Talking about climate change is important. Educating about climate change is important. And so is making everyday changes to fight climate change, in whatever ways we choose to do it, whether that’s cutting our carbon footprints via how we travel through to eating more sustainably. Lobbying for legal policies around curbing CO2 emissions – both on a local and national level – is hugely important too.

Climate change is a global threat though, and with trillions of tons historic anthropogenic, or man-made, CO2 in the atmosphere that needs dealing with, we need action at a commensurate, enormous scale. To go toe-to-toe with climate change requires innovation, daring, and a serious war chest. 

In January 2020, we announced the $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this competition will challenge innovators for four years to develop and demonstrate game-changing carbon removal systems. Design and build a working carbon removal system that can show a path to gigaton scale and low cost and in the words of Mr. Musk himself, “we will shower them with money.” 

At this point, you may be asking yourself “What’s a gigaton?” or I’ve got some trees in my backyard, can I enter to win the $100 million?” or “Why do we need this anyway?” All good questions. When thinking about global warming and CO2 emissions and carbon removal, it’s useful to keep scale in mind as a sort of decoder. So for example, “What is a gigaton?” It is one billion metric tons. “And how big is that?” It’s really, really, really big (keep reading to find out how big).

With that said, below are ten useful numbers to chew on to help ground the climate conversation and perhaps spark some ideas to enter into the $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal.

3 million years

That’s how long it’s been since atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been as high as they are now at between 415-420 parts per million. That’s the Pliocene Era for the geological historians out there, a time when prehistoric camels roamed a then-balmy Northern Canadian Arctic and global sea levels were as much as 24 meters higher than they are today. Failure to meaningfully drive down atmospheric CO2 concentrations mean accelerated global warming and a fast pass to climate the planet hasn’t experienced in millions of years. 

48 lbs

That’s the approximate pounds of CO2 a single tree can absorb each year (or roughly 22 kg -- we know metric too). That pencils out to around 1 ton of carbon dioxide consumed by the average tree by the age of 40. Trees and other natural solutions have the potential to play a significant role in our carbon removal strategy, but there are significant challenges in ensuring that the carbon is sequestered durably and that the projects are scaled sustainably. Natural solutions can put pressure on scarce water and land resources if not cited properly, and care must be taken to preserve local ecosystems.

43 billion 

The amount of CO2, in tons, that we pump into the atmosphere each and every year based on figures from 2019 by the Global Carbon Project. This figure increases every year, in spite of recent efforts to decarbonize the global economy.

0.13

The amount, in degrees Fahrenheit, that the temperature has risen, on average, every decade since 1880 (that’s 0.08 degrees in Celsius). This figure has increased since 1980 to more than twice that rate, according to the NOAA’s 2020 Climate Report – meaning that the globe has now warmed by 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century. 

$100 million

The prize purse pledged to the winners of XPRIZE Carbon Removal. The competition – open for registration beginning April 22 – invites innovators and teams from anywhere on the planet to design and demonstrate solutions that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away  in an environmentally benign way. Funded by the Elon Musk Foundation, the prize purse is the largest in history and is intended to act as a super-sized carrot to get the attention of the world’s best and brightest into the carbon removal fight. 

The Future Winner of XPRIZE Carbon Removal

4

The number of primary carbon removal categories in XPRIZE Carbon Removal – rocks, land, sea, and air. Any carbon negative solution is eligible for the competition: nature-based, direct air capture, oceans, mineralization, or anything else that sequesters CO2 permanently. Solutions will be evaluated by third party experts for their ability to demonstrate the removal of CO2 at a rate of at least 1000 tons per year, as well as the expected cost of removal once scaled to 1 million tons per year, and their ability to scale sustainably in order to remove 1 gigaton per year.

1,000,000,000 metric tons 

Otherwise known as a gigaton. For additional context, a gigaton is “...2.2 trillion pounds, or 10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers.” To say “it’s a lot” is to call the Grand Canyon “big” or Da Vinci “a tinkerer”. It’s enormous, especially when you consider where we are starting from. XPRIZE Carbon Removal competitors must demonstrate a working system capable of removing 1,000 tons per year, an audacious but achievable scale for many early stage carbon removal companies. For reference, the largest planned commercial carbon removal project in the world will only tip 1 million tons of annual removal when it is completed -- in 2024. 

30 trillion 

Tons of storage possibilities: According to an Icelandic study cited by Climeworks, an organization already working on carbon removal, the global capacity to store carbon dioxide through geological sequestration alone is vast, lying between 5 and 30 trillion tons. 

191

The number of countries party to the Paris Agreement. Which, on one hand, is great because it signals leaders around the world are paying attention and willing to take on some level of commitment in the fight against climate change. On the other hand, the agreement has been widely criticized as toothless and to date hasn’t led to any meaningful action on carbon emissions. The burden of restoring balance to Earth’s carbon cycle should fall on nations who have contributed the most to historic emissions and who have used decades of burning fossil fuels to drive economic growth. Easier said than done unfortunately as nations weigh stricter emission regulations against economic growth, but we are starting to see greater appetite from national leaders for action on CO2 emissions in the form of carbon pricing and progressive carbon taxes. 

10 billion

The projected population of Earth by 2050, as well as the estimated annual CO2 removal needed to avoid the worst climate outcomes in the IPCC model. For future generations to thrive, we have to invest in carbon removal tools now in order to meet the ambitious gigaton scale needed in the future. Delaying development of these technologies will only put us in a deeper CO2 deficit that we will have to climb our way out of if we are to ever return to pre-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2, or anywhere close to that. XPRIZE Carbon Removal is that needed rocket fuel to kick carbon removal from warp speed and into “plaid”.

Carbon Removal - Going Plaid in 2021

To find out more about XPRIZE Carbon Removal or to register your team, check out our website.