Branson offers £12m reward to save the planet

Sir Richard Branson, together with Al Gore, called for scientists to come up with a way to combat greenhouse gases
13 April 2012

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson has offered a £12.8 million prize to scientists to find a way to help save the planet from climate change.

Flanked by former US vice president Al Gore and other distinguished environmentalists, Sir Richard called for scientists to come up with a way to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

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Describing the challenge as the largest prize ever offered, Sir Richard compared it to the competition for a person to devise a method of estimating longitude accurately.

It was 60 years before Yorkshire clock maker John Harrison came up with an accurate method and received his prize from King George I.

Sir Richard said today: "The earth cannot wait 60 years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today."

He said he had been influenced by James Lovelock, the inventor of Gaia Theory, which suggests that the world may already have crossed a "tipping point".

"My wife Joan is a down-to-earth, practical Glaswegian," he said. "When I told her that Lovelock believed we may already be doomed, she responded by saying "There are a lot of brilliant minds out there. Surely one of them would be able to come up with a solution"."

He said that most people's experience of the idea of a "planet under threat" came from science fiction stories in which a superhero steps in to save the day.

He said: "Today we have a threat. Still we have to convince many people that the threat is urgent and real and there is no superhero.

"We have only our own ingenuity and we have no hope of a meaningful solution unless we find a way to work together." He added: "Necessity is the mother of invention."

Former US vice president Al Gore said the earth had a "fever" which had to be taken seriously. He said: "Up until now, what has not been asked seriously on a systematic basis is, is there some way that some of that extra carbon dioxide may be scavenged effectively out of the atmosphere? And no one knows the answer to that.

"It is safe to say that until recently the answer would have been an immediate and dismissive "no" but we are now in circumstances where the most difficult questions have to be asked."

Mr Gore said the invention of Morse Code by Samuel Morse followed the death of his wife. He said that Morse had been in Washington DC when he received a message that his wife was ill in West Virginia and dashed to her side but was too late. "The telegraph came from his efforts to spare others the sense of loss," he said.

Mr Gore continued: "There are many other examples of new technologies and innovations we have discovered that did not come in the first instance from the head but came from the heart."

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