix the problem seems to be related to wealth?
7) "repeal" Kyoto protocols. They don't work, they are counter productive, they will cause more global warming.
The US did not sign Kyoto. George Bush did not believe in global warming, so he reneged on the agreement made by Clinton to sign the protocol.
Eco-Nazi talking about spending money
It's his money. You are a big fan of capitalism, and he's a capitalist (that's how he made his money). Who are you to criticize how he spends it? That sounds very socialist to me.
Parent