25 ways you can go green

Car

• 8. Buy a hybrid. Although the tax breaks on these cars can rise and fall, hybrids such as Toyota's Prius continue to get good reviews from customers, and the cars get 60 miles a gallon.
• 9. Contemplate buying an electric car. We use the word contemplate here because there really aren't a lot of electric cars to buy at the moment. You can order a Tesla Roadster, but its $92,000 price tag puts it out of the range of most drivers. The Zap Xebra costs a mere $14,000, but it goes only 35 mph and can't be operated legally on freeways.
  
  But starting later this year, the options will increase. Th!nk, a Norwegian company, will soon release an electric town car and bring it to the states in 2008. Tesla will release a $50,000 sedan called Whitestar in 2009. Zap, an automaker based in Santa Rosa, Calif., offers an all-electric three-wheeler. Even giants like Nissan have all-electrics coming. Altair Nanotechnologies is also working to get businesses to adopt electrics as their fleet cars.
  
  Electric cars aren't perfect. Most barely can go more than 120 miles before needing a recharge and they cost more than their gas-powered equivalents, but advocates say both factors will improve.
• 10. In the meantime, try a plug-in hybrid. A plug-in hybrid is essentially a regular hybrid with bigger batteries that you can recharge through a wall socket. These cars can get 100 miles a gallon and generally pollute less. (The amount of pollution produced by recharging the car depends on how much coal your electricity-generating utility burns.) Converting now costs about $10,000, but that price will decline.
• 11. In the Midwest, look into ethanol. Although gas stations all over the country mix a little ethanol into their gas, only about 1 percent of the nation's gas stations sell ethanol. Most of them are in the middle of the country, in shopping-center parking lots. So check out the neighborhood before you buy.
• 12. Think diesel. Biodiesel--made from vegetable oil or drippings from the deep-fat fryer--produces far less carbon dioxide than regular diesel. It can be put straight into conventional diesel cars. With few modifications, a diesel car can run entirely on vegetable oil. Used diesel cars are rising in price, with bidding wars breaking out on some auction sites. A new crop of clean diesels coming from Europe in the near future will help expand the supply of diesel cars.

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