$25M Bounty Offered for Global Warming Fix

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."

Plant Respiration

[gbulmash]

How much carbon dioxide does a single tree consume in a year of respiration and how many trees could be planted for $25 million?

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:

[xtracto]

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.

That is something I have always thought since I was a little kid. Humans do this kind of thing *every* day. Every "invention" we have is a revised,accelerate

I'm sure we could

[Sycraft-fu]

But it would require energy. The whole reason hydrocarbons are a good source of energy is precisely because the C + O2 -> CO2 reaction gives off energy. So to make it go the other way, you need input energy. Plants get it from the sun, where would we get it from. Then, of course, assuming you have a source the question is why not just cut the middle man and use that source directly?

Re:I'm sure we could

[yog]

Put a couple thousand square miles of solar cells out in the desert, and for every megawatt they generate, reduce coal/gas/oil energy production by that much.

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.

Re:I'm sure we could

[jo42]

Beg to differ.

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.

Re:

[FooAtWFU]

You know, I'm aware that Exxon-Mobil has done a variety of indisputably unethical things. Go ahead and impugn them for whatever like that.
And they have also earned a profit. Oh, horror!

Consider: They need to send surveyors to locate oil fields, procure the rights to these oil fields from the oft-recalcitrant local authorities, drill wells thousands of feet into the earth, build big pumps to raise the oil, build pipelines for hundreds or thousands of miles through inhospitable territories, construct truly

Re:

[skinfitz]

How much of big oil profit gets spent on researching alternative energy?

They are precisely the people who need to be developing things like E85 ethanol and electric cars, but it isn't happening because with all that profit, there is no incentive.

You could pave the entire state of Illinois...

[patio11]

... with solar panels, and still not have enough capacity to power Chicago. Much of the world does not live in Southern California! We have strange weather phenomena, like clouds! And this isn't a once in a while problem, its EVERY FREAKING DAY! In the spring, at least. In the winter, we have clouds and snow and ABSCENCE OF SUN for weeks at a time. Perhaps we could put Lake Michigan on stilts and use it as a battery. (Seriously, most pumped water storage is like hydroelectric power, heavily constrain

Re:I'm sure we could

[Grishnakh]

Please point to any instance in the last 50 years or so in which the USA was actually being seriously threatened by another country.

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.

Re:

[c6gunner]

Spending a 10th of what you currently spend would give you a military of 300,000 tops, including active, reserve, and national guard. Compare that to China's 6 million active and reserve.

The biggest problem with a massive decrease would be exactly what people bitch about these days. When you finally DID end up mobilizing your military, you'd have to recruit like mad and re-instate the draft. This would lead to a decrease in level of training and professionalism, which would result in an increase in crime

Re:I'm sure we could

[trentblase]

If you plated the entire US with solar panels, using the most efficient panels we currently know how to make, and you assume that there is no cloud cover or other weather obscuring the sun at any point during the year... you still wouldn't have a significant fraction of the power used by the entire US.

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.

Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question

[Sycraft-fu]

Why not just dispense with the whole "convert CO2 to carbon and oxygen" and just use nuclear as a direct power source? We already know how to do that, quite well in fact. So if nuclear is the answer, why not just use it?

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

[SatanicPuppy]

Hydro never lived up to the hype. Dams silt up, dams ruin rivers, and, aside from a few really good spots, dams don't generate enough power.

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.

Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question

[Broken scope]

You know... if there was a large industry for getting rid of nuclear waste... someone would find a way to do it quickly, safely, and cheaply just so they can be a rich bastard off of it.

Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question

[chris_eineke]

someone would find a way to do it quickly, safely, and cheaply

Hey, that's easy. Just dump it into the ocean. That'll give the marine biologists a couple of new monster species, too. Where is my government tax break and research grant?

</hahaonlykidding>

Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question

[Broken scope]

... if only I could smack people through my monitor.

Re:

[Darby]

Heh. I wish it were so, but the invisible hand of the market tends to focus on 'cheaply' unless you regulate the f*** out of the market - at which point the government might as well just do the business itself.

