Former US Vice President Al Gore says January 1st will be the launch of a campaign of “mass persuasion” to freeze carbon emissions.
It will be modeled on the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, where a wide range of groups from entrepreneurs and activists to political leaders were involved.
Gore made the announcement during a two-day Greentech Innovation Network meeting organized by Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB).
The group has decided to become involved on a national level, and is already talking with members of Congress. The objective of the 2-day meeting was to determine which policies and technologies could most effectively fight global warming.
The Greentech Innovation Network, which consists of environmental entrepreneurs, policymakers and academics, helped convince California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign the model carbons emission law, passed in September.
Kleiner Perkins partner John Denniston said the group will help finance Gore’s political efforts.
“If we put all our efforts on the parliaments, this will take decades,” said Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, a panelist at the meeting. “We need to build constructive alliances between the scientific community and the business community.”
KPCB announced the inaugural winner of its “KPCB Prize for Greentech Innovation,” Dr. Eli Gal for his breakthrough process for capturing CO2 from coal-fired plants. The $100,000 KPCB Greentech prize was established to encourage innovation by recognizing entrepreneurs like Dr. Gal for substantial advancements in Greentech — technologies for clean water, clean power or clean transportation.
Dr. Gal’s innovative technology is a chilled ammonia-based process that is dramatically cheaper and more efficient than alternative and conventional CO2 capture technologies. It captures over 90% of CO2, lowers the cost of scrubbing emissions from $40 per ton of CO2 to $20 per ton, and requires as little as half the power needs that other scrubbing technologies require.
The judges were Dr. Steve Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics; Bob Epstein, co-founder of Environmental Entrepreneurs and Sybase; Fred Krupp, President of the Environmental Defense Fund and Amory Lovins, Founder and CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute. They looked for a winning technology based on its ability to inspire innovators, likelihood to work and ability to benefit from the prize money.
KPCB has also established the “KPCB Prize for Greentech Policy Innovators” to recognize and award $50,000 to outstanding policy entrepreneurs. The winner of the policy award will be announced in Spring 2007.
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