James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

CLIMATEWIRE | Time magazine selected Elon Musk as its “person of the year” in 2021 after the billionaire entrepreneur upended the car market, reinvigorated the space industry, and funded a $100 million competition for climate technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air and sea.

But Musk won’t attend Time’s event in New York City on Wednesday to fete the winners of that groundbreaking contest. The $50 million grand prize will go to Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup founded three years ago that works with crushed rocks and subsistence farmers to soak up climate pollution.

It’s unclear why Musk, an environmental hero turned MAGA diehard, is skipping the capstone event for a climate contest bankrolled via his eponymous foundation. Neither he nor Time responded to requests for comment. The XPrize will be announced at the Time100 Summit, the magazine’s annual event featuring 100 influential people.

In addition to running electric-vehicle-maker Tesla and the aerospace firm SpaceX, Musk is leading President Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency has slashed climate funding for research, projects and agencies.

“We live in very complicated times,” said Nikki Batchelor, who led the Musk-funded carbon removal competition at the XPrize Foundation. Prior to joining the nonprofit, she worked as an innovation adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development — the first federal bureau effectively shuttered by Musk. (Musk has no ties to the three-decade-old foundation aside from being a donor.)

“He was one of the leading voices trying to push clean energy forward and think about innovative solutions to tackling climate change,” she said of Musk, the world’s richest person. “We’ve continued on with that.”

Batchelor spoke with POLITICO’s E&E News before XPrize publicly announced the final carbon removal contest winners, each of which removed at least 1,000 tons of CO2 in a year and provided a business plan for how they’ll reach 1 million tons annually. Since 2019, carbon removal companies have locked away about 650,000 tons in total, less than the annual emissions of two natural gas power plants.

The runners-up were NetZero, Vaulted Deep, and Undo Carbon, which netted prizes of $15 million, $8 million, and $5 million, respectively. Undo Carbon uses an enhanced rock weathering approach similar to Mati to remove CO2 from the air faster than the natural carbon cycle. NetZero and Vaulted Deep both lock away CO2 by preventing carbon-rich organic matter from biodegrading.

Commercializing carbon removal technologies is important because the world is unlikely to reduce the burning of oil, gas, and coal quickly enough to prevent the buildup of dangerous levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. As a result, climate scientists have concluded that it will be necessary in the coming decades to increase the Earth’s carbon removal capacity by billions of metric tons annually.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________