Hillary Clinton wants
to spend oil companies’ profits to subsidize R&D in the energy sector. Al
Gore and Richard Branson have another idea: they’re offering $25 million
to the person who comes up with the best way of removing carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere, and anybody who comes up with a method which will remove at
least one billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere is eligible.
I hope this is the first of many such prize funds – and I hope that the
US government gets in on the act as well. If Hillary does end up socking a windfall
tax on oil companies, a prize fund would be a better way of spending it than
a picking-winners approach.