It’s time to see how our favorite gadget makers and Internet search engines fare when it comes to their commitment to fighting climate change. While Greenpeace has its green electronics guide, the non-profit Climate Counts released a new scorecard on companies this week, which includes a list of electronics makers and Internet/software firms ranked according to the actions they’ve taken to reduce carbon emissions and combat global warming (hat tip to CNET). IBM and Google lead their peers, while Apple, eBay and Amazon lag far behind.

At the top of the electronics category are IBM, Canon and Toshiba. IBM recently told us that they have been working on environmental stewardship since 1971, so no surprise there. But way at the bottom are Apple, Nokia, and a little further up, Dell.

Apple has come under fire from environmentalists in the past, and the company has been trying to change its ways. But apparently when it comes to carbon emissions, not so much. Dell, on the other hand, was one of the first computer companies to commit to reducing its carbon footprint, so we’re not sure why it scored so low. Dell has also consistently had a pretty good track record for recycling, and recently started showing off its new eco PC, which is 81 percent smaller than a standard desktop and uses 70 percent less power.

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While many cleantech startups are working on making cleaner burning fuels for our cars, a biotech firm Down Under is engineering cleaner digesting grasses for our cows. Gramina, a joint venture between Australian Molecular Plant Breeding and Kiwi PGG Wrightson Genomics, is genetically engineering pasture grass to be more digestible so that cows grazing on it burp up less methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. (Hat tip Science Daily)

Cows produce methane as the microbes in their gut break down the cellulose of the grasses they eat. Just as lignin and cellulose are difficult for ethanol producers to breakdown, so too is it in the cow’s stomach. And actually researchers at Energy Biosciences Institute are looking to cow stomaches as a model for how to process plants into fuel.

Gramina is working on making grasses that maintain their structural integrity but have less lignin. The firm’s researchers hope that suppressing the expression of the enzyme ‘O-methyl transferase’ in the grass will make it easier to breakdown — and therefore produce less methane during digestion.

The joint venture won a Aus $1.8 million grant (or about $1.7 million USD) from Australia New Zealand Biotechnology Partnership Fund for their research in April. Gramina is also working on making grasses that grow better in warmer climes, in the expectation that climate change will be changing the temperature of grazing lands.

If you’ve got a YouTube account, a camera, and a deep-seated yearning to get behind the wheel of a plug-in hybrid, Google wants to hear about it. Google.org’s RechargeIT program is hosting a contest soliciting videos from wannabe plug-in drivers, as well as testimonials from proud plug-in owners, on YouTube. The winning videos will be featured on RechargeIT’s web site and win yet-to-be announced prizes.

RechargeIT, Google’s plug-in hybrid demonstration program, is working with the California Cars Initiative, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto promoting 100+MPG plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The submitted videos will be incorporated into RechargeIT’s Plug-in Hybrid Locator map, which already features 104 plug-ins all over the States, many of them DIY projects.

It doesn’t look like the contest has officially launched, but the submission page is up and CalCars encourages you to submit right away, as your video might get featured in promoting the contest.

Google.org has been working with battery startup A123 and conversion module maker Hymotion to convert the search giant’s own hybrids to have plug-in capabilities. RechargeIT has four plug-in vehicles that it has been road testing and collecting data from via embedded Linux computers, and it has recently started sharing that data. It’s still a little early to draw any big conclusions, but Google has enjoyed showing off its next-gen cars. Now, it wants to see yours.

Utilities plan to use solar power from both the massive solar plants that are being built in the California Mojave desert, as well as large scale distributed rooftop solar projects, like the one Southern California Edison is planning. So which technology is better? Centralized solar systems that use the sun’s heat to generate electricity, or hundreds of rooftops covered in solar panels strung together to generate power?

Roy Kuga, the vice president of the Energy Supply Division at California utility PG&E, had some interesting ideas about the pros and cons of each technology at the Berkeley, Stanford CleanTech Conference Series on Wednesday. Basically, while solar thermal plants provide lower solar prices, higher efficiencies and better energy storage, distributed solar rooftop programs are quick to deploy, and less costly when it comes to transmission lines and water needs. Check out the detailed list below:

Distributed Photovoltaic Solar Rooftop Projects:

Pros:

• These projects can get up and running fast. Around 8 months, Kuga says, noting that the solar industry is also trying to bring down this time dramatically.
• Distributed projects are not dependent on building long transmission lines to remote locations (such as the desert).
• Distributed projects are also not dependent on the high water needs that solar thermal plants require for cooling.

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EnerNOC delivered first-quarter earnings Wednesday that were a mixed bag. The company beat Wall Street estimates, which is always nice; but its operating loss nearly tripled from the previous year to $11.7 million, which is not so nice. The net loss of 57 cents a share is down from 91 cents a year earlier, which sounds good. But it fell only because the number of shares used to calculate EPS (19 million shares vs. 4 million a year ago) grew faster than that loss.