Not necessarily. You can get by with minimal regulations as long as the penalties for failure to abide by the regulations are sky high.

Take everybody's favorite whipping boy Microsoft. They regularly steal other people's shit...ok, violate their copyrights.. gotta keep it on the level ;-). They make (

Re:

[angrymilkman]

fire it into the sun?? what if the rocket explodes like the challenger and we get showered by highly nuclear waste?

Re:

[bendodge]

Nuclear power is statistically safer than conventional. I guarantee there were more accidents last year per kilowatt for conventional power than nuclear. (Airplanes are also statistically safer than cars.) The big problem is that terrorists have successfully terrorized people on the subjects.

Chernobyl was using a design US engineers had rejected as unsafe, and the Three Mile Island disaster wasn't. It was a successful test of nuclear safety measures.

As for nuclear waste, why not recycle it? R-r-recycle it!

Re:Ok but that brings me back to the 2nd question

[Dun Malg]

Going to nuclear is only a transformation of waste. Simply this is a shift in waste not a solution. Then suddenly its no longer CO2 but it is some radioactive stuff that needs to be buried for thousends of years underground. One might store CO2 in the first place underground and skip the expensive uranium in between. Remember uranium isn't an endless power solution either, thats why we try to research fusion. Uranium is a limited feul on earth.

Current estimated accessible uranium reserves are enough to last approximately 500 years, at the current rate of consumption. If all electricity production (hydro and other "clean" power included) was converted to nuclear, there'd still be enough for nearly 80 years. This is assuming the current wasteful method of not reprocessing fuel. Waste reprocessing, which itself generates energy, would increase the fuel utility by a factor of 10, and would eliminate nuclear waste entirely. In short, we have enough fuel to run fission reactors in place of all the conventional CO2 generating power plants for over 1000 years. Fuel is not the problem. The problem is enviro/peacenik whackos who conflate nuclear weapons with nuclear power and tar them all with the same brush. People like that create a groundswell of popular ignorance that leads to things like Jimmy Carter signing an executive order banning the building of ALL breeder reactors. A particular type of breeder reactor is used to make weapons-grade plutonium. Fuel reprocessing breeder reactors, however, create an inseperable mix of plutonium that is utterly unusable as a weapon. Now why Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, would ban all breeder reactors is a question with only two possible answers: a) the man's an idiot and faked his way through school, or b) he was making a purely symbolic, political gesture. The issue of nuclear power has been thoroughly politicized, to the point where it's hardly about science anymore.

The best things here would be a natural energy source.

All energy sources are natural, from water running downhill, to hydrocarbons combusting, to atoms splitting. You can't apply a "back to nature" philosophy to the production of energy!

Re:

[dave420]

Don't pin it all on the long-hairs - people are also a bit worried about nuclear reactors/plants blowing the fuck up on their doorstop, or the effects from such an explosion raining down on their homes. Those folks are not greenist nutters - they have legitimate worries.

And don't confuse the US with the rest of the world. The rest of the world hasn't "politicized" nuclear power to the extent you claim the US has. Maybe the US will take the lead from other countries, once it's realised it's beneficial.

Re:

[Dun Malg]

Don't pin it all on the long-hairs - people are also a bit worried about nuclear reactors/plants blowing the fuck up on their doorstop, or the effects from such an explosion raining down on their homes. Those folks are not greenist nutters - they have legitimate worries.

No, they have illegitimate scare-monger derived worries. How, exactly, does a sensible nuclear reactor "blow up"? Don't bother to cite Chernobyl, as nobody but the safety-unconcerned Soviets would ever dream of building a flammable graphite shielded reactor, much less one with a huge positive void coefficient like the RBMK. The worst nuclear accident in US history was TMI-2, a 30% meltdown, and it was completely contained until the asshats in charge of cleanup decided it would be OK to simply vent some of

Re:

[Dun Malg]

OK, so at present consumption we've got 100 years.... Instead of 20% we go to 100% plus transportation and heating and we've got less than 10 years, fifty with your scratch dirt reserves, it's hardly worth building the reactors.

