MELVILLE, N.Y. — There's a battle going on in my house.

My husband, John, is always hot. I mean sweat-dripping-down-his-face-in-65-degree-weather hot. He blasts the A/C and sleeps in shorts without a blanket. Me? I'm under two layers in my flannel PJs.

He's taken to running the air conditioner and two ceiling fans in the living room whenever he's home. If he spends two hours upstairs and I turn off the unit in his absence, he invariably complains when he comes back down.

I can wear a sweater, he says. If he's warm in shorts and a tank top, there's nothing less he can wear in polite society. So the onus is on me. But unless it's crazy humid outside, I'm an open-the-windows kind of girl. And therein lies the problem.

When we first moved into the house three years ago, there were three huge white pines dwarfing the house, right outside the front door. They were messy, spewing sap all over the front porch, garden bench and walkway. And they blocked the house completely. But in the heat of that first August, you couldn't help but notice — and appreciate — that when you walked from the driveway to the front door, you felt a drastic 10-degree temperature drop. It was nice. When I think about it in hindsight, we didn't really run the air conditioner as much that first summer. But when the vacuum cleaner became a permanent fixture in the foyer, I realized the trees had to go.

It's been a lot warmer in the house since. In fact, I read recently that shade trees can reduce electric bills for air conditioning by 15 percent to 50 percent.

And if you want to get all environmental about it, there's more: One tree can absorb the CO2 output from four cars every year, while producing enough oxygen for a family of four. In fact, planting trees remains the cheapest, most effective means of removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

According to the Bailey Nurseries Trees are Cool program, if every American family planted just one tree, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by a billion pounds annually. This is almost 5 percent of the amount that human activity pumps into the atmosphere each year.