Virgin's Prize to Fight Global Warming

May Monten, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Feb 9, 2007 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."

Sir Richard Branson, the celebrity British businessman who heads the Virgin group of companies, announced today that he will be funding a 25 million dollar prize to be awarded to the first person to figure out how to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Branson called it the Virgin Earth Challenge.

Al Gore stood next to Branson at the press conference where Branson announced the prize.

Reuters quotes Branson as saying "Man created the problem and therefore man should solve the problem," and that "unless we can devise a way of removing CO2 (carbon dioxide) from the earth's atmosphere we will lose half of all species on earth, all the coral reefs, 100 million people will be displaced, farmlands will become deserts and rain forests wastelands."

icWales quotes him as saying, "The earth cannot wait 60 years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today."

Branson also said that the way most people think of a "planet under threat" comes from science fiction stories. In those stories, a superhero swoops down, in the end, to save the day. But in the real-life threat that we face, there are no superheros to save us. We have to do it ourselves. "We have to convince many people that the threat is urgent and real," he said. "We have only our own ingenuity and we have no hope of a meaningful solution unless we find a way to work together."

He hopes that his prize, the largest ever offered, will spur the kind of creative thought necessary for us to save the planet and ourselves.

To win the prize, a person will have to come up with a way of removing a billion tons of carbon gases from the atmosphere for ten years. Branson, Gore, and a group of environmentalists and climate scientists will be the judges.

Branson, a high-school dropout, started his business empire by founding Virgin Records. He later started Virgin Airways, then Virgin Mobile. There are now a dizzying array of dozens of companies under the Virgin brand ranging from Virgin Cola to Virgin Active (a health club chain) to the cutely-named Virgin Brides (a bridal wear shop). He was knighted in 1999 for "services to entrepreneurship." He is said to be worth almost six billion dollars.

This isn't the first time he has announced plans to fund projects to fight global warming. In October, 2006, he said he would invest three billion dollars over the next ten years for that purpose.

Sources

Virgin's Branson offers $25 mln global warming prize, by Jeremy Lovell, Feb. 9, 2007, Reuters

Branson offers prize to save planet, Feb. 9, 2007, icWales, icwales.co.uk

Richard Branson, Wikipedia

Published by May Monten

Syndicated entertainment writer and serial blogger. View profile