The first winners of a multi-year, $100 million Xprize competition for entrepreneurs attempting to reduce or reverse carbon emissions have been announced. Though the majority of Musk’s money won’t be distributed until 2025, each of these 15 firms will receive $1 million today to keep the lights on until then.

What is an xprize milestone?

It is a non-profit organization that creates and conducts public competitions to promote technical advancement for the greater good. James Cameron, Larry Page, Arianna Huffington, and Ratan Tata are among the members of their board of trustees. The XPRIZE objective is to use incentivized competition to achieve “radical discoveries for the good of humankind.” It promotes high-profile competitions to encourage individuals, businesses, and organizations of all types to create creative ideas and technology that will aid in the resolution of the world’s major issues.

7 things you should know about climate change

• Climate change has already made weather events worse or more frequent for at least 85 percent of the world’s population, according to new research, and the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report stated that many of the impacts of climate change are widespread, exacerbating, and likely irreparable. Meanwhile, as governments and organisations seek ways to reduce emissions and combat global warming, global carbon capture projects have increased by 50% in the last nine months; the world’s largest carbon capture plant, which opened last month in Iceland, will pull thousands of metric tonnes of CO2 from the air and pump it underground using geothermal energy.

• Carbon removal encompasses a wide range of methods for removing carbon pollution from the atmosphere. These range from more natural alternatives, such as forest restoration and regenerative agriculture, to more engineering approaches, such as devices that directly harvest CO2 from the air. They all have the ability to extract CO2 from the air and store or sequester it for an extended period of time.

• Climate change may be mitigated, if not reversed, by removing carbon from the atmosphere. CO2 is the primary physical driver of human-caused climate change, with a significant portion of CO2 emissions remaining in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years. Carbon removal can help decrease or even reverse climate change by cleaning up CO2 and finally pulling down atmospheric CO2 levels.

• Meeting the Paris Agreement’s targets would very certainly necessitate carbon removal. The international community pledged in the Paris Agreement to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius and ideally below 1.5 degrees Celsius while pursuing sustainable growth. To do so, mankind must achieve net-zero emissions, if not “net-negative” emissions, in which we remove more CO2 from the atmosphere each year than we emit. Carbon removal will very certainly play a key part in accomplishing those objectives.

• Carbon sequestration is not a substitute for reducing emissions. The essential thing we can do to combat climate change is to cut our greenhouse gas emissions, particularly CO2. It can help to augment emissions reductions, but it’s too slow and expensive to do all of the necessary work.

• Carbon removal is not the same as carbon capture and storage from fossil fuels. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is frequently promoted to lower CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. This isn’t carbon abatement. To determine the difference, look at where the carbon comes from: carbon removal removes carbon from the air and stores it underground, whereas fossil CCS just captures carbon from fossil fuels before it is released into the atmosphere Carbon sequestration isn’t created equal. Every method of carbon removal has advantages, disadvantages, possibilities, and trade-offs, but some methods are better than others, and some will operate better in some locations than others. Creativity, scientific study, and sound policy may all contribute to long-term carbon reduction.

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