EDITORIAL – Eco contest targets effect, not cause

Without a government-sponsored solution to global warming in sight, some say it’s time to… Without a government-sponsored solution to global warming in sight, some say it’s time to take matters into our own hands. That attitude led Sir Richard Branson, Virgin CEO, to offer up a $25 million prize to the person who comes up with a cost-effective way of cleaning at least one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. Branson has also pledged $3 billion for research of renewable energy technologies, according to the BBC.

“The Earth cannot wait 60 years,” Branson said in the BBC article. “I want a future for my children and my children’s children. The clock is ticking.”

And just in case ensuring the future of our planet isn’t enough of an incentive to get on this global warming thing, there’s always that $25 million to entice people into doing what’s right.

We have an idea. It seems like what we need is a series of tubes to suck the carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere and shoot it out into space, never to be seen again. But what utilizes a series of tubes to function? The Internet! We need to enlist the aid of someone who invented the Internet so he can harness the tube technology, make a cool $25 million and solve this problem.

It seems that Branson was one step ahead of us. Al Gore will be part of a panel of judges who will oversee the progress being made in the competition. Joining Gore will be Gaia theory inventor James Lovelock, British environmentalist Sir Crispin Tickell, U.S. climate scientist and NASA Institute for Space Studies head James Hansen and Tim Flannery, an Australian mammalogist and paleontologist.

According to Gore, part of the reason that we aren’t working harder to find a solution is that people just can’t fully comprehend what’s happening.

“It’s a challenge to the moral imagination of humankind to actually accept the reality of the situation we are now facing,” Gore said alongside Branson at the competition’s announcement.

“We’re not used to thinking of a planetary emergency, and there’s nothing in our prior history as a species that equips us to imagine that we, as human beings, could actually be in the process of destroying the habitability of the planet for ourselves.”

Branson’s initiative only reinforces a general lack of faith we have in the governments of the world to do anything about this problem. While we admire Branson’s dedication to environmental causes, and we’re thrilled that someone’s finally trying to get people to start thinking about turning things around, we would like to see more effort being poured into the cause, rather than fixing the effects. Perhaps the $3 billion he’s pledged for research will take care of that. We can only hope.

As important as it is for people to come to the realization that global warming is a big deal, it’s equally important that people realize and embrace the idea of making changes in their lives – changes that will help to eliminate the causes of excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Hopefully, this contest will not only yield a practical and effective way to rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, but also drive home the importance of finding alternatives to the problem in the first place.