Investors watching EnerNOC for a while know that there’s a reason for the losses. The company is spending heavily, especially on new employees, to gain a bigger foothold in a growing market opportunity. So while first-quarter revenue grew an impressive 87 percent on year, general and administrative costs (which include network operations workers) grew by 212 percent and R&D costs expanded by 343 percent.

EnerNOC’s business is helping utilities, grid operators and other companies like manufacturers use their existing energy more efficiently. With energy prices rising and blackouts likely to become more common, many companies are realizing energy efficiency is not only smart, but necessary.

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Record Windy Year: The American Wind Energy Association says the if the pace of wind installations keeps going like it did in the first quarter of 2008, there will be a record 5,600 megawatts of power installed this year — MarketWatch.

Poulsen Hybrid an Auto X-Prize Contenda?: Autoblog Green wonders if the Poulsen Hybrid could be the sleeper hit for the Auto X Prize. Who knows — AutoblogGreen.

Fuel Cells Say Cheese: MTI Micro said it is working with a Japanese digital camera company to create a fuel cell-powered digital camera. Questions are: which company, when can we buy it and how much will it cost? — CNET, Greentech Media.

Ponds as Carbon-Friendly As Oceans: A researcher at Iowa State University says ponds could absorb as much carbon as the world’s oceans — Science Daily.

Oil Out-Bubbles Tech: A Bespoke Research Chart compares oil, housing and tech bubbles, and as Paul Kedrosky puts it oil has out run tech — Kedrosky.

As global food prices rise and food riots rock the developing world, grain-based biofuels are coming under heavy fire. But a new grain-based ethanol startup has just secured $300 million for barley-based fuel and it claims its methods won’t impact food supplies — one, because the company will produce locally, and two, because barley is a less energy-intensive crop than corn. Glen Allen, Va.-based Osage Bio Energy received the large private equity commitment from First Reserve Corp. and will use it to build four biorefineries.

Osage Bio Energy was founded in 2007 to pursue barley-based ethanol under parent company Osage Inc., which distributes some 100 million gallons of ethanol annually in the Southeast. There are nearly five million acres of fallow farmland in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast every winter, Osage estimates, and barley, as a winter crop that requires less fertilization than corn, could be grown locally on these millions of acres and used in their nearby biorefineries.

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It’s a bit of an oxymoron, but hunters can actually be outspoken environmental stewards. And now those green Elmer Fudds can zip about the wilderness in search of game in all-electric style. Electric vehicle startup RTEV officially launched yesterday and is marketing its Ruff & Tuff brand electric vehicles to sportsmen.

RTEV says it has already sold 1,000 vehicles and is in the process of expanding its electric offerings. Wheego, the other division of RTEV, will launch a line of electric scooters and bicycles later this year. But the startup has bigger plans than small-scale electrics: It plans to debut auto-shaped, low-speed vehicles in 2009 and full-sized, full-speed electric vehicles by 2010.

While the company’s leadership has some 20 years’ worth of experience in golf carts, this seems like an extremely ambitious timeline, especially since we’ve seen so many delays from so many well-funded electric startups recently.

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Those still hoping clean coal will become a reality can take comfort in the knowledge that tax dollars are still funding carbon capture and sequestration endeavors. Making good on its promise to fund a number of smaller, distributed projects to test the capture and storage of carbon following the nixing of the FutureGen project, the Department of Energy has awarded $126.6 million to two regional carbon capture projects.

Of the total, $61 million will go to the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership and $65 million to the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership for two large-scale projects that will test the ability of different geologic formations to “safely, permanently, and economically store more than one million tons of carbon dioxide.” The $126.6 million will be also complemented by $56.6 million from industry partners.

The projects will test the entire CO2 injection process for large-scale — one million tons — and permanent sequestration. The DOE claims these two sites, located in California and Ohio, “are the most promising” geologic basins in the country, with the ability to store more than 100 years’ worth of North American CO2 emissions. What will it mean, then, if the “most promising” projects, which don’t have any disclosed operation dates, don’t work out? How much more time and money will the DOE invest in sweeping our carbon problems under the carpet?

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The Energy Biosciences Institute, a first-of-its-kind, half-a-billion-dollar partnership between energy giant BP and the labs of UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lawrence Berkeley National, has published its list of the first 49 projects it will fund to the tune of $20 million. Christopher Somerville, director of the institute, told us in an interview last November that they have been working on this list for months; it includes projects like researching the guts of termites to learn about breaking down cellulose, as well as those that review current biofuels laws and regulations.

Somervile had also expressed concern that the negative mainstream media discussion of corn ethanol could poison the whole concept of biofuels before researchers ever got a chance to develop more environmentally attractive practices. But at the institute, he said, they will actually be looking at biofuel options from dedicated energy crops that have a 10-fold-plus energy return and no run-off. These 49 projects will do much to provide education for the public and shape the future of the industry.

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