Branson's Climate Prize:
Richard Branson is offering a $25 million prize for the development of a technology capable of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Branson's Climate Prize:
- Forget Subsidies, Try Prizes:
Enquiring minds, etc....
Now where's my check?
Who harbors that notion exactly?
More seriously, I think the idea is to make something that will remove rather more carbon dioxide and take up considerably less space.
To reduce the amount of carbon dioxide, we need to put carbon permanently back into the ground to make up for all the carbon removed from the ground in the form of oil and coal.
Ironically, in the United States, we actually bury a lot of carbon that used to be in air but was then absorbed by plants. In particular, we put a tremendous amount of organic matter (lawn waste, food leftovers, paper, etc.) into landfills. True, some of this matter decomposes, turns into gases, and escapes back into the atmosphere. But much of it does not. That's why landfills fill up. Probably we could think of ways to bury more carbon waste (stop recycling paper and making compost piles?) and to limit its decomposition better (sealing it in plastic?). But these moves are not as environmentally fashionable as simply reducing the amount of oil and coal used.
Maybe some CO2 is released when the plant dies, but nothing compared to the amount it uses up in photosynthesis over its lifespan. Time to look back to your 9th grade science book: light + 6H20 + 6CO2 -> C6H12O6 +6O2. Plants certainly do permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Hey, if someone can do that, more power to 'em. But in the meantime there's no reason the rest of us can't get rich off Volvo-driving bobos by selling them "organic CO2-scrubbing plants" for three times what a nursery charges (aka six times what Home Deport or Lowes want) That's some wealth transfer I can get behind ;)
I still remember my freshman English professor telling us that at least one good thing came out of World War I.
SGT Alfred Joyce Kilmer, who is best known for his poem "TREES", was killed by a sniper in France during World War One at the age of 31.
You are correct that plants absorb carbon. There's no doubt about that. But when they die and decompose, they release it again. It is part of the famous carbon cycle (probably the next chapter in the 9th grade science book). According to the CMU website below:
"Photosynthesis by plants removes about 120 billion tons of carbon from the air per year, but plant decomposition returns about the same amount."
http://telstar.ote.cmu.edu/environ/m3/s4/cycleCarbon.shtml
So unless we can reduce decomposition, we don't change the amount of carbon dioxide much in the long run just by growing plants.
Who harbors that notion exactly?In a larger context, everyone who wants to raise your taxes.
It's true (as noted above) that green plants on land don't sequester carbon dioxide, because what they absorb from the atmosphere as they grow is returned as they decompose. But the largest amount of biomass on the planet is not on land, but in the deep oceans. Here a fair amount of CO2 gets sequestered as sediment, since the dead organisms sink and at depth there is too little oxygen for the required oxidative decay to convert the carbon compounds in the plant back to CO2. Over time the sediment turns into carbonate rocks (e.g. limestone), and that is where almost all of the Earth's primordial CO2 now lies.
Hence if you really want to remove CO2 from the air in gigantic amounts, you need only boost the biomass of phytoplankton and foraminefera in the oceans. (Some have argued that seeding with iron, a critical nutrient far from land, would do the trick, but I believe recent experiments have cast some doubt on this.)
You'd want to do this quite carefully, however. An atmosphere with too little CO2 would probably be worse than one with too much. A hotter Earth we (and plants) can deal with; a glaciated Earth starved of enough CO2 to support flowering plants on land would be much worse.
In short, I think Branson would have done more good offering his prize for something plausible, more modest, and safer, like the development of more efficient automobiles and airplanes.
Roger Helms and Allen Paddington.
Yes. I suppose we will never develop a technology that lets us fly faster than birds, who are the result of so very many years of evolution.
I was talking to a friend of mine tonight about the time frame for when coal, oil, and oil shale were laid down, and the nearest was, I believe, the coal out west here, maybe about 40 million years ago. A lot of the oil is, I believe, about 80 million years old, and the coal in WV and PA maybe 200 million years ago. Even burying it for a million years would be ok with me. Ok, even 100,000 years. After all, where were we, as a species, back 100,000 years ago? And hopefully, w/i the next 100,000 years, we should be able to figure out what to do with the stuff.
The law of unintended consequences.
Besides, do we even know for a lead pipe cinch that CO2 is a bad culprit in global warming?
I really like this idea of awarding prizes. Last year, we watched SpaceShip One win the X-Prize for being able to go into space twice w/i 10 days or so. And there are prizes now out for completely autonymous vehicles. Part of the allure is the money, but probably more, the bragging rights and notoriety of winning.
Better check the fine print before you make plans for that $25 million. According to Reuters, you only get $5 million for developing the technology; the other $20 million is payable after the technology has actually been implemented and has removed one billion metric tons of carbon gases per year from the atmosphere for 10 years.
