Today’s tip of the day is prompted by my discovery of a new site launched by the UK Department for Transport called ACT ON CO2. Its goal is to provide information on how to reduce pollution from cars, and it provides a very useful search engine to help you find the top 10 least polluting cars in 14 different categories, including ‘Performance’ (the Subaru Impreza wins with a mere 244 g/km2 of CO2 emissions!).

This site is great if you are looking for a new car - it even tells you how much your tax disk will cost - and I for one intend to pay a maximum of £30 for my tax disk rather than the £300 now asked for the big polluters! However for most of us, buying a new car is not the immediate solution to our green problems - if we could all afford to go out and buy  a new car today, we could reduce CO2 emissions by a huge amount over night! IF.

Time to stop dreaming then, and to look at the other things we can do to reduce our CO2 emissions when driving. Here are my sensible green driving tips - I say ’sensible green’ because they are mostly just that. In adopting these habits you will drive more sensibly, generate less CO2 emissions and save money at the same time:

1. Stay within the speed limit. This is probably the most obvious tip of all, but still needs to be said. I think we’ve got better at observing speed limits in town, but who doesn’t put their foot down from time to time when out on the open road? If we stick to speed limits at all times, we will reduce co2 emissions. As an example, it can cost you as much as 25% more fuel if you drive at 70 mph rather than 50 mph.
2. Change gear at 2,500 revs. Sticking that bit longer in every gear will give you an extra second on your 0 - 60, but will it really get you there that much quicker? Keeping the revs down reduces your emissions.
3. Avoid harsh acceleration and braking. Harsh acceleration means your car is doing more work than necessary. Harsh braking means your car will have to work harder to get back up to speed again. Try to drive smoothly.
4. Use air conditioning sparingly or not at all. Aircon is powered by the engine. Therefore using your aircon means you use more energy. Your petrol goes down much quicker, and you generate more emissions.
5. BUT try not drive with the windows open either. I think there’s an opportunity to relaunch a product here. Remember those plastic slipstream thingies you could attach to your front windows so that air was channeled more efficiently to cool the inside of the car? Isn’t there a opportunity to produce something that lets us drive with the windows open without reducing drag and thus increasing our emissions? Anyway that’s the problem, and the conundrum. Aircon uses petrol, whilst opening the windows increases the work the engine has to do, and so uses more petrol….
6. If you are going to be stationary for more than 2 minutes, switch off the engine. This one is crucial when sitting in the queue on the motorway on yet another bank holiday. If you’re not moving, don’t waste petrol. The car has to work hard when first heating up, but once it’s warm, you can switch off an on without generating massive additional co2 emissions.
7. Don’t drive around with unnecessary heavy things in the car. I reckon you can work this one out without more explanation, although maybe a special mention for anyone who has a roof box for going on holiday who forgets to take it off as soon as they arrive / get back home. These things have a huge effect on your petrol consumption!
8. Check your tyre pressure. Squashy tyres mean more work for the engine - oh, and you use them quicker too.
9. Get your car serviced regularly. A properly serviced car is a more efficient car. I know services cost money, but not nearly as much as breakdown recovery and even a new car.
10. Only use the car if there is no other solution. Over 25% of UK car journeys are under 2 miles in length. Are they all really necessary?

In the long run, the only real way to reduce CO2 emissions from cars is for us all to drive more efficient cars, but this is going to take time. In the meantime however, we can all work to drive our current cars more efficiently. It will make a difference.

September and another UK number plate change is approaching, and this means that for a fair amount of people, thoughts are turning to changing the car. Whether you are intending to take the decision by September or later on in the year, it is crucial to add an additional criterion to your car selection process: what are the CO2 emissions in g/km2?

This is a measurement scale that we all need to learn by heart. We should look up the typical emissions for our current cars, although we should bear in mind that these figures will be affected by age, insufficient servicing, badly maintained tyres and non green driving habits. We should then all aim to buy a new car with at least 20% lower emissions.

Better still, we should go as far as we can and look at the following list of cars with emissions of 120 g/km2 or less, provided by the VCA. There are already 36 of them according to this list, and more are on their way - in particular the Volkswagen Blue motion which is out this summer with only 102 g/km2. What’s more, they are not all super minis, and they are not all as expensive as the trendy Toyota Prius, certainly the dearest of the bunch, and they will save you money on petrol and on your tax disc too!

Whatever you do, do try to cut your emissions every time you buy a new car. If we all do this, the CO2 reduction targets set by our governments will become far more realistic, our remaining fossil fuels will go that little bit further (until we can phase them out totally), and in this time of spiralling petrol prices, we will go that little bit further for that little bit less.

