A worldwide tree planting campaign is aiming to reach a total of 7 billion by the end of 2009 – that means just over one for everyone on the planet.

The United Nations says the campaign has exceeded expectations since it began in late 2006 with a goal of planting one billion within a year: two billion have been planted already. That means another 5 billion by late 2009.

A lot of the plantings so far have been by carried out governments —  including 700 million by Ethiopia, 400 million by Turkey and 250 million by Mexico. That still leaves a lot still to be planted by companies and people like you and me.

Of course it leaves questions about how many survive — there are no checks to see if the saplings — like the one in the photo being planted by Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangaari Maathai (right) in 2006, grow to maturity. 

Trees absorn carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow and release it when they rot or are burned. So planting trees can take a chunk out of global warming — a U.N. official says that 7 billion trees would, if they reach maturity, soak up as much greenhouse gases as Russia emits in a year.

Have you noticed more trees in your neighbourhood? Or have you planted any?

A new survey by the Pew Research Center indicates that U.S. Republicans, never warm to the idea of human-induced climate change or rising global temperatures, are growing even cooler to the idea.  

Most scientists have linked climbing temperatures to so-called greenhouse gas emissions from carbon fuels such as oil and coal.

“The proportion of Americans who say that the earth is getting warmer has decreased modestly since January 2007, mostly because of a decline among Republicans,” Pew says.

It was refering to findings from its latest nationwide survey of 1,502 adults which was conducted April 23-27.

“Republicans are increasingly skeptical that there is solid evidence that the earth has been warming over the past few decades: just 49 percent of Republicans say there is evidence that the earth’s average temperature has been rising, down 13 points since January 2007,” it said.

It said that overall 71 percent of those surveyed thought there was solid evidence of a warming world compared to 77 percent in January of 2007.

It further found that about half of Americans or 47 percent believe global warming is the result of human activity but views on the subject reflect a sharp partisan divide. It said 27 percent of Republicans hold this view versus 58 percent of Democrats.

This partisan divide narrows among the non-skeptics in both parties.

“Despite the huge partisan differences over whether the earth is warming, majorities of those in both parties who say there is evidence of global warming believe that it is possible to reduce the effects of higher global temperatures,” Pew said.

“Overall, 74 percent of those who say there is solid evidence of global warming say it is possible to reduce its effects, up from 67 percent in June 2006. Among those who believe there is solid evidence that the earth is getting warmer, there is little difference in those who think that it is possible to reduce the effects among Republicans 69 percent, Democrats 74 percent, and independents 77 percent.”

Pew does not speculate about the causes of the overall shift in sentiment.  On the Republican side this may not be good news for the party’s presumptive presidential candidate John McCain who advocates a more activist policy on the issue than that pursued by President George W. Bush.

Perhaps  environmental awareness wanes when the economy hits a rough patch. Or perhaps the skeptics would argue that they have not seen any really convincing new evidence or studies over the past year on the subject.

A California company called E-Fuel  wants you to ferment home brew  — for your car.  It sells a $10,000 portable ”MicroFueler” that plugs into home power and water supplies to ferment sugar into 100 percent ethanol at a rate of 35 gallons ( 132 liters) per week.  

For families that drive at least a combined 34,500 miles (55,520 km)  in cars that get average fuel efficiency, the MicroFueler will pay for itself in less than two years if gasoline prices stay near record levels, says Tom Quinn, the company’s CEO and financial backer.

E-Fuels says it will link buyers to cheap supplies of sugar, such as inedible surplus sweetener from Mexico, and launch a carbon credit system to cut the feedstock cost of regular table sugar.

“This paradigm shift is not going to work unless we can knock out of the ballpark the cost of feedstock,” Quinn said at the unveiling of the MicroFueler in New York. He said the credits could knock down the cost of fueling up to less than $1 per gallon (3.8 liters).

 E-Fuel says the unit will start shipping late this year.

Interesting product, but will it help ease motor fuel prices or fade the black eye corn-made ethanol has gotten for helping to push up grain and food prices? “This could be fun for tinkerers, but unfortunately it’s not a quick solution for our problems,” said Nathanael Greene, a resource specialist at green group the Natural Resources Defense Council.

What do you think? Pricey gadget or fount of bargain fuel?  

Can the running shoes we buy really help protect the environment?

According to a new list by nonprofit group Climate Counts, Nike ranked first among the world’s most climate-friendly companies.

