digg

Just grow a ***** load of Algae, they're much more effective at converting CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen that trees, either that or just stop polluting so much - prevention is the best cure.

Imma go plant a tree. Gimmie my money!

Richard Branson can start by not having an airline.

I know, I know, I'm a dick. Digg me down.

The official competition website: http://www.virginearth.com/

And don't forget Al Gore's backing Branson here too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6345557.stm

If people really want to make a differance plant atleast 50 oak trees in your yard. Show you care.

A giant air filter is the solution. Give me my money j/k

There was an article on digg quite a while back proposing we all paint our roofs white to reflect enough sun back out that we would fix the warming we have done....or something

Anyone else recall?

algae blooms... preferably in the pacific where it can be gathered and sunk into a subduction zone along with some nuclear waste :)

@miles01110 that's simply untrue. You're true that it hasn't had a huge percentage swing (by huge i mean more than a few percent) but with a star vs its planets even a fraction of a fraction of a percent can change climates over the entire solar system.

Plague.

Lets make some giant space mirrors

Put all the gas in a plastic bag and send the plastic in the space. Ok i win.

now I really got it....

A REALLY BIG solar powered Ionic Breeze... If Sharper Image builds it, I will split the money with them

I was watching him on Richard And Judy this morning (GASP!) and it was quite interesting.

There will also be smaller cash prizes for the general public who discover a way to help cut our emmisions.

Branson is also hoping governments will chip in and help fund it. He also said it was 25m on the show

The contest dictates that your design must remove 1 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.

That's about 32 tons per second.

A typical SUV outputs about 30 tons of CO2 per year.

This seems unreasonable.

"As long as it doesnt take away my freedom im all for others conserving"

Sound to me you want others to do your part for you. How convenient. In a job, you would be fired. On earth..?

Thankyou Sir Richard Branson. We need more of your initiative and debacle regarding envirnmental issues before its too late.

I hope he succeeds.

reply hiccupped...

make something that stirs up the crud on the bottom of the sea. make it wave or wind powered and movable. Put a whole bunch of them in an area where lots of nutrients settle to the bottom but is never stirred up (just eventually turns in to rock)
This is where all the algae which is the base of the worlds biggest carbon sink (when it happens naturally from storms and currents)
it also creates a huge food chain including lots of tasty fish for humans to eat.

There must be no Chem E's since I didn't read "build a giant CO2 scrubber". Add your favorite CO2 scrubbing material (NaOH for example) and your done. Or you could just build giant stack to space. It's really that easy...

Seriously though, the $20M is a real insult. Unless you can convince all the worlds governments to stop burning fossil fuels for that much, this is nothing more than a dumb publicity stunt.

Quick, everyone stop breathing so I can win my 20 million.

invent paint which changes color from dark to light color 20°c so it will absorb sunlight energy when it is cold and reflect it when its hot.

This is stupid. Why doesn't he just offer eleventeen kajillion zillion whoopdeedillion dollars? No one is ever going to be able to reverse the damage.

Man that guy's such a rouge billionaire

isn't that more like 19 million USD? ... a million bucks is a pretty big difference

Well I remember seeing this problem in a wise t.v. show one time called Futurama. Their plan: "Kill All Robots!!!"
In the end though instead of killing lovable Bender, they effectively made a large boost of thrust to knock Earth slightly out of it's orbit. Let's put that plan to action!
I guess I cannot collect the reward since it was not my idea, give the money to The Professor

I read about a method for scrubbing CO2 a while ago. We have factories/plants that take lime, powder it, then let it fall through the air. The lime attaches to the CO2 and becomes limestone. Heat to remove the CO2 and repeat. We still have to find somewhere to put the CO2, my personal favorite idea is to ramp up diamond making technologies and replace glass with diamond wherever we can.... or something. I would love it if every computer display, cellphone, PDA, wrist watch, and iPod in the entire world was scratch proof, etc.

I'm sorry I caused all that global warming.

I was on a roll.

my theory is richard branson is the type of guy who wants to live forever, or a lot longer. Which is why he's investing so much money into stem cell research and now this.

just like how arnold passed stem cell research in california. He actually wants to become the terminator and live forever.

Now THIS is the way to do it: Incentivize, motivate and consider other options other than advocating that entire economies be diminished or shut down.

Capital idea, Sir Richard!

£10M is nothing this is guilt money, if he wanted to do something he should help fund the new hydrogen powerplant in Peterhead(Scotland) the first of what is to be many built by primarily BP(an oil company, also with the government but only BP is pulling its weight) and £10M would barely cover the cost of training operators(i know this for a fact ive helped with the numbers). Its a friggin joke he wants to help the environment don't start a commercial passenger space service which will cost massive amounts of pollution.

There are allready maybe half a dozen promising methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere and i cant think of one where as little as £10M will make much of a difference as it would require a 100 times that amount to complete the R&D and put them into action.

Besides we arent yet at the point where we need to remove it, its causing climate change but its nothing to dangerous at the moment if we just stop pumping out the CO2 and move to neutral CO2,like the hydrogen power plant which is a pilot there are already several more on the boards after this first one is finished and its very efficient and simple process and then the relatively small amount of carbon released is then captured underground using existing fossil fuel extraction facilities.

