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The California Clean Tech Open kicked off its second competition with a sunny outlook at San Francisco's City Hall Tuesday night. In October the contest will award six fledgling green businesses with start-up starter kits worth $100,000 in cash, office space and professional services. Prize sponsors include AMD, Google, Lexus and Pacific Gas & Electric.

Last year 156 seedling companies entered the open, which is backed by nonprofit Acterra; twice as many contenders are