years.
Al Gore agreed to be a judge; so too did Tim Flannery and James Lovelock. I also asked two other distinguished people to join the panel — Sir Crispin Tickell, the director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation at Oxford University, and Dr James Hansen, professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute and head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. This was a heavyweight group of assessors.
The judges will decide whether a scheme has the potential to make a significant difference to global warming, and whether the prize should be awarded to one winner or shared between two or three. We found that setting more prescriptive targets was pointless, because there are so many ways to address the greenhouse gas problem. This point was very well put by James Lovelock, who was as sharp as ever when commenting on our early suggestions:
I was surprised to read in the outline of the Virgin Earth Challenge that the requirement for the prizewinner was the removal of at least one billion tonnes of CO2 per year. This seems small compared with the near 30 billion tonnes we add yearly. In fact, 6.3 billion humans breathe out yearly nearly two billion tonnes of CO2 — trying to restore the Earth by removing one or even two billion tonnes a year is a bit like trying to bail out a leaky rowing boat with a teaspoon…
He said we should keep in mind that a billion tonnes of carbon could be taken out of the atmosphere if we synthesised our food, which would release huge areas of farmland to revert to natural vegetation.
Is it too late to make the conditions harder and at the same time more general? It would be a shame to have to turn down a good proposal for a method for making tasty and nutritious food by biochemical synthesis directly from air and water.
I knew I had to get Jim more involved, and Will Whitehorn offered to go and see him. Returning from a climate change meeting in France with former president Jacques Chirac, he agreed to complete the line-up of judges for the prize. ‘It’s a grand idea,’ he wrote, ‘and who knows, it might just promote the discovery of an answer. We have all spent far too long sleepwalking towards extinction and need an incentive.’
I think that all business people need to have sceptical scientific friends who can challenge, prod and stimulate. Jim was certainly doing this for me.
A successful application for the Virgin Earth Challenge could very well take into account the Earth’s self- regulating ability. In September 2007, Jim and his colleague Chris Rapley wrote to the science journal
One way to do this would be to lower vertical pipes into the ocean. Wave power could enable a simple pump to drive cold, nutrient-rich waters up from the depths to the relatively barren ocean surface. This would promote the growth of algae, which would consume CO2 and produce dimethyl sulphide, the chemical that turns humid air into clouds.
Jim mentioned this example to me because he was attending a meeting in Washington the following week and wanted to discuss the idea with scientists and engineers there. He recently wrote to me with a new idea:
More and more I think our best chance of reversing global heating lies in the burial of charcoal on land and in the ocean. If most farm waste were turned into charcoal yearly on the farms and then ploughed in, this alone would do much more than anything otherwise proposed. More than this, the preparation of charcoal yields a modest amount of biofuel and the total could be quite large. It would take longer to establish the same scheme with ocean farms but if we really intend to do something this is the way to go.
It’s an ingenious notion — and might even become a successful business proposition.
Within the first year, the Virgin Earth Challenge attracted more than 3,000 notes of interest — and this was very exciting. But one thing began to dawn on me: prizes do take time to produce results. Peter Diamandis came up with the X Prize concept for commercial space flight in 1994 and over the course of several years had presented it to numerous people for funding — including Virgin — but it wasn’t won by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen until ten years later. As fighters in the war against global warming, we were all too well aware that time was one thing in very short supply.
A prize of $25 million was an incentive for departments at a lot of universities — but I began to ask what if there was a bounty ten or even twenty times this size? Perhaps this would attract the major industries to divert significant research and development into the project. A prize of this magnitude would do a great deal to stimulate the large corporates with their massive R&D spending power.
With this in mind, early in 2008, I accepted an invitation to address the UN’s two-day workshop on climate change, where I was made UN Citizen of the Year by the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for my work on climate change. As the owner of several airlines, even I can see the irony in that!
I already had a lot of sympathy for the views of Jeffrey Sachs, outlined in his book,
So I arrived in New York with Jackie McQuillan and Jean Oelwang, determined to make a public plea for the creation of an Environmental War Room. I intended opening with a Cousteau quotation: ‘There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Russia, no China, no Taiwan. Rivers flow unimpeded across the swathes of continents. The persistent tides, the pulse of the sea do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth.’
The president of the UN General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs for Macedonia, chaired the session. As I remember it, this went under the banner ‘Addressing Climate Change: The United Nations and the World at Work’. Srgjan was a gracious host. Among the other participants were the Secretary-General and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. Also with me at the conference was the actress Daryl Hannah, a perceptive campaigner on climate change issues.
On 11 February, Srgjan introduced the session: ‘I am very much encouraged in that the climate is changing — in terms of the political climate at least — and that people have replaced ignorance with awareness. Awareness is now our ally but that’s not enough. We are not talking about long-term planning and the world of tomorrow. We’re talking about the emergencies of today.’
He explained that the United Nations was talking about partnerships and that a negotiation process was going on among member nations on setting up targets on greenhouse gases. But he said that only partnerships that included the business world, the media, the non-governmental organisations, and academics (such as those who made a contribution with the IPCC, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and helped politicians understand the magnitude of the problem) would work. He stressed that the UN could not do it all by itself. The chairman said that when he was preparing for his role as president of the General Assembly he had read about climate change — and he acknowledged the creation of the Virgin Earth Challenge. ‘It is not by chance that they are here; they inspired me,’ he said. ‘I invited them… this is why we are here together.’
I started in a sombre tone. At the last minute I dispensed with the poetic Cousteau intro and went straight for the jugular. ‘There are some eminent scientists who already believe that we have gone through the tipping point, that there is nothing mankind can now do to stop the Earth heating up by five degrees, with all the dire consequences that will come with that.’
I then cited Jim Lovelock, saying that he went further than the UN report and he predicted we would lose all the floating ice in the summer months in the Arctic Ocean within ten years and that the five-degree rise is likely within forty years, rather than the eighty years that had been predicted by the United Nations. However, unlike the UN report, he believes that the world will then stabilise at this five-degree rise and that there will be survivors. But much of the lush, comfortable world that we now enjoy will be gone. It will erode into a largely featureless desert.
