I had the opportunity to chat yesterday with Tim Flannery, the Australian author of The Weather Makers, who stopped into the Toronto Star to speak with a handful of reporters and editors about what he’s been up to since the release of his eye-opening book on climate change. One of the most intriguing tidbids that came out of that conversation is that he’s been working closely with British billionaire Sir Richard Branson on ways of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, part of Branson’s $25 million Earth Challenge Prize announced in early February. In addition to Flannery, NASA climate scientist James Hansen and environmentalist James Lovelock and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore are helping Branson with the contest. According to Flannery, more than 2,000 innovations have been submitted for the prize.

One interesting idea that Flannery is involved with calls for reforestation of the tropics through special agreements with developing countries. He didn’t go into great detail, but from what I could gather these countries could make money based on the price of carbon by planting trees, including harvestable fruit trees that could double as food production. Countries involved in the projects would enter an agreement whereby communities would be paid based on the level of reforestation in a given area, and this would be accurately monitored by a global system of satellites. Both sides of the carbon trading scheme — the country paying for the carbon credits and the country receiving payment — would have access to this satellite system so they could calculate forest inventory based on the same visual data. If signs of deforestation appeared a country would have to refund payment accordingly, and presumably some kind of dispute mechanism would be created to handle disagreements.

Seems interesting, if not overly complex. But hell, at least somebody is thinking about these things. Flannery believes there’s enough tropical lands — former forests that are now grasslands — to stabilize CO2 concentration through permanent sequestration of the carbon.

Also, Flannery seems to be a big fan of pyrolysis technology, like the kind use by B.C.-based Dynamotive and a number of other Canadian companies to turn biomass, such as wood waste, into bio-oil, syngas and char. The bio-oil and syngas are both renewable fuels that can be use for power generation, heating and chemical production, while the carbon- and nitrogen-rich char, he says, can double as a fertilizer and way to permanently sequester carbon.

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