By Alastair Bland

Automobiles that thrive off of alternate energies. Car companies show off how fast and furious can be green and clean.

Reynolds, Indiana doesn't look like the town of the future. But the little Midwestern town has one thing going for it. Hog manure. Lots of it. Until last year, that didn't seem like a plus for the town where hogs outnumber people 3 to 1. But then the state government got the idea to turn the town's biggest problem into its biggest asset. The result? BioTown, USA.

There's no way around it: Your car is contributing to global warming. In fact, it's almost certainly the single most environmentally harmful component of your lifestyle. The transportation sector is responsible for nearly 40 percent of nationwide greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention plenty of ozone-damaging and smog-forming pollutants. The good news is that new clean-car technologies are emerging at a rapid pace – not just behind the scenes, but in the showrooms of car dealerships near you. Efficient hybrid-engine cars like the Toyota Prius and the Ford Escape SUV can't keep up with demand. Meanwhile General Motors and Ford are ramping up their development of flexible-fuel vehicles that can burn both standard gasoline and biofuels such as ethanol. So if you're in the market for a climate-saving, planet-positive vehicle, which should you choose -- better mileage or biofuel?

A new biofuel for jet engine could be in the works. Researchers in North Dakota say they have been working for four years on a process that converts soybean or canola oil into aviation turbine fuel or

If you could track the proliferation of self-powered homes back to one grassroots seed it would undoubtedly be Home Power magazine – the Bible for do-it-yourselfers committed to producing homegrown energy from solar, wind, and small-scale hydropower, and retrofitting their homes with efficiency measures. Read by off-gridders and city-dwellers alike, the magazine has been around for nearly two decades – since 1987 – and can safely be called a trend-setter.

With France's wine industry in an economic slump, grape growers are looking at new markets for their crop. One possibility: biofuel. According to a Reuters story, French winemakers are exploring ways to produce more alcohol from the grapes, making them a plausible substitute for sugar beets as a source of ethanol, which can be used on its own or mixed with gasoline to create a cleaner fuel. France is already Europe's third largest producer of ethanol. The country currently has a wine surplus of four billion liters, the largest in a decade, thanks to overproduction and increasing competition from other countries.