High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Virgin Earth Challenge is a competition offering a $25 million prize for the first person or organization to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the Earth's atmosphere to avoid global warming. The prize was conceived and financed by Sir Richard Branson, a successful British entrepreneur, and was announced in London on 9 February 2007 by Branson and former US Vice President and 2007 Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, creator of the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth on climate change.The Virgin Earth Challenge is similar in concept to other high technology competitions, such as the Orteig Prize for flying across the Atlantic, and the Ansari X Prize for spaceflight. The prize will be awarded to the first scheme that is capable of removing one billion metric tons (= 1 gigaton) of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year for 10 years (at present, fossil fuel emissions are around 6.3 gigatons per year). $5 million of the prize will be paid at the start of removal operations, with the remaining $20 million paid after the successful completion of the scheme at the end of the 10 year period.