Way to handwave away the numbers, man. 100 years' reserves we've already found. Projected reserves are 500 years worth. And allow me to repeat (more slowly this time, so it's heard) that with fuel reprocessing those numbers go up by a factor of ten. That equals 1000 and 5000 years worth, respectively. Even converting all electric power generation, that only increases consumption seven-fold, giving us 140 years on current reserves, 700 years projected total including undiscovered reserves.

Re:

[dangitman]

One word: Nuclear.

It's pronounced 'nucular.' Nu-cu-lar.

Re:Plant Respiration

[eln]

Trees alone won't solve the problem for the same reason they aren't solving the problem now: people keep cutting them down.

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.

Re:Plant Respiration

[PFI_Optix]

One word:

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.

Re:Plant Respiration

[stratjakt]

Algae goes wild when you dump fertilizers in a stream, and can utterly choke off all life in a river or lake. I'd be very very wary about any plans to grow it "en masse" in the ocean, seems like the type of thing that'd easily get away from you.

Re:

[balloonhead]

Global warming
-> increased sea levels
-> increased sea surface area
-> increased algae (maybe)
-> ....
-> profit!!!

I suppose if all the planet's covered in water ,the algae will sort out the greenhouse thing, then the ice caps will reform, and things will return to normal.

Re:Plant Respiration

[drix]

Or we could just plant fewer humans...

Re:

[hypnagogue]

You are mistaking trees as a carbon scrubber. They are not machines that clean CO2 out of the air -- they are carbon sinks, converting airborne CO2 into cellulose. The best thing you can do is cut down the trees, dry them out, and store the wood in a cool, dry place. One mechanism for this is by framing houses out of the wood. Then, plant another tree in it's place. As it grows it will pull CO2 out of the air. Then, when it's growth slows, cut it down, turn it into lumber, build another house out of

Re:Plant Respiration

[menkhaura]

Well, once you burn the grass for... eh... medicinal purposes, the carbon will be re-released into the atmosphere

Re:

[olyar]

The technology is there to do the scrubbing, the issue is more how do you do that process without using a whole lot of energy to do it? And of course, that energy has to come from a plant somewhere that is putting CO2 back into the atmosphere...

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:

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

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

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Re:

[SiliconEntity]

"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."

Not necessarily. You can't make money by solving global warming because there is no one who will pay you for your technology. The benefits from reducing CO2 are spread out among everyone on earth and are too diffuse for conventional market rewards.

Only if we create a global system for carbon credit trading, or apply mandates to force people to

Re:Plant Respiration

[skelly33]

But you think $10M was enough to put Scaled Composites' Spaceship One into LEO? It's a token offering to inspire the imagination. Don't knock a generous and genuine offer just because you have not been inspired.

Re:Plant Respiration

[reverseengineer]

Warning: back-of-envelope calculations follow. The bond energy of the two carbon-oxygen double bonds in carbon dioxide is about 374 kilocalories per mole of carbon dioxide. At 44 grams CO2 to a mole, a billion tons of carbon dioxide (using 1000kg=ton) is on the order of 2x10^13 moles. This would require 3x10^13 megajoules of energy, which to provide in one year (31556926 seconds) would demand 950 gigawatts of power, which will undoubtedly require more than 25 million dollars to generate. This assumes perfect efficiency in the process, of course, and does not factor in any carbon dioxide released in the generation of that much power.

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.

Re:

[Apu]

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.

Question... Did you think of this idea before the back of envelopes calculations or after? Because, if after, than the bounty is already doing its thing. Whether or not your particular idea is really feasible isn't the key -- as others have pointed out, it would probably take more money to make sure every idea was really feasible. The bounty is making people think of things they didn't think about before and imagine the possibilities. "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without

Re:

[mdsolar]

The prize conditions do mention that the carbon has to be kept out of the atmosphere for 1000 years, so if you make a useful product, you've got to be sure that it is not useful in a way that it goes back into the atmopshere. Fuel is out, some plastics which degrade are out too. For long term storage, mineralization looks good: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/300 / 5626/1677 [sciencemag.org] though not terribly useful. Need to read whole article so this might send you to the library. It might be better to pu

Re:

[jfern]

Not going to work AEP has planted 21,914 acres with nearly 19 million mixed hardwood and conifer trees at a cost of approximately $5.7 million. Projected CO2 sequestration is 4.7 million metric tons over the term of the project. Link [e8.org]

Re:Plant Respiration

[eln]

I once knew a chick who was so tightly wound she would probably excrete diamonds if you fed her carbon. Perhaps we could get a group of that type of people together and solve the problem that way.

