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$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."
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.
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
(Read it through. It's worth it)
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
fire it into the sun?? what if the rocket explodes like the challenger and we get showered by highly nuclear waste?
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
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
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
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.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Don't think we haven't thought of this....
signed,
The Developing World
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.