One thousand trees

Chris Watters, Christian Stringer and Andrew Thomas of the new company LimeGreen Earth. (Bruce Bottomley Photo)

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected in Copenhagen tomorrow with the hopes of injecting new life into flagging U.N. climate talks.

The negotiations are scheduled to end on Friday with a summit gathering including President Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and many other heads of state.

Entrepreneur and recent Dalhousie grad Andrew Thomas is one of those cheering President Obama on. And, he’s gone a step further, by offering to offset the carbon emitted by Air Force One to get him to Denmark.

Mr. Thomas’s new company LimeGreen Earth is planting 1,176 trees to offset the carbon that Air Force One, a Boeing 747, will emit on its journey from Washington to the conference in Copenhagen. President Obama will be traveling 6,400 kilometres, and Air Force One will emit an estimated 196 tonnes of carbon during that time.

So why President Obama and not our own leader Stephen Harper?

Mr. Thomas, on the phone, confers briefly with his partners, Chris Watters and Christian Stringer.

“It’s because Obama will be the central figure on Friday when he goes into the conference,” says Mr. Thomas, a Dal management grad, from Saint John, N.B. “Everyone’s looking to him for leadership.”

They’ve tried to let the folks in the White House know what they’re up to: “We’ve emailed and twittered at them,” says Mr. Thomas with a laugh.

LimeGreen Earth is a Saint John, N.B-based company which specializes in offsetting carbon emissions. Among the ways it aims to do that is through investing in green initiatives and planting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide.