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Recently, Branson and Al Gore announced the establishment of the Virgin Earth Challenge, which will award a prize of $25 million to the individual or group who is able to demonstrate a commercially viable design in an effort to remove at least a billion tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere per year for at least a decade. The prize will be open for five years, with a distinguished panel of judges meeting annually to determine whether a design that offers the promise of such a huge breakthrough has been submitted. There are fascinating possibilities out there. For example, Klaus Lackner, a professor at Columbia University, has designed a synthetic tree to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a process already in place with more limited technology on nuclear submarines whose crews are sometimes required to spend months in the ocean deeps. At the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, one scientist discussed the development of a photoconductive (solar-powered) fiber that presumably could be used in clothes and furniture; another discussed cutting the cost of producing cellulosic ethanol (the amount of energy it takes to produce one gallon of corn-based ethanol is more than five times that of what it takes to produce one gallon of cellulosic ethanol); still another talked about the prospect of genetically modifying viruses to be hybrid materials that can store energy. Such organisms could be used to make batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells. Someone else may have to match Richard Branson’s $25 million so there can be more than one prize.

For progress in reducing automobile emissions, there is already another prize. The X PRIZE Foundation, which gave $10 million to the team that built the first private spacecraft to leave the earth’s atmosphere, is offering the same amount to anyone who can develop a car that will get 100 miles a gallon and can be mass-produced. Several cars getting more than 100 miles a gallon have been made, but so far all have been too costly to be mass-produced. That’s the problem the X PRIZE Foundation wants to solve. The prize winner will be selected based on competition races in 2009. If such a car is produced, millions of us will rush to buy it, and transportation-generated CO2 emissions will plummet.

The move to develop clean energy markets and replicable models that increase profits and reduce greenhouse gases is being driven not just by big companies and prize givers but also by venture capitalists and green social entrepreneurs. Perhaps the most important venture capitalist is Vinod Khosla, a partner in the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Khosla came to the United States after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology and found his way to Silicon Valley and an MBA at Stanford. In 1982, he started Sun Microsystems with funding from his friend John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, another visionary venture capitalist with a strong social conscience. In 2004, Khosla put much of his personal fortune into Khosla Ventures, which invests in both for-profit and “social-impact” projects. He is working with partners to provide microcredit to 25 million borrowers living below the poverty line, to improve health and education in India, and to build a “Global Home” for $5,000. Most important, in terms of market building, he is one of America’s foremost advocates of a clean energy future, investing in ethanol and other biofuels, bio-plastics, solar power, and other environmentally friendly technologies. Khosla believes that clean energy entrepreneurs can lift the burden of climate change from our children’s future and, in the process, spark an explosion of new businesses and good jobs in the United States, just as information technology did in the 1990s.

Other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are following Khosla into clean energy, riding the wave of concern about climate change and sensing the evident new economic opportunities in the wake of the collapse of many Internet companies in the