Virgin scientists to the rescue

First, you've got to hand it Richard Branson. Say what you want about his contradictory ways -- promoting wasteful extravagance while saving the planet from the products of those wasteful ways -- but his choice of brand name was brilliant. And it gives newspaper editors and bloggers an irresistible headline for anything he does. This time, it's a generous, $25-million prize for anyone who can come up with a way to scrub the atmosphere of all that nasty carbon dioxide we (including his transportation businesses) are pumping out.

Overseeing the innovations are James Hansen, the noted climate scientist and head of the NASA Institute for Space Studies; the inventor of Gaia theory James Lovelock; UK environmentalist Sir Crispin Tickell; and Australian mammalogist and palaeontologist Tim Flannery.

Al Gore, the former presidential candidate turned environmental campaigner, is also on the judging panel.

Nice line-up there. But the details bring us back down to Earth.

They are looking for a method that will remove at least one billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere.

Since we are currently pouring some 26-28 billion tonnes of the stuff into the air now, removing a single gigatonne amounts to an offset of less than 4 percent. Hell, even Kyoto would do better than that.

All of this smacks of an infatuation with technology. It's the same kind of approach fuels the harbingers of carbon capture and sequestration. Great ideas, in theory. But the energy required for such technologies has to come from somewhere, and in most cases we are decades away from figuring out how to make such gear more efficient that just using that energy to displace the fossil-fuels we're using now. Might as well wait for fusion power (which is 40 years away and always will be, as they say...)

Similar attitudes plague even those promoting genuinely clean alternatives. In Canada, Hydro-Quebec likes to tout how many millions of tonnes of CO2 its new hydroelectric plants will offset, but the truth is those plants are simply meeting growing demand for electricity, not actually replacing dirtier forms of electrical generating capacity.

Technology is part of the answer, of course. But more important is implementing political, economic and social strategies and tactics that are already available. In other words, reducing demand for chemical and electrical power. Nobody wants to hear that, but it's inescapable.

So bully for you Richard "virgin" Branson. You're part of the solution, but it's a very small part of the solution, and you're still part of a very big problem.