We’ve always known that Richard Branson is all about hot air. The brash, devil-may-care Virgin whiz kid has piloted his hot air balloons for record-busting distances. He’s also built a Virgin megaconglomerate whose tendrils reach into all aspects of consumer life, including a reality TV show. Now he’s putting his money where his mouth is – he’s created a contest that will award $25 million to anyone who can come up with a way to extract one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. (Note: The extra ne of tonne must weigh a lot, as a British tonne is actually heavier than an American ton.)
Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are a side effect of global warming, which scientists worldwide have just confirmed that, yeah, is a result of human activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Since modern humans developed only 40,000 years ago, we don’t know what high levels of carbon dioxide will do to us. By some estimates, the world hasn’t seen these levels of carbon dioxide for 650,000 years. It’s all a grand experiment, see?
Still, $25 million is nothing to scoff at, so I decided that I would give it a go. You can’t win unless you play.
So I did a little research, and you know what — Australia beat me to it. The country plans to phase out incandescent light bulbs, the kind Thomas Edison invented 125 years ago. They are turning to compact fluorescents.
But will that work? Well, I assume that replacing 15 incandescents with compact fluorescents will save some 500 kg of carbon dioxide per year (per this quiz about Canada, but I think a little extrapolation is OK here). If you multiply that number by roughly 20 million Australians, yeah, I think they’ve got it.
Oh well, you snooze you lose, and all that.
Besides, I don’t think Sir Richard would have liked my idea very much, which was to shut down Virgin Airlines.
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