Billionaire, adventurists and sometime TV personality Richard Branson along with former Vice President Al Gore announced a $25 million prize to top scientists if they could find a way to suck the green house gases warming our planet out of the atmosphere, presumably without ending all life as we know it on Earth.
Branson also asked other governments to match the money he was offering as a prize in the spirit of the Longitude prize sponsored by the British government for scientists and mathematicians in the 17th century to develop a means for determining longitude at sea enabling a safe navigation of the oceans and globe. Gore elaborated on the challenge explaining that the prize was for a cure and not something that alleviates the symptoms or creates a stop gap measure temporarily improving things.
The goal is an end to the problem of green house gases that have collected primarily as carbon is released into the atmosphere from petroleum that has been locked safely in the ground for millions of years.
To date there have been technologies that have surfaced that were designed to remove Carbon from the air. One of those was a synthetic tree developed at Columbia University, but it never left the drawing board for lack of funding. Another is the technology used on nuclear submarines to clean the air. That application is obviously limited to a much smaller scale and so its obvious that scientists need to think of solutions much larger in scope.
No comments:
Post a Comment