Good grief, don't be obtuse. "Faster" is not the only possible figure of merit. Birds, for example, are enormously more efficient and far less polluting than any mechanical flying device.
And I assume that after removing CO2, he'll offer another prize for finding how to feed plants with hot air.
I'm not being obtuse. Your original post suggested that it was ridiculous to think that technological devices could be designed to outperform biological entities. I provided one of countless examples of such devices.
Obviously you have never encountered a flock of Canada geese.
Yes, but neither that Reuters story nor Johnathon's original link contains the fine print - and there's got to be quite a lot of it, or else all the prize will engender will be a race to create trivial variations on existing carbon sequestration methods. This isn't like the prizes won by Spaceship One or Lindbergh, where the requirements could be simply and clearly stated because they were for something that no one was doing already. A press conference is not at all the place for putting across such complexity, especially not when there's a politician present - and Branson might be as bad a windbag as Gore.
They're more efficient? Really? How many birds would it take to get 300 people from New York to Los Angeles? How much energy would they use, and how much pollution would they emit?
Not sure if that's really true, but at least even they have come to recognize reality. But I'm sure the doubters will claim that they are a bunch of wild-eyed yahoos who know nothing at all about climate change.
There are two issues in play here, and they are often confused for one another. One is the idea the temperature is increasing. The other is the idea it would not be happening except for the activities of humans.
It's quite possible to believe the temperature is increasing, yet see no reason to attribute it to men.
A third idea is the notion that humans can change the course of the temperature change.
But of course. Nonetheless, there have been a great many people on this blog who have denied that there is any global climate change going on at all. Now with Exxon/Mobile admitting that it is happening, the people who deny any climate change have less and less to support their contentions.
It is possible that the way we store the excess CO2 will backfire on us, but that's not what davod seems to be worried about. The issue isn't whether to reduce atmospheric CO2 but rather how.
Splunge wrote:The problem with this logic is that the trees which won this cut-throat competition did so based upon their ability to survive and reproduce, not their ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. After all, evolution selected us too even though we add CO2 to the atmosphere every time we breathe. The capacity to regulate the atmosphere is a factor in evolution but only a subtle one; factors like the ability to survive wind, fire, snow and termites matter a lot more.
Trees do many other things which wouldn't play major roles in natural selection, like providing shade and sheltering birds, but it wouldn't make sense to conclude that people couldn't do these things more efficiently. It might (or might not) be reasonable to conclude that we could never manufacture trees more efficiently than the trees propogate themselves, but that's about as far as the evolutionary argument can take you.
karl wrote:Trees absorb far more CO2 during the day than they emit at night. That's where much of the carbon in their wood comes from.
Plants aren't the only carbon sinks in nature. Various types of rock absorb CO2, as do sediments on the ocean floor. Even if living creatures emit more CO2 than they consume, these emissions have long been in balance with the absorption by the various natural sinks. The problem is that none of these absorption processes can keep up with the vast increase in carbon emissions humans have caused.
If the biota released significantly more CO2 than plants and other natural processes could absorb then the level of atmospheric CO2 would have risen constantly for billions of years. That didn't happen. The level has fluctuated somewhat over time, but these changes were extremely gradual. The recent rapid increase in CO2 levels is unprecedented, and the only plausible explanation is that it was caused by human activity.
I doubt we could find anyone at Exxon who denied the temperature readings presented in the scientific data. So, one has to ask 1) what temperature, 2) where, and 3) over what time span?
We probably would find the people at Exxon also accept the readings from the US satellites showing atmospheric temperature remaining steady for the last eight years. We might ask who else accepts this data. Al Gore? Michael Moore? Ellen Goodman? Greenpeace?
So is the recent increase in Xbox 360s but im not losing sleep over it.
The counter-argument, I think, is that there is a lot of oxygen out there (21% of the atmosphere) we wouldn't be pulling that much out. However, if that's true, there can't be that much C02 in the air, either.
You have it backwards. The recent rapid increase of CO2 levels cannot be explained as caused by human activity. At present, there is simply no way to explain it. It is possible that it is caused by human activity, but if that is the explanation, some as yet unknown feedback phenomenon is multiplying the CO2 we are emitting.
Set off Nucs in out of the way places. Putting junk into the upper air. No problem. we don't want Nuc Winter just a little Fall.
Simple, easy, cost effective. Gives us something to do with our old Bombs. It's a win win.
Try it you will like it. Cooler living through A-Bombs.
CO2 makes up less than one-tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, but even this small amount is enough to create the greenhouse effect that has kept the earth warm for eons. The concentration of CO2 it would take to cause a catastrophic temperature increase would still be small compared to that of oxygen and might seem like "not much" numerically, but that's beside the point.
The problem will come when all those CO2 burbing machines get infected with toxic fungus and mold and spread it to all parts of the Earth and we all get sick.
I vote to go with more trees and abolish the judiciaries over usage of paper.