Photo credit: patrick dentler

Newsweek has a good quote from Barack Obama when he was preparing for one of the debates:

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

The quote pretty much speaks for itself. We need strong government actions now. It will be interesting to see what Obama can and will do during the climate talks in Poland, one month from now, and in Denmark, next year in December.

Here is a clever ad that says: “Save Trees. Trees Save.”

From where the advertisement comes from is unknown. If someone knows who made this ad or more background information regarding the advertisement please let us know about it by making a comment below. Thanks!

Here is a short note for our readers that use the bookmarking service StumbleUpon.

If you go to http://stumbleupon.com/earthday/ and “thumb up” that page you will help to plant trees, for free.

“Every day millions of StumbleUpon users discover great web sites and give them a “Thumbs-up”. Starting this Earth Day, we want to harness the power of our community and the “Thumbs-up” to plant trees for the National Forest Foundation.”

Every time a StumbleUpon user “thumbs” up that page a tree will be planted with help from the National Forest Foundation. This event will end on May 2, so hurry up and “thumb up”.

This is a pretty neat idea and in some way similar to Green Blog’s own tree planting program (Sorry! I just had too..).

As we all know planting trees can help fight climate change and poverty. And now you can help out to plant trees, for free!

Our green forum currently only has 85 members. We want more people to find out about this friendly forum community. That’s why we will plant one tree two trees for every hundred members that sign up, starting from today. That means we only need 15 more new members until we can plant our first trees.

So, invite your family, friends and co-workers and help us plant trees!

Tree-Nation.com and WWF will plant our trees. They are supported by the United Nations Environment Programme, so you can safely trust that this is legit.

You can read more about this in our forum.

It only takes a few seconds to register an account and it’s free. Thank you!

Update 1: We will now plant TWO trees for every hundred members that registers on our green forum.

Update 2: Two trees have been planted – Thank you!

In Madrid, the capital of Spain, a huge structure called the “Air Tree” is currently under construction. It is designed to both affect the surrounding environment and act as a social gathering point for people.

The “Air Tree” will generate its own electricity using solar photo voltaic cells placed on top of it. The solar panels will generate enough electricity to be able to sell the energy to local energy companies.

Inside the structure trees will be planted to produce oxygen, just like an ordinary tree. Due to this the surrounded areas will get a cooler temperature. It is expected that during summers it will be 8-10 °C cooler inside and nearby the “Air Tree”. More trees will be planted around the structure to enhance the cooling effect.

The “Air Tree” will be built with recycled materials and has been co-financed by the Housing and Land of the City Council of Madrid and by the European Union under the LIFE programme-2002 (ENV/E/000198).

You can find more information, in Spanish, and pictures of the “Air Tree” over at Plataforma Arquitectura.

For the right-wing opposition in Spain, this should have been crystal clear before they launched their climate saving plans.

The Spanish political party, Partido Popular, have started their election campaign by promising to plant 500 million trees to combat climate change and stop the devastating effects it will have on Spain.

The 500 million (!) trees are planned to be planted under a four years period, if Partido Popular gets elected. That’s ten times more trees than the ruling socialist party PSOE promised to plant when they got elected.

While it is truly a notable campaign promise, for a political party that last year regarded climate changes as “something that will happen in 300 years”, one must wonder how it will be possible. Planting over 14000 trees every hour, 24 hours per day in four years can be a bit, “complicated”.

Image credit: Extranoise. Image licensed under a
Creative-Commons Attribution license.