In its second annual report, Climate Counts ranked companies based on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, support of global warming legislation, public disclosure of their efforts to address climate change, and whether they measure their impacts on the environment.

Nike ranked well in all those areas, garnering a score of 82 out of a possible 100 points. Stonyfield Farm, IBM, Unilever, Canon, General Electric, Toshiba, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and Sony rounded out the list’s top 10.

Google, Anheuser-Busch and Levi Strauss logged the largest score improvements, each jumping over 20 points since last year. The average company score improved 22 percent over last year, when Canon was the top scorer.

Who were the losers? In a word, restaurants.

Olive Garden and Red Lobster owner Darden Restaurants, Wendy’s and Burger King each scored zero out of 100 points, while KFC and Taco Bell owner Yum Brands registered a single point for encouraging reduction of energy consumption.

Jones Apparel Group was the only other company to receive a score of zero.

For Climate Counts’ full list, click here.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University  and is a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

On April 16 President Bush gave a speech laying out a new United States climate policy goal - stabilizing US emissions by the year 2025.

During the course of this speech the President reported as progress a previous goal he had announced in 2002: that the “carbon intensity” of the US economy under his administration has been declining at the rate of about 18% per decade — the rate he targeted in 2002. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon emitted by US fossil fuel combustion per dollar of US economic output.

There has been both just and unjust criticism about using this benchmark for progress on US climate. Just criticism is the fact that the US economy has long been ‘decarbonizing,’ including under the Clinton Administration, at a little less than 18% per decade, without any climate change policies.

The forces driving this include continual improvements in energy efficiency, structural changes in the economy like the growing information technology sector and environmental concerns unrelated to climate, like air pollution control. Therefore the US administration did not make clear to the public the actual meekness of the 2002 goal.

The US administration should not be faulted however for focusing on carbon intensity as a key metric for progress, in addition to total emissions. Carbon intensity must indeed drop if we are ever going to control emissions. It just has to do so fast enough to offset economic growth.

So, for example, the new goal of stabilizing US emissions in 2025 simply means carbon intensity has to decline at the same rate as US economic growth then: if the economy is growing at say 3%, then carbon intensity must decline at 3%. Eventually, to bring actual US emissions down, the intensity will have to decline at a faster rate than the economy is growing.

There is nothing wrong with framing climate policy this way (although many do not feel that US emission stabilization in 2025 is enough.)

Indeed, we ought to be speaking much more about carbon intensity so that it attains the same familiarity in the public mind as economic growth rates and population growth rates. It is going to be one of the most important economic and environmental numbers of the 21st century.

It’s hard to imagine how big some of the cracks are on this link to satellite images of the Arctic ice during winter – dark lines hundreds of miles (km) long abruptly appear off the Canadian islands at the bottom right of the picture as the ice swirls through the winter.

At the top right, vast amounts of ice are flowing out of the Arctic basin southwards along the coast of Greenland.

“As of the middle of March, most of the basin, including the pole itself, appears to be covered only by seasonal ice,” it says. The image comes from Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, via a link supplied by Thomas Homer Dixon, an environmental expert at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto.

The summer sea ice in the Arctic shrank to a record low extent in September 2007, outstripping the previous 2005 record, according to satellite observations since the 1970s. Dark water, once exposed, soaks up ever more heat than reflective ice and snow, accelerating the process. A less chill Arctic in turn would tend to heat the rest of the globe.

And some researchers say that the Arctic ice may have reached a “tipping point” because of global warming and that it is destined to vanish in summers within decades — earlier than projected by the U.N. Climate Panel.

What do you think?

It’s almost creepy watching this video of a colossal squid slowly thawing out in a giant tub at the Museum of New Zealand. If this were a horror movie, after all, it would suddenly start flailing around with its monstrous tentacles.

Researchers say that the squid, weighing 495 kg (1,090 lb) and caught off Antarctica in 2007, will be unfolded for study on Wednesday after it is defrosted. It is expected to be 6-8 metres long.

That could tell scientists more about colossal squid, rare creatures that are the world’s biggest invertebrates. Sometimes someone wanders into the video frame and you get a sense of how enormous the squid is.

So the video above is not just a curiosity that looks like a poorly stocked fish section in a supermarket with a broken freezer full of water.

“This squid is a really nasty agressive sort of squid…a gelatinous blob with seriously evil arms on it,” the New Zealand Press Association quoted Steve O’Shea, a squid expert at the University of Auckland, as saying of a previous colossal squid in 2003.