Google, inserting yet another finger into yet another pie, has recently announced their latest project, the plug-in hybrid car. Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm with goals to make a positive impact in global development, global public health, and climate change, has launched the RechargeIT initiative, aiming to produce vehicles that are more energy efficient and thus to reduce CO2 emissions from cars.

The plug-in hybrid car is just what it says it is: a hybrid car that you can also plug in. With a larger battery and a power point that allows you to plug your car into the mains, the plug-in hybrid can travel up to 40 miles on electricity alone before resorting to the petrol engine and typical hybrid functionality. Google claim that this increases the economy of the car to as much as 73 mpg. What’s more, taking into account that batteries can store energy, Google aims to use the same batteries as sources of electricity to feed back to the grid when they are plugged in and not in use.

For the moment, this is all experimental, and part of Google’s aim to become CO2 neutral as quickly as possible, but if the experiment proves to work, and to be efficient, then this technology should absolutely be used for the benefit of all.

Which brings me back to the question I asked in the title: Can Google help reduce global CO2? Some of us are a little scared about Google and the things they are getting up to online. It’s true that they are buying up more and more of the internet, and things could start to be a little too big-brotherish which understandably makes some people a wee bit paranoid.  What’s more, what does an Internet company know about new energy sources? At the same time, however, they are one of the most powerful and richest companies in the world, with more money to spend than some small nations, and money is something that we desperately need in order to keep up the momentum in reducing our CO2 emissions.

The difference between Google and governments is that it is easier for Google to decide how to spend their money. Yes, they have to answer to their shareholders, but, for now at least, they are happy people (and rich), and this doesn’t look like changing in the near future. In fact, although ‘Philanthropic’ generally means charitable and not-for-profit, imagine how much kudos and how much money Google.org will make if they are the ones to finance the next generation of energy-efficient motor engines!

So for me the answer is absolutely and categorically yes. Google can help reduce global CO2 by injecting badly needed cash into badly needed research. Let’s hope they keep coming up with great ideas too.

Cars have only been around for a century, and accessible to all for maybe 70 years, but today most of us just can’t live without them. However, unless we find a radical solution pretty quickly, many of us are going to be forced to do just that.

Cars contribute around 12% of annual CO2 emissions, but this figure should be easy to improve on, so they have been earmarked as a key area in the battle against CO2 emissions. Following the complete failure of the European Car industry to get near to the target average of 140 g/km for all new passenger cars set for 2008, the EU has toughened its objectives, and set a mandatory goal of 120 g/km for 2012.

This goal is completely inachievable in today’s market, where only Fiat has managed to pass below the 140 g/km limit, where the German manufacturers, providers to much of the fleet market (BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Audi) average in the 160’s, and even Citroen and Renault miss the bus (144 and 149 g/km respectively). And that’s without mentioning the favourite manufacturers of the petrol heads: Porsche, Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin average well over 300 g/km, and there are far too many 4×4’s sitting happily in the 250’s with no real intention to change. In spite of the good news that more and more small cars are being sold, the bigger cars still have too large a market share and too little intention to reduce their emissions.

If the targets remain exactly as they are now, and mandatory, the gas guzzlers would - theoretically - no longer be legal. Clearly, this is not going to happen, so what can we do? Here are just a few thoughts:

1. Set CO2 reduction targets based on percentages for each manufacturer. It is absolutely possible to reduce emissions in Porsches without spoiling the “pleasure factor”!
2. Encourage development of hybrid engines at all levels. Ok, Lexus are being very cheeky when they talk about their ‘green’ 4×4, but at least a 4×4 with a hybrid engine emits under 200 g/km. It’s a step in the right direction. The same applies to Ecofuel and Biodiesel.
3. Work on the middle market. Surely the biggest market out there today is the family car - Scénique, Picasso, Touran, etc. These guys are certainly the ones responsible for a lot of emissions - shopping, school run, everything you shouldn’t do in a car if you don’t want to pollute - so if the manufacturers can concentrate on producing energy efficient MPV’s this will have a far more dramatic effect.
4. More official incentive schemes. Buying an energy efficient car should be encouraged at all levels.
5. Ensure availability of alternative fuels. This is a huge blocking point. Why buy a biodiesel car if there aren’t any biodiesel pumps in your area?

There are many other ideas, but it’s worth ending with a comment about existing cars: it’s all very well setting targets for new cars, but that does nothing for all the cars in existence already, and for at least 10 years each in general. As far as these - and all cars on the roads - are concerned, we also need to concentrate on:

• Education on greener driving
• Research into producing cleaner fuels
• Why not encourage more owners of older cars to convert to GPL?
• Where relevant, reducing speed limits
• Improving and reducing costs for public transport

We have to face up to the fact that cars will be around and polluting for a long while yet. In the meantime we need to identify the easy small steps that everyone can take - even they will have a positive effect.