Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who briefly passed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as the world's richest person before a slide in Tesla's stock price dropped him back a spot, recently asked his Twitter followers for advice on how to best give away his money.
"Critical feedback is always super appreciated, as well as ways to donate money that really make a difference (way harder than it seems)," Musk tweeted earlier this month.
In 2012, Musk signed the Giving Pledge, an initiative launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that asks signatories to donate at least half of their wealth within their lifetime. He has primarily donated toward science and engineering education, renewable-energy research, pediatric research, and research into human space exploration.
But an estimate by Forbes in September found that Musk had donated just $100 million — less than 1% of his net worth, which consists mostly of stock in his companies.
Still, Musk's proposed carbon-capture contest would go toward a cause that is likely to play a major role in fighting climate change moving forward, especially under the Biden administration.
A study published in Scientific Reports in November concluded that companies and governments urgently needed to "start developing the technologies for large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere," a process known as carbon capture and storage.
Earth's average temperature is on track to blow past levels that the Paris climate agreement — which President Joe Biden rejoined Wednesday — set as goals for 2100.
But even if all greenhouse-gas emissions stopped by then, according to the study, at least 33 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide would need to be sucked out of the atmosphere each year using carbon capture — roughly the total amount of carbon dioxide the global fossil-fuel industry emitted in 2018 (36 metric gigatons).
The technology is becoming widely accepted as a safe form of geoengineering compared with other approaches, and Biden voiced support for it in his campaign platform, saying his administration would take steps to "accelerate the development and deployment of carbon-capture sequestration technology."
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