And the Oscar for Sequestration Technique Goes To…

When Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio came onstage Sunday night at the Oscars to talk about the greening of the Academy Awards (they bought carbon credits to offset the emissions from all the travel to and from the ceremony, made eco-friendly choices in buying their supplies, etc) they were great.  Al and Leo’s banter was suitably witty; Gore’s fake-out presidential announcement was hilarious;  if Leo had pronounced the full name of NRDC (it’s Natural Resources Defense Council, not National) the whole thing would have been perfect.  Luckily, the only people in America to notice the slip up were the communications staff of the NRDC.  I only noticed because I was at an Oscar-watching party with one of these people.

So it appears that Al Gore is officially a Hollywood personality, clinching the title of America’s Favorite Climate Change Expert cum Documentarist when An Inconvenient Truth won Best Documentary.

But as good as Al and Tipper look in red carpet gear, Gore has another, more important award to work on.  Al Gore, along with fellow friend of polar bears Richard Branson (the owner of Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records, and a new space tourism agency) have initiated the Virgin Earth Challenge.  The Challenge, which has a $25 million prize, will go to the person or group who comes up with the best techonology to remove man-made carbon from the atmosphere.  The Challenge was unveiled early this month, and coincided with the latest (and scariest to date) report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It’s a fantastic idea to award a huge cash prize to whoever can come up with such a technology – dying polar bears and melting icecaps are all fine and dandy for bleeding-hearts watching documentaries at their local indie theater – but nothing incentivizes like a huge pile of cold hard cash.  The technology that wins the prize must be economically viable and effect a net decrease in the carbon in the atmosphere over a 10 year period, without producing harmful side effects.

This sounds like a tall order, but for $25 million, some geochemist who really wants a fleet of Maseratis and a diamond hat should be able to figure it out.  There are already several enormous carbon-vacuum-machines (“carbon sinks” in the biz) at work on the planet:  forests, for example, and oceans.  Carbon cycles through the oceans and atmosphere sort of like water (but not exactly – if you want a bit more science you can get it here, or if you’re really hard core you can get the mind-boggling version here).  Suffice it to say that carbon molecules don’t have to sit around the atmosphere turning the earth into a greenhouse, raising sea levels, murdering polar bears, flooding islands and causing freak weather.  They can also, for example, get taken in by plants in photosynthesis (you just have to stop chopping down rainforest – I’m not citing rainforests for feelgood reasons either, though I know they have become synonymous with dolphins in their eco-cutesiness – they are actually superb carbon sinks), or absorbed into the surface of the ocean and then sink down with the cold water. 

Even the DOE – that’s right kids, the United States Department of Energy - is doing some research and development around carbon sequestration (in nature it’s called a carbon sink, when humans do it it’s called sequestration).  The problem with this is that, as long as you can freely emit as much carbon into the air as you want to, nobody’s going to use the sequestration technology.  Our policymakers could learn a thing or two from Al and Richard about being a little more long-sighted.

So why not invent some giant carbon vacuum and aim it at the sky?  Or attach machines to the out-pumps of carbon-emitting factories to trap the carbon as it comes out, and transform it into something else?  Bonus points if you can capture the atmospheric carbon and squish it into diamonds.  There’s good money in it, and even a prize.