Green Options

If you doubt there are a lot of clever and green do-it-yourselfers out there, check out Yahoo! Green’s Make It Green gallery, which features — as of today — 21 ideas from real people across the country looking to make the planet a better place.

For a $10 entry fee, anyone with a great do-it-yourself project can submit his or her idea to the site, where visitors can vote for the ideas they like best. Yahoo! will also put on display some of the top product ideas during next week’s Maker Faire in San Mateo, California.

The United States has good reason to take pride in its recent green technology achievements. A look at world-wide wind energy production alone should give Americans cause to brake into the famous “We’re number one!” chant. However, there are a number of truly remarkable, environmentally-friendly technologies that have so far, at least for the most part, passed the US by.

#1: High-speed trains

America, this is what a train should look like. These streamlined vehicles rocket between destinations at around 190 MPH (300 km/h) in at least eighteen countries outside the US. And they’re getting even faster. This week, Kawasaki made headlines with plans for a new 217 MPH (350 km/h) train in Japan. High-speed trains make long-distance travel fast, comfortable, and more hassle-free than flying. You sit back with a book, a beer, or a sandwich and relax, watching the scenery whiz past. Seriously, what’s a red-blooded nation like the US doing without a form of transportation that actually encourages beer drinking?

Although there is not currently a nation-wide high-speed train system in the US, things are looking up. In 2000, Amtrak opened the Acela Express, a 150 MPH (240 km/h) train serving Boston and Washington DC. More exciting yet, Californians will get to vote this November on whether to build a 220 MPH high-speed train connecting Sacramento and San Francisco in the north with Los Angeles and San Diego in the South.