There's a lot you can do to limit your emissions while driving. Control your speed, get a fuel efficient vehicle, even carpool. But no matter what you do, you can't reduce your emissions to zero.
For a few dollars a year you can purchase "carbon offsets" for the emissions you can't reduce directly, just like Google does.
I use terrapass, but I'm sure there are other organizations out there.
Interested in an energy-efficient auto? You're in luck. That's because nearly every major car company has a hybrid line, or has plans to introduce one soon.
But enter the showroom, and instead of seeing green, you may be seeing red. Many of the market's hybrids—cars which combine gasoline engines with battery-powered electric motors—forsake fuel-efficiency in the name of power and performance.
Mild-hybrids may not save you money at the pump, but they are a little nicer on the environment.
A basic principal of economics is that of supply and demand. If demand for a commodity rises and the supply does not, the price increases. With demand for electricity in the US expected to increase by fifty percent over the next three decades and expansion of generating capacity in a holding pattern in many cases, prices for electricity are expected to rise.
As I said before, it's inevitable.
Here's the first surprise: "Debit or credit?" is actually an unfair, misleading question. There is no such thing as a debit card that's used as a credit card. When you hand over a debit card, you are engaging in a debit transaction no matter how you answer. When clerks ask this question, they are really asking you to pick one of two ways they can process your debit – a PIN (personal identification number) based transaction or as a signature-based transaction. One costs the merchant a little more and one takes a little longer to hit your checking account, but fundamentally a debit transaction is a debit transaction.
That's why I use my American Express as much as I can.