Re:Plant Respiration

[Randolpho]

That might solve the "I want diamonds" problem, but there are two fatal flaws:

1) Eating carbon won't reduce carbon dioxide

2) The folks at DeBeers will come for you in the dead of night.

Re:Plant Respiration

[QuickFox]

I once knew a chick

This is Slashdot you insensitive clod!

Re:

[jeff4747]

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.

Re:Plant Respiration

[QuickFox]

Mass genocide of all developing countries humans then use that now vacant land to plant the trees.

Your idea has merit, but it would be far, far more efficient to kill the rich, as we spew out orders of magnitude more pollution per capita than the poor.

Re:Plant Respiration

[grcumb]

Mass genocide of all developing countries humans then use that now vacant land to plant the trees.

Your idea has merit, but it would be far, far more efficient to kill the rich, as we spew out orders of magnitude more pollution per capita than the poor.

Don't think we haven't thought of this....

signed,

The Developing World

Good News, Everyone!

[User 956]

All we need to do is drop a large ice cube in the ocean every now and then. Thereby solving the problem.

Re:

[ForestGrump]

And since water is most dense at 4deg C, the sea level will rise!

Grump, Environmental Scientist.
Yes, I really have a real degree in this field.

Re:

[0100010001010011]

And while getting that degree you probably missed numerous episodes of Futurama

It's already been solved

[andy314159pi]

It's called an air-conditioner. Duh.


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?

[dotmax]

Why, that's just ~32 tons of CO2 per second. Piece of cake.

Re:

[acidrain]

Why, that's just ~32 tons of CO2 per second. Piece of cake.

And that 5 million is 0.05c per ton if you are using it to meet the requirements for the first 10 years. 5 or even 25 million is pocket change for large industrial projects, this story is a joke. I might take the 25 million to build an apartment block, but not save the world.

Worse if it is English Billions

[NotQuiteReal]

Since he is English maybe he means a billion [wikipedia.org] (10^12) tons? Then it would be 32,000 tons a second.

Negative impact on the environment?

[pclminion]

Please define.

Re:

[charlieo88]

Didn't James Bond already stop you once in Moonraker?

Global Warming Fix

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

Global warming? What is that, some new street drug? And $25M for one shot? Crazy...

Mother Nature

[KermodeBear]

After all, I'm sure that a human can take care of the earth better than Mother Nature can.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It is our mission to defeat Mother Nature in her attempt to wipe us out.

Re:Mother Nature

[drinkypoo]

After all, I'm sure that a human can take care of the earth better than Mother Nature can.

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.

The solution is nuclear power. . .

[electrosoccertux]

My paypal is [e-mail].

Re:

[pashdown]

How are you going to mine, refine, clean-up then store/recycle your fuel without emitting CO2? Fission proponents seem to believe that uranium magically appears on your doorstep then disappears when you're done.

Re:

[dbIII]

Good point - if a nuclear power generation method is developed that is worth using we should give it a go. Spending some of that lobby money on research and development instead of trying to push 1950's designs on the taxpayer would be a start - perhaps a design good enought that it would even need government investment and subsidies would be developed?

Currently the outlook for nuclear power is not good - but with a bit of effort on accelerated thorium and other upcoming methods it may be more than just an

The problem isn't coming up with a way to do it...

[MarkusQ]

The problem isn't coming up with a way to do it, it's getting people to buy into it. There are lots of ways to cut down on our use of fossil fuels (nuclear, space-based solar, etc.) and there are lots of ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere (though most if not all of the best ones involve plants and sunlight). But we have a huge culture/industry built around the notion of burning fossil fuels and that isn't going away any time soon. Given that they are willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people

Plant a forest(s), among other things...

