Will a Multi-Million Dollar Contest Be the Answer to Global Warming?

Like most American kids in the 1960s, I was an avid Star Trek fan and I rooted for every new development in the U.S. space program. I'll never forget staying up past midnight to watch Neil Armstrong take Man's first steps on the moon.

But by the time of the first shuttle disaster in 1986, I was less concerned with the Star Trek mission and more concerned with the fate of the Earth. Apart from the human tragedy of the disaster, the setback to the space shuttle program didn't seem to matter much, and the image of the Challenger flameout at 48,000 feet over Florida seemed symbolic of the utter failure of Western society to create a sustainable civilization on Planet Earth.

The recent release of the IPCC's fourth assessment on climate change is just one more milestone documenting the disintegration of Earth's planetary life-support systems. The world must act quickly, but I am not impressed by the announcement last week that Sir Richard Branson, founder of a company that is building a fleet of excursion vehicles for the space tourism market, has offered a $25 million prize for the invention of new carbon-sequestration technologies.

Branson's space travel company, called Virgin Galactic (in line with his other ventures, Virgin Media, Virgin Trains and Virgin Airways), is building five suborbital spacecraft based on Burt Rutan's X-Prize winning design, SpaceShipOne. Tourists will pay about $200,000 a ticket to spew greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere and enjoy an hour of bouncing around in microgravity. Presumably, it was the success of the X-Prize competition in producing this space toy that inspired Branson to offer the carbon-sequestration prize, which he calls the Earth Challenge. Sadly, Branson's prize may do more harm than good.

There are two big problems with the Earth Challenge prize. First, and most important, it sends the wrong message to those who are just waking up to the true threat of climate change: it says we can solve this problem by inventing the right techno-fix. Branson himself said it at his news conference announcing the prize: "Man created the problem; therefore Man should solve the problem."

If "Man" is about to jump in and fix the carbon problem, then we'll all be able to carry on with business as usual, right? Yikes! If this perception becomes widespread, then there will be no motivation to change our wasteful habits. We can relax, because we have plenty of coal in the ground and our techno-heroes will find a way to capture and store those pesky carbon molecules out of the way somewhere.

Encouraging complacency is one problem. Then there's the problem that any techno-fix solution big enough to make a difference has the potential for dangerous unintended consequences of planetary magnitude.

Ideas like pumping CO2 deep into the ground or the ocean may sound promising, but can create new disasters. For instance, the oceans have already been absorbing much of the CO2 generated during the fossil fuel era, and as a result, they are turning acidic. No one knows how much more acidic the oceans can become before the calcium shells of animals like clams and corals begin to dissolve.

We can also inject CO2 into old oil and gas fields and coal beds -- it is being done right now in Norway, Texas and Canada. But in order to be effective as a carbon-sequestration strategy, hundreds of underground reservoirs would need to be created and maintained.

Jeff Goodell, writing in his book Big Coal, says that each reservoir would spread out "fifty or so square miles underground, which means that if carbon sequestration does indeed become widespread, tens of thousands of people will be living above giant bubbles of CO2." Leakage is a problem, he says, "CO2 is buoyant underground and can migrate through cracks and faults in the earth, pooling in unexpected places." A 20 percent concentration of odorless CO2 can cause a person to lose consciousness in "a breath or two" and asphyxiate.