Elon Musk, the world's richest person, tech-preneur, founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Hyperloop etc has announced this $100 million prize to anyone who can bring an effective technology to capture the atmospheric Carbon that can reduce or help contain Climate change. .
If humanity can think of ways by which we can clear just the air we breathe and water we drink and use for our daily purposes, the world would be a better place to live.
Alex Rau et al writing in HBR Jan, Feb 2010, Can Technology really save us from climate change, (click here) mentions that Clean tech has from 1996 to 2007 followed essentially a path as given in the picture. There has been a clear lag of three years from innovation to implementation stage. From about 160 patents in 1996, the number of patents has increased to 1600 in a span of 10 - 11 years, ie. almost 10x growth. In the same time span we find, the implementation or installation of new wind energy installations also increased to 25000 MW from 2500 MW, this happened with a time lag of approximately three years.
The above data shows when a surge in innovation happens, there will be a successful implementation phase with a lag of 3 years. Also every 30 months, ie. 2.5 years, there has been a doubling on clean energy implementations in the wind energy sector. It may be too early to comment on something like a Moore's law for Green technologies (Gordon Moore, '65, the no. of Transistors on a Silicon chip doubles eighteen months), but the trend shows that very soon we can propose something similar.
Considering the pace at which clean technolgies are growing, very soon some organisation or individual will be able to collect the $100 million prize money (which is just one in 200th of his wealth as of Jan '21) from Elon musk and thus make the world a better place to live.
George..
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