“Without any doubt if you fell in the water, you could be shredded to bits by a colossal squid. It is the T-Rex of the oceans,” he said.

So if you thought Jaws was bad….

Fewer cigarettes get lit indoors in bars and restaurants because of smoking bans from California to Ireland but something else is going up in smoke from a sidewalk in central Oslo – about $100,000 a year in extra outdoor heating bills.

The heated pavement, installed at a cost of about $400,000, may be the most extreme example of an environmental side-effect of smoking bans: rocketing power use.

“It’s warm out here even when it’s snowing and minus 10 (14 Fahrenheit) on the worst winter day,” said N. Virani, managing director of the Mona Lisa restaurant, which includes an outdoor section named after former health Minister Dagfinn Hoybraten who introduced the smoking ban in 2004.

Virani said he believed it was the only heated sidewalk in Scandinavia. And it’s true — today at a chilly 10 Celsius (50F) outdoors it felt like sitting at a warm outdoor cafe by the Mediterranean.

The strip of heated paving outdoors, and heaters in the roof, represent about 180,000 watts of electricity. Total electricity bills for the large business have almost doubled to 1.2 million crowns ($240,000) a year, Virani said.

 The restaurant had to close down an indoor ”cigar and cognac bar” with turnover plunging after the law entered into force. “Overall, turnover has recovered,” Virani said, even accounting for the extra bills.

In Norway almost all electricity comes from hydropower so the extra use is not doing much to stoke global warming, largely blamed on use of fossil fuels.

But think of all the thousands of extra gas and electricity heaters outdoors spurred by the smoking bans around the world…

I’m a big fan of the smoking bans overall as a way of protecting workers’ health and helping some people to kick the habit. But what can people like Mr. Virani do about the side-effect of soaring power use that in many countries is strengthening what U.S. President George W. Bush once called an ”addiction to oil”?

Solar power companies have been working around the clock to drive down the price of clean electricity from the sun so it can one day be as cheap as the energy we get from dirtier sources, like coal plants.

Until we get there, however, some solar panel installers have come up with a solution that they say will give more people access to solar energy. How are they doing it? By allowing customers to lease, rather than buy, the photovoltaic solar panels for their roofs.

It’s the same idea, really, that has enabled some people to get behind the wheel of a luxury car they could otherwise not afford — low or no upfront costs followed by a monthly bill.

SolarCity, based in Foster City, California, is one company that recently started offering leases to its customers. Chief Executive Lyndon Rive told Reuters he wanted to do away with the hefty cost of buying solar panels — on average about $20,000.

“Even those who really want to make an environmental change can’t part with $20,000… the solution is just too costly for them.”

Under SolarCity’s lease program, customers with a small home could pay as little as $70 a month for a 2.4 kilowatt system, Rive added. The company is also allowing customers who sign up before July 31st to put no money down on their system. After that, upfront costs should be between about $1,000 and $3,000, Rive said.

“We can essentially make it so that everybody can now afford clean power,” Rive said.

The leased projects will be financed through Morgan Stanley, and SolarCity said it will serve as a one-stop shop for both installation and financing.

Right now the program is only available in California, but SolarCity is expanding to Oregon, Arizona and has plans to go to the East Coast.

Looking for clean air and lots of greenery? Los Angeles is probably not the first place that comes to mind.

Still, the city as famous for traffic and smog as it is for sunshine and celebrities is working hard to earn the mantle of the greenest big city in America.

In its latest move, the L.A. City Council this week passed a law that will require all new building projects bigger than 50 units or 50,000 square feet to comply with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building standards. The city claims the move will cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 80,000 tons by 2012 — the equivalent of taking 15,000 cars off the road.

Mayor Antonio Villairagosa says the goal is the most aggressive of any big U.S. city. It is part of a broader plan the mayor laid out last year to reduce L.A.’s carbon footprint by 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.0

Still, critics point out that L.A.’s plan is not as aggressive as the one being pursued up North, in San Francisco — a debate the “Los Angeles Times” chronicled on Tuesday. In the story, advocates said L.A.’s move will have more of an impact on the environment because it covers so much more ground than San Francisco.

In the meantime, L.A. might have to take on an even bigger challenge — convincing the public that it can really go green.

As one LAT reader commented: “Los Angeles green? Only with paint.”