Reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

Richard Branson is offering $25m to anyone who can come up with a way of removing one billion metric tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years.

2 crazy ideas that came to my mind was: Can we pack all the carbon dioxide and sent them to outerspace? Probably not lest it affects the carbon cycle. Or, if technology allows, perhaps we can compress them into liquid and pack them off to a container and release them slowly overtime, but how will it affect the carbon cycle and how much energy will be needed to do all these?

A more practical way would be to reduce meat consumption or become a vegetarian/vegan so as to decrease the demand for live stock production. In one of my previous post, I mentioned how factory farming results in more demands for land usage and deforestation. Deforestation can also be due to extensive logging and burning of forests.

Burning of fossil fuels also release CO2 into the atmosphere, and this process can be slowed down by using alternative renewable energy sources such as wind and solar energy.

Slowing down the above two processes reduces the release of carbon into the atmosphere, but what can we do about taking carbon back from the atmosphere? One way is to plant more trees. Trees use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis and reduce the amount present in the air.

Weighing the importance between our home and the economic benefits from environmentally unfriendly practices is a pressing issue. We are all interdependent on one another, being rich or poor is mere comparison, if everyone dies, what’s the use of having lots of money?