Global Warming is like Elton John's wife... non-existant

The bad thing is that no one truly understands global warming, and if these guys are wrong about it being CO2, then it could send us into a ice age. The good thing is it'll stop the Earth from becoming a watery planet in the next 500 years. Now, don't get me wrong I'm all for alternative fuels and reducing pollution but I think that there is more here than meets the eye. An interesting experiment done by Nir Shaviv shows that solar energy could be to blame to the increase of temperatures while CO2 plays a small role. So far that's the only solid work I've seen that's shown that there may actually be a culprit. *shrugs* I'm not saying that we should burn more fossil fuels or anything of the like, but we should consider all of our options before we go ahead and do this. The Earth isn't going to become a watery grave any time soon.
The good thing is if we are right, then hooray. We stopped the Earth from becoming a watery grave in a hundred years or more.

The problem with hydrogen as a fuel is that it takes so much damn energy to convert it to a usable state it becomes a wash at best. There is a similar problem with ethanol from corn. Corn requires large amounts of fertilizer which is derived from oil in part. The other costs of conversion drag down the net energy gain greatly. Free lunches are hard to come by.
Those that don't want to pay a tax for CO2 reduction don't need to worry. You will pay the tax one way or the other. When Mother Nature reduces the economic output due to climate change and disaster, you will pay. Some economic estimates recently released claim that if governments don't commit 1% of GDP to environmental remediation then 20% reduction in GDP will be the result in a few short years. For those who choose not to believe in human caused global warming a vast experiment is being run as we speak that should provide many answers. In just a few short years man will have doubled the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere from preindustrial times. The results should be obvious but remedies may be out of reach as climatic feedback loops kick into gear. Good luck with that!

Recognize Virgin for doing something worthwhile:

http://dotherightthing.com/entries/623

Wait for a huge volcano to blow and throw us back into an ice age. Then we'll be hoping that we can pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere to warm us all up.

Shut down Virgin Airlines...

You mean Bobby Sixkiller?

Industrial hemp...everywhere.

Look, why don't we all switch over to using water or hydrogen. Pass a 220v current through water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Burn the hydrogen and add the oxygen back in. You can also store large amounts of hydrogen inside metals such as Magnesium. There is NO pollution from this what so ever. You can even reverse the process to make water.

I find it amazing that after all these years, no-one has put more money into this.

Also, I forgot to add that it is also safe to use. I see a future where you buy a small magnesion block or something similar to put in your car.

Oh my gawd I think I figured out the best way to remove CO2 from the air. Leave a contact e-mail address in the news stories so people would actually contact you to get the reward. lol if this wasn't such a great subject and topic I wouldnt dugg it

We will only change if it is painless or mother nature bites us up the backside.
I'm not a scientist, but how would I do it. Many suggestions using algae; great but it will only have localised effects, and probably very limited. But what would happen if we could get the bio-mass into the atmosphere like a volcano does with it ash. If we could develop a very light green bio product, without the Ops! factor, that could be ejected into air. As it floats around the globe it would absorb the CO2 become heavy and fall back to earth; a bit like a sponge. Well it was only an idea.

If we all drank more Jack Daniels, then we'd be too boshed to drive, reducing carbon emissons from autos significantly. Actually, $10m for solving the global warming problem would be a steal.

Stopping globle warming

I 've sent a report from green peace with this
To whom it may cansurn. I had the idear of putting mirrors in space to reflect heat away in my head for about 3 years. I even sent the e mail about it, to Patrick Moor hoopping I was hered and it was done. theres a resone I came up with the idear, it is because I've worked somthing els out. Its to do with what other effects the ice caps are having. I'll not go into that now.

The idear about sticking mirrors in space to reflect heat away, I thought to my self, we could learn to control the weather with it. What it is, since hurricane Katrina, all the hurricanes that was heading to the United states where getting down graded, and just before thay got inland.
With me seeing this, I thought the Americans must be already doing it. About a year ago I sent the idear to BBC 24 news. I tex them weather is hot and cold so if you stick mirrors in space and reflect more heat on hot and cold you control hot and cold why are there some goverments putting them up there, ask your scientist is it possible. I know. Then I put my name. Not long after that, it flashed up on screen, climit change posible. These are the sort of things I seen happening. Some one how worked for BBC took over ITV, then sent a big coraspondant to the antartica to do specal reports. I think it was to black mail America, because not long after, thay had a quantum change in the climit. Thay evan made a three part serise on control of the weather with a documentry about it on BB2 strate after. Nothing els was happening about it. You see I want people to know theirs an option and I want the Americans to reflet heat away, not on us. We still can control the weather doing it that way. I sent the idear to green peace and thay said it can be done but don't want anything to do with it. I recon its because if people thinks theirs a salution thay will stop being green. Thay also said there are scientise working on the idear. I know that is because of me. Thay want to consantrate on the CO2. Well if you stablize the weather, we can stop all the droughts that are causing the plants and trees to die. We can evan make new forrists with this idear.
I've got idears where a lot of money can be made by this and I've also got other idear on this planet. I would love to see Richard Branson with the idears I've got.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: RE: global warming
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:59:52 +0100
From: info.info@uk.greenpeace.org
To: jonnybard@hotmail.co.uk


Dear Johnny,



Thank you for this email. You are quite right, mirrors in space would be one way of cooling the Earth down a bit, and there are scientists working on this and one or two similar solutions. Greenpeace wouldn’t support this idea, as whilst it could stop the warming effect, and possibly stabilize the weather, if we continue to emit CO2 then there are other unpleasant consequences. For example, CO2 acidifies the sea (it becomes carbonic acid when absorbed by water). If we don’t reduce our CO2 output we will end up with dead seas and oceans, regardless of the temperature. If we do reduce our CO2 output then we might not need the mirrors in space. There is the possibility that we might get CO2 emissions under control, but need a short-term solution to deal with the effects of the pollution we’ve already emitted, in which case the mirrors might be useful.



Regards,



Graham Thompson

Supporter Services

Greenpeace UK



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