What if you could promote peace in the middle-east, protect the environment, and save money, while driving your car? That sounds like a revolution which will shake everything from the air you breeth to international geopolitcs.

Dozens of green cars, trucks, and SUVs were showcasted at this year's Tour de Sol, a green transportation festival and competition organized by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association since 1988.

Big car makers such as Toyota, Honda, Ford, and GM were present with their new models aimed at mass consumers. The new 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid was definitively one of the highlights on that side of the festival. It is a fairly good looking SUV running on gasoline energy, electrical battery power, or both together.

The reason that car makes so much sense is that the 330-volt electrical battery is regenarative, meaning that you don't have to plug it to the grid to recharge your electrical motor. Of course, the electrical motor saves gas consumption as the engine turns on and off automatically, depending on the driving conditions, so a tank of fuel goes further. It seems to us that it is just a matter of time for electrical motors as a complement to the regular gas engine to become standard on every cars. It just makes so much more sense, and obviously not only from an environmental point of view, since using less gas also means spending less.

The main drawback, we heard, is that we don't know yet how much time the electrical motor can run, because as car drivers know batteries run off after a while.Toyota, however, has not had to change any battery yet on any of their Prius model which came out 6 years ago. Still that seems to be a area worth researching. Big car makers are no doubts investing much into that. Another issue is that there are not that many electrical car mechanics around yet. That is a niche still open for green entrepreneurs. You will face exponential demand!

But at Tour de Sol, the real action is with the cars made by mad inventors, high schools and colleges. If you tought the Delorian from Back to the Future was cool, wait til you see the prototypes that this year's copetitors came up with.

This is what we have learned: you can start driving green today if you own a Diesel car. It will run on ethanol or vegetable oil. Sterling College students came up with their own special biofuel mix, which is better for your car's engine than the old oil you can recycle from your corner Chinese restaurant (although that also works). What's good news is that is smells good, a little like French Fries.

Other schools created hybrid cars, a little like the Ford and Toyota mentioned above but better because instead of being running on gas, they are running on vegetable oil or ethanol. The Toyota representative explained me why big car makers haven't put a non-gas based car on the US market yet: Gas in the US is much cheaper than, say, in Europe where the price of diesel and regular gas are close. And Americans are not ready to pay more for diesel. That's what he said, and we are not sure whether we should believe him or not.