When you hear about banks in the news these days, it’s usually a report about going broke, committing mortgage fraud, or generally just sucking. Deutsche Bank has just done something quite out of the mainstream news—and while it’s just as depressing, if not more so, than people losing their homes or big business relying on government bailouts, it at lease serves a purpose for everyone.

It has created a 70-foot-tall monitor that counts carbon in real time at its New York location. The total, which can also be seen here, shows the current number of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The counter’s website explains the dangers of a warming climate, citing greenhouse gases as the culprit. It states, “…Since we can’t see them, it’s easy to forget they are there. Out of site, out of mind… The Carbon Counter displays the running total amount of long-lived greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, measured in metric tons.”

Who ever thought a bank would be behind something like this? I wonder if the International Bank of Business and Credit in The International had been so environmentally conscious, Clive Owen would still have had such a beef with it.

The site also has a carbon calculator you can use to find out just how big your footprint is, lots of energy-saving tips to use, and a widget of the counter that you can download and post on your desktop.

Another interesting thing that the company has on its website is a link to resources—when you click it, it takes you to a page sponsored by the National Resources Defense Council, which is pretty nifty. Even niftier is that the page lists ways for businesses, investors, real estate owners, and consumers to combat global warming. The genius of this is that it still approaches the subject in a business-oriented fashion (which means focusing on money-saving ideas as well) while still maintaining the good of the environment as a whole on the front burner.

In short, this may be a giant step in getting U.S. businesses—as well as other companies over the globe—focused on a new, more important form of green.

When the counter was launched on June 18, it displayed 3.64 trillion metric tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It continues to count the 2 billion metric tons added each month. There is no time to act like the present to stop this gross output of carbon. What are you going to do today to help offset your own carbon footprint—or to even shrink it?