Gore, Branson Announce Climate Prize

(CBS)  Former presidential candidate Al Gore has joined forces with the British financial heavyweight Sir Richard Branson to offer up a $25 million reward to inspire innovations in the field of combating climate change.

In an exclusive London interview with CBS News Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith, Gore said: "What we are facing is a planetary emergency. So some things you would never consider otherwise, it makes sense to consider."

Branson announced the "Earth Challenge" prize Friday morning at a news conference in London with Gore, who served as vice president under Bill Clinton, and then failed in a 2000 White House bid before becoming a vocal environmental activist.

His recent documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth," is credited with bringing the issues of global warming and carbon emissions much nearer to center-stage in the American media - in addition to creating an Oscar buzz and rumors of Gore being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Branson, chairman of the wildly successful Virgin Group, said the prize will go to whoever comes up with the most innovative way of sucking harmful greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

"The Earth cannot wait 60 years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today," Branson said at the news conference. "The Earth cannot wait 60 years."

When Smith asked the men whether their prize campaign might distract attention from the important drive to get politicians onboard the push for a greener planet, Branson acknowledged, "it's going to be a problem to get the political will of, you know, some countries, in particular America, to actually get out there and encourage people to go for smaller cars, to encourage people to use less carbon."

Gore told the Early Show co-anchor that there had been a "big shift" in American public interest in global warming, and that such a shift was the only thing capable of driving a change in the political policy of the country.

"I think you really are going to see change in the way people demand politicians in both parties make this their top priority," Gore said.

But, Branson said if the political will isn't there yet, that's just more evidence that there's an urgent need to give the private sector new incentive to solve to the problem, and that's the goal of the prize money.

Judges of the competition, which applies the basic business theory of creating a huge incentive to get a problem solved, are looking for a method to remove at least one billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year.

The judges include a NASA scientist and several top environmental researchers from around the world.

This is not the first time Gore and Branson have joined forces to bring attention to climate change. Gore backed the English tycoon's September 2006 pledge to devote all the profits from his transportation businesses - which include air and rail - to fight global warming.

Branson said that over 10 years, the amount allocated from his business ventures could total $3 billion.

We should also be mindful that they set a contest goal of at least 1billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere (1GtC), not CO2. 1GtC corresponds to 3.67 GtCO2, and the IPCC reports that we are currently producing we humans are producing almost 27 GtCO2/yr, plus an additional 6 GtCO2 from land use. That means that the prizewinner would only be removing about 1/9th of what we are currently producing each year. Thus we would need nine winners to stabilize today%u2019s usage and another 10 running continuously for the next 50 years to remove the 100-ppm of CO2 we have added during the last 300 years.

To emphasize the magnitude of the problem if we planted forests at 3500 trees/acre this would take an area twice the size of Texas each year. Trees that were eventually harvested and turned into wood products and not allowed to decompose. That generally works out to 175 new trees a year for every human on the planet and around 9100 or so to get caught up over the next 50 years; roughly half of the earth%u2019s habitable surface area with new trees, or $50K/person just for trees.

I guess my point is there are many ways to draw carbon from the atmosphere.
As one who has studied the problem I am mindful that whatever we eventually do to solve the problem, it should also empower families to live sustainable lives, because people are not polluting the planet because they want to do it, rather it is the only way they can survive in today%u2019s world. That is what we need to change!

[olgreyghost]

erasmus6:

It's wiggling my fingers and you're still wasting energy...

[feelfree1]

Here is an idea. Seize and liquidate the assets the worst offenders, such as Exxon-Mobile, and use the proceeds to finance many many small distributed power production sites.

By eliminating anti-human groups like Exxon-Mobile, for use in financing this transition, we will be getting a 3 or 4 to 1 return!

[buffalo_ken]

You know this discussion has touched on some real topics that need to be discussed in general. I'm glad to have paticipated.

Again I say: Peace!

KH

[ecochick]

O.K. This is fun, I think I figured out how to play: In order to confuse people we just disseminate bad information, and deny. The only problem with playing that way is that we'll never solve the problem. Let's all get a full understanding of what the true mechanisms pushing climate change are, before we throw in our theories of how to affect it. So, once again here's the problem in a nutshell: The earth's atmosphere had reached a kind of equilibrium before we, humans, started using one of it's stabilizing mechanisms as fuel. That mechanism is the carbon-sink:(coal, wood and petroleum). Now we have to figure out how to rebuild the carbon-sink. OK, READY, SET, GO!

[crater7]

WE CAN START BY KICKING THIS CURRENT ADMINISTRATION OUT OF WASHINGTON. THEN WE CAN START CLEANING UP OUR WORLD. NO NEED TO SEND THE PRIZE CHECK, USE IT TO CLEAN UP BUSH'S MESS.

[ncaasaf]

Not only do we face dealing with this planetary emergency, but in parallel we must deal with scientific fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) from folks like reasnmclucus. Its hard to imagine what lies at the heart of their motivations to mislead. Financial interest? Physcological needs?

Here is an example of this from her post. She states, and is correct, that the lower stratosphere has been cooling. However, this is actually an expected sign of an intensified green house effect. See the NOAA sponsored abstract at: http://cires.colorado.edu/science/projects/csv-reidG01.html

The climate change evidence is clear and alarming. Anyone who wants to debate if this is really happening, or whether its because of humans, must be sidelined. The debate now should be how to stop, and as Branson and Gore have challenged, possibly erase, the CO2 spike for which we are responsible.

Encourage your government representatives to support the McCain-Lieberman bill. Make it a priority for the next US president to agree to the Kyoto Protocol. Take action to reduce your own CO2 emissions. If you're so inclined, pray that we have the will to find a way out of this crisis.

I'll keep you all updated on my progress towards winning this prize :-)

[feelfree1]

Re: "Branson, chairman of the wildly successful Virgin Group, said the prize will go to whoever comes up with the most innovative way of sucking harmful greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere."

Sounds pretty f-ing dumb. Obviously, the far more practical, affordable, and realistic method of reducing CO2 levels in our atmosphere, is to prevent/reduce this substance from being artificially being added to our atmosphere in the first place.

[ecochick]

What are you guys smoking out there? I want some. What's this *** about absorbing energy, and wavelengths? It sounds good but you're missing the point. Global Warming is the term first used by scientists, which has led to a lot of confusion. That's why people are beginning to use the term climate change. We're NOT Talking about energy absorption at the atomic level, good God. Open a book. What we are talking about is reaching an equilibrium in a closed system. And that equlibrium has been disturbed thereby affecting other inputs in the system. It just happens to be that the other things in the system are living, and adapted to the way the system used to work, not so well with the changes. It has more to do with available chemicals for reactions than it does with calories produced by the chemical reactions.

[reasnmclucus]

His first step should be to find some real scientists instead of the clowns who think that CO2 has some type of magical power to control the temperature of the air. I have yet to see any sound scientific evidence that CO2 can gererate heat by absorbing and reemitting low energy radiation. The IPCC's own figures indicate only a watt or two of energy per square meter is involved and that isn't enough energy to keep a mosquito warm.

Niels Bohr received a Nobel Prize for his research indicating that the absorption of specific wavelengths of light was associated with the energy state of a molecules electrons rather than heating of the atom (i.e., an increase in its motion). A molecule absorbing a specific wavelength of light can not absorb light of that wavelength again without first emitting the same wavelength of light.

If humans are influencing climate it is through such actions as the terracalories of heat humans produce each day and flying airliners at high altitudes. The clouds produced from airplane contrails can keep warm air from rising into the stratosphere -- last year was the third coldest year on record for temperature of the lower stratosphere.