Billionaire offers $25 million prize to fight global warming

LONDON — British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, with former Vice President Al Gore at his side, offered a $25 million prize Friday for anyone who can come up with a way to blunt global climate change by removing at least 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year from Earth's atmosphere.

It's an idea many scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say may be possible someday.

Branson, saying the "survival of our species" is imperiled by current environmental trends, said the prize was similar to cash inducements that led to some of history's most notable achievements in navigation, exploration and industry.

The winner must devise a plan to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere without creating adverse effects. The first $5 million would be paid up front; the remainder would be paid only after the program had worked successfully for 10 years.

"I believe in our resourcefulness and in our capacity to invent solutions to the problems we have ourselves created," said Branson, who has pledged to invest $3 billion in profits from his transportation companies, including Virgin Atlantic Airways and Virgin Trains, to fighting global warming.

"We are now facing a planetary emergency," said Gore, who has become one of the world's leading voices on climate-change issues, most lately with his documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth." Gore, who will serve as a judge in the Virgin Earth Challenge, said he hoped the contest would spur scientific innovation without distracting from more practical steps people can take to battle global warming, such as using energy-efficient light bulbs or pressuring politicians to confront "the crisis of our time."

"It's a challenge to the moral imagination of humankind," Gore said at a packed news conference, where several noted climate scientists and authors attended, provided videotaped endorsements or appeared by live video link.

How much is 1 billion tons?

It's about 12 percent of all the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans each year. The United States is responsible for about 20 percent of the global carbon output, but U.S. forests may remove as much as 1 billion tons per year. 

Source: National Science Foundation

Gore and Branson said that although scientists are working on technologies to capture carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at power plants and other industrial sources, no one has developed a strategy to remove gases already released into the atmosphere. Those gases are contributing to a dramatic increase in global temperatures that could have catastrophic results in coming decades, they said.

"We're nowhere" on technologies to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, Gore said. But he said he hoped innovators might be spurred not simply by the cash prize offered by Branson but by passion for working on what he called "a moral issue."

Branson compared the quest to a competition Britain's Parliament launched in 1714 to devise a method of estimating longitude accurately. Six decades passed before English clockmaker John Harrison received his prize from King George III for discovering an accurate method.

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

Other judges in the competition are James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; British environmentalists and authors James Lovelock and Crispin Tickell, and Australian conservationist and author Tim Flannery.

Gore, Branson and the other panelists referred repeatedly to a study released last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of hundreds of scientists from 113 countries, that concluded human activity is warming the planet at a potentially disastrous and irreversible rate.

Gore dismissed critics who say the potential effects of climate change have been exaggerated. He said the overwhelming scientific evidence is that "the planet has a fever." He likened the situation to parents told by a doctor that their child needs medical care, saying those parents shouldn't listen to "some science-fiction expert who tells you it isn't real — you listen to the doctor."

Gore said he believed public interest in climate change was growing in the United States. But when asked if he thought Americans were ready for a presidential campaign in which global warming was the central issue, he said, "We're not there yet."

Branson and Gore said they hoped to ask the governments of the United States, Britain and other countries to contribute to the prize money, or match the $25 million pledged by Branson. "I don't have much influence with this administration," Gore joked.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.