from Bruce Sterling’s blog we learn:

Technology Review: Billionaire Offers $25 Million to Save Earth!

Billionaire Richard Branson is on a tear these days. Last year at Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative meeting in New York, Branson announced that he would spend $3 billion of his Virgin profits to research and develop renewable-energy technologies. Now he has announced a $25 million prize for anyone who creates a system that removes at least one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in each of ten years.

I read the first part – cool, nice idea. God knows what percentage $3 billion is of his total profit, but good on him. Then I read the second part – and I’m like WTF!?! It conjures up visions of big machines sitting out in the desert sucking in CO2. Climate going bad? Turn up the notch. Add more! Not a good idea in any way I can see.

I think the one lesson we should be learning right now is that global weather is one bad ass complex system. The last thing we wanna do is start screwing with it some more. Sure, by all means let’s stop adding to the massive amount of CO2 we’ve spewed into the atmosphere as part of our rampant industrialization. Please, let’s make our machines more energy efficient. But let’s not kid ourselves by thinking that just building another machine is gonna make everything go back to ‘normal’. The damage is done, it’s time to start cleaning our act up.

And there are a myriad of different solutions out there. Not just solar panels and wind farms. Green roofs will help mitigate the urban head island effect. And they make the city nicer too.

Kevin Kelly in his book Out Of Control details a way more industrial-ecology:

Eighty miles west of Copenhagen, local Danish businesses have cultivated an embryonic industrial ecosystem. About a dozen industries cooperate in exploiting “wastes” from neighboring factories in an open-loop which is steadily “closing in” as they learn how to recycle each other’s effluent.

A coal-fired electric power plant supplies an oil refinery with waste heat from its steam turbines (previously released into a nearby fjord). The oil company removes polluting sulfur from gas released by the refining process which can then be burned by the power plant, saving 30,000 tons of coal per year. The removed sulfur is sold to a nearby sulfuric acid plant. The power plant also precipitates pollutants from its coal smoke in the form of calcium sulfate, which is consumed as a substitute for gypsum by a sheetrock company. Ash removed from the same smoke goes to a cement factory. Other surplus steam from the power plant warms a biotech pharmaceutical plant and 3,500 homes, as well as a seawater trout farm. Hi-nutrient sludge from both the fish farm and the pharmaceutical factory’s fermentation vats are used to fertilize local farms, and perhaps someday soon, also horticulture greenhouses warmed by the power plant’s waste heat.

And these are just the things I know about. I should really pick up and read my copy of going native: living in the Australian environment. As I remember it, it explains how we can re-tool our European living patterns to live far more effeciently. After all, this drought isn’t going anywhere.

Doesn’t this sound like such a more sensible idea than the Carbon-Dioxide Capture and Storage plan the Australian Government is touting:

CCS involves the capture, transport and long-term storage of carbon dioxide, usually in geological reservoirs deep underground, that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere.

Let’s get real about this people. And remember: if it’s yellow, let it mellow – if it’s brown, flush it down.