$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."

Comments

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: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

[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.

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.

only a billion tons/year?

[dotmax]

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

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.

Pah! Trivial!

[zmollusc]

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

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: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

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.

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.

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