Where the natural gas from the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline will end up is a murky question tied up in a 30-year-old treaty, expansion of Canadian tar sands operations, and trends in natural gas supplies both in the United States and in Canada.

Environmentalists fear at least half of the relatively clean-burning Alaskan North Slope gas will end up fueling tar sands operations in Alberta, where the pipeline will end, instead of coming to the lower 48 states to replace carbon-intensive coal in power plants. The tar sands operations already consume about 20 percent of Canada’s natural gas, and they are expected to need as much as twice that by 2035.

Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network calls the pipeline "a stealth dirty oil mega-project … conceived by Big Oil.”

“Under Plan Palin, ExxonMobil and TransCanada would construct a 1700-mile natural gas pipeline from the Arctic, heading south,” Brune writes. “About half of it is likely to be siphoned to help produce the dirtiest oil on earth.”

It might not be that simple, though.

Could something as simple as white roofs actually make a dent in our carbon emissions and help curb global warming?

Physicist Steven Chu, our Nobel Prize-winning Secretary of Energy, thinks so. At the St. James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium in London last month, he pushed for a global initiative to lighten the color of roofs, roads and pavements to cut carbon emissions by the equivalent of taking all cars off the road for 11 years.

As residents of hot countries have known for centuries, buildings painted white stay cooler because they reflect the sun’s heat. Light colored materials reflect more solar radiation, including visible, ultraviolet and infrared light (which accounts for most of the heat), than dark materials which absorb heat. Albedo, the gauge of solar reflectivity, is calculated from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the highest measure of reflectivity.

Maximizing the number of high albedo surfaces around the world could significantly help cool the planet, said Chu, former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

A new report claims the world can scale up eight clean technologies so massively and rapidly they could meet 60 percent of new energy demand and abate more CO2 than is necessary for climate stabilization in just 10 years.

Naturally, this scale-up won't come cheap. The report estimates that annual private investment worldwide would need to triple between now and 2020 to reach $500 billion to $800 billion per year:

At this scale, clean energy investments would be in line with fossil-fuel investments.

This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Current global investment plans for maintaining and expanding energy infrastructure are on the order of $13 trillion over the next 10 years. The United States alone has a planned investment of close to $1 trillion.

Shift a sizable chuck of that money into ready cleantech solutions, the authors argue, and the results would be world changing: climate mitigation, energy security and 5 million new jobs planetwide.

While cork flooring and bamboo furniture get all the attention in green homes, eco-substitutes for old-school construction products like concrete, lumber and insulation are where the real action resides in the growing green building materials market.

Spurred by shifting attitudes among consumers, government mandates, and the higher prices green buildings fetch on the market, the building industry is embracing more environmentally friendly materials.

The global market for these products is now forecast to grow 25 percent over the next five years to $571 billion in sales, according to NextGen Research.

“Companies increasingly are looking at their products from cradle to cradle, from the material in the ground to when the building is remodeled or replaced,” said Larry Fisher, research director for NextGen Research.

While some of these green materials—engineered wood made from waste scraps, for example—aren’t new or hi-tech, others have emerged after years of research and development often backed by venture capital financing. And as is so often the case, nimble startups run by hungry entrepreneurs appear to be leading the way in bringing innovative products to market.