[Radon360]

Trees....lots of trees.
Solar powered. Self-sustaining, self-propagating...pretty much self-everything.

It's pretty obvious to do any carbon dioxide scrubbing on a large scale, it's going to require a process that requires as little artificially-induced energy input as possible.

How about large saltwater algae beds in arid regions adjacent to the ocean? Harvest the algae, press out the plant oil, and make biodiesel. Algae is probably the most efficient crop for something like this.

Re:

[Derek Pomery]

Biodiesel is most definitely not taking a billion tons out of the cycle since you're just burning it again.

Trees will do this, but you'd need a hell of a lot of trees, since you have to compensate for the amount that gets released back when they die, lose leaves, get cut down and burnt, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration# Forests_2 [wikipedia.org]
"one million of these trees will fix 0.9 teragrams of carbon dioxide" wikipedia claims this figure as over a 40 year lifespan.
Using that as a WAG (and assuming

Easy but hard.

[SatanicPuppy]

Carbon sequestration is relatively easy. Plant more trees, create artificial algae blooms...Anything green and growing will take in a lot of carbon. There have been studies recently dealing with certain types of pine trees that even suggest that the trees are growing faster in the higher CO2 environment we're making for them, which suggests that natural processes will step up to take advantage of the carbon rich environment.

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

[Anon-Admin]

It is in the top 10 for CO2 fixation! It has over 25,000 uses of which smoking it is just 1!

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]

Re:

[stratjakt]

The "war on drugs" budget is small, the DEA is almost entirely funded by "civil forfeiture", the completely fair idea that if you are caught selling a bag of pot, then everything you own (car, house, photo album handed down from grandma) must have been the proceeds of your drug dealing, and deserve to be taken away and auctioned. Even if falsely accused, and acquitted, getting it back is nearly impossible.

But, people watched "Scarface" in the 80s, and said "WOW thats how drug dealers live? ferrari's and m

Re:

[Peter Trepan]

Interesting how the CO2 levels started to rise just after the government banned growing it!

I thought it was due to a decrease in the number of pirates [wikipedia.org].

Seriously, dude. Arguments about global warming and scratchy hemp shirts aren't nearly as good as the argument that it's just none of anyone's damn business what you smoke.

Irony of it all

[gilesjuk]

Richard Branson owns an airline, if he wants he could reduce co2 by a large amount by changing his business.

Of course if he pulls out of the market then others take his place.

Re:Irony of it all

[Mr. Sketch]

True, but he launched Virgin Fuels to research alternative fuels:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2862 259 [go.com]

FTA:

Branson, whose business interests include Virgin Atlantic airline and Virgin Trains, rejected charges that it was hypocritical for him to sponsor the prize. He reiterated a commitment made in September to invest $3 billion toward fighting global warming, saying he would commit all profits from his travel companies over the next 10 years.

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.

Easy

[spyrral]

Stop burning fossil fuels.

Where's my 25 million?

Re:

[Intron]

The effect on global warming of burning forests is greater than from burning fossil fuels. So let's stop burning forests in South America and Indonesia. The best way would be to cancel the economic incentives which promote burning -- which is mostly using the cleared land for other cash crops or for grazing. Another way would be to clear the land, but not burn the biomass. Use it for making paper, wooden items, buildings, etc.

Nuclear bomb

[ALimoges]

Dropping a nuclear bomb every once in a while on a large cosmopolitan city would definitely do the job...

Pah! Trivial!

[zmollusc]

Simply declare co2 to be the worlds currency and pretty soon it will all be safely locked away in swiss vaults.

Algae-Biodiesel+Charcoal

[rohar]

One of the best ideas I have seen is algae for biodiesel [energytower.org] with charcoal production from the waste. The charcoal holds the carbon for a long period and is at worst case neutral spread on agricultural land and has some potential to be beneficial [bidstrup.com].

There were a lot of studies on the idea in the '80's by the DOE [energy.gov], but it was shelved due to low oil prices at the time.

