Richard Branson Offers $25 Million Eco Challenge

Richard Branson has offered a prize of $25 million to the first person who can demonstrate a system which reduces carbon gases in our atmosphere. The Virgin Earth Challenge prize requires that the solution be able to remove one billion tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years. No mean feat.

The panel of judges include, Al Gore, the former presidential candidate turned environmental campaigner; James Hansen, a noted climate scientist and the head of the Nasa Institute for Space Studies; the inventor of the Gaia theory, James Lovelock; UK environmentalist, Sir Crispin Tickell; Australian mammalogist and palaeontologist, Tim Flannery; .

Richard Branson also announced the new Virgin Fuels business venture, which is going to invest up to $400 million on green energy projects over the next three years. Sir Richard Branson has already promised to invest $3bn in profits from his travel firms, such as airline Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, into research for technologies dealing with renewable energy.

I've always found the activities of this very public man inspiring and very laudable. Here is a man who knows how to spend his money and also how to use his influence in very positive ways. He also knows how to have fun... For more information visit Virgin Earth Challenge.