FaceGlobalWarming.com

When you think of car hire you probably remember the experience of that summer vacation where you spent an hour after getting off the plane trying to find the little mobile van so that you could retrieve the keys to something that resembled a fridge on wheels, before spluttering out of the airport in a foreign country on the wrong side of the road with one eye on the map and the other trying to remember how to change gear with your right hand.

Do you want to know how you can drive around using plain tap water as fuel and laugh at rising gas costs, while reducing your auto’s emissions and helping to prevent more global warming?

That was the headline I read and my initial gut reaction was “Oh no… Not another save money on your gasoline scam”.

I thought, here was someone trying to make an easy buck because of how absolutely terrible the price of gasoline and diesel had become.

These days it seems everything has a carbon footprint, and that includes how we look up local business phone numbers and email addresses. So for those of us wanting to minimise our contribution to climate change what’s the most energy efficient way to find a local service?

The short answer is probably to walk to your neighbour and ask them if they know a good local butcher, builder or bar. But that’s not always possible or fruitful. Most people need a permanent source of local information, in the form of a paper directory or online directories. Paper directories may seem more energy efficient - just get one out of the cupboard and flick through, rather than plugging in a computer, but that’s not the whole story.

The car hire industry has been criticised for many years over a poor environmental record. Campaigners have argued that the use of a hire car means the traveller is journeying in a selfish non-environmentally friendly fashion, claiming that if the traveller was to take public transport the impact upon the environment would be lessened to some extent. What campaigners negate to realise is that public transport is not always an option, in rural areas sometimes car hire is the only solution.