Solve global Warming and more

[FinchWorld]

Eat the homeless, now we have enough housing. Eat criminals, no more over full jails, possible drop in crime rates. Eat everyone who live in a house with an odd number, halfing amount of cars on the road. And with all that eating we solve third world hunger too.

Re:Solve global Warming and more

[jimicus]

Don't know if you realise this, but a very similar solution to a very different problem was proposed a few centuries ago:

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html [art-bin.com]

(Read it through. It's worth it)

Plant LOTS of trees

[oneandoneis2]

Do I win $25 million..?

No impact on the environment?

[Pollux]

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.

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.

Re:

[Ambitwistor]

Taking a billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year isn't going to be drastically bad, since that's still significantly less than what we put in every year. Even if we halted CO2 emissions entirely, that's still not worse than pre-industrial times when we weren't putting large amounts in.

You are at least half right though: too much change too suddenly can have negative impacts. What would be the impact of instantaneously cutting CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow? Maybe still not that bad. Reduci

Re:

[DaveJay]

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

How about just running out of oil?

[viking80]

Running out of oil will do this quite effectively, and that will happen within not too many years.

Re:How about just running out of oil?

[Software]

Oil will never run out, it will just become more and more expensive. As the price increases, people will find replacements or do without. But there's no guarantee that the replacement technologies will give off less CO2 (think of coal).

My method...

[shoolz]

My method doesn't actually remove 1 billion pounds, rather it prevents that 1 billion from being released. I cannot talk about all the details until the patent is filed, but let's just say it involves Rush Limbaugh and a really large cork.

Re:

[edwardpickman]

It would also remove a substantial amount of atmospheric heat that is released with the CO2. Might I suggest adding a second cork to prevent the release of methane which is even a worse greenhouse gas than CO2.

Defined his way out of paying.

[iamlucky13]

This is definitely a Catch-22.

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

[mpapet]

It's been a while since I've done these calculations, but I think the present value of the so-called $25 million bounty is $6.2 million with the payment schedule given. That's what $25 million with the payments laid out as proposed is worth today at 4% return.

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

[denis-The-menace]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/ecohacking .html [wired.com]

"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:

[pclminion]

The easiest way to remove billions of tons of CO2 would be to have a billion people or so stop breathing. Perhaps these global warming fear mongers can lead the way.

Great idea! All those dead human corpses will just rot and all the carbon of their bodies will be released as CO2! Wait a second...

The CO2 that humans breathe out is not part of the problem. That CO2 comes from carbon you ingested in the form of food, which came from animals/plants, which ultimately came from the air. So when you breathe o

Re:

[QuickFox]

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:

[BluedemonX]

Hemp. Process the oils for diesel.

Re:

[Canthros]

Air quality won't be so great, and the acid rain would be a problem, but the sunsets will be fantastic.

Re:

[BluedemonX]

Or we could go back to driving cool cars. 1969 Dodge Charger, 1970s era Gran Torino, etc. Particulate matter.

We find a cure for cancer and have everyone smoke again.

Return to cool AND drop planetary temperatures. Oh right, wait. Global warming is a myth.

Dust melts snow/ice

[AHumbleOpinion]

Particulates in the atmosphere actually have a "warming" effect with respect to melting snow packs and ice. They become part of the snowflake, but they absorb rather than reflect solar radiation, snow/ice melts too quickly.

Re:

[Ambitwistor]

Easy enough to find. Here [earth-policy.org] is one graph that goes to 2004. To 2006 should be possible to find with some searching.

Re:Yawn, Eco-Nazi talking about spending money...

[puppetman]

4) Eat the environmentalists; less SUV use, less air travel, less hot air, less sewage. Yuck!

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.

Re:

[sycodon]

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.

Clinton did not sign the Kyoto agreement because the Senate voted 98-0 to reject it.

Re:

[I'll Provide The War]

Close, but it was 95-0.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_li sts/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=105&session=1& vote=00205 [senate.gov]

Declares that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997 or thereafter which would: (1) mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex 1 Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period; or (2) result in serious harm to the U.S. economy.

Re:

[Dachannien]

Interesting. If you allow 25 square meters per tree, it would take an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined to provide enough trees to absorb a billion tons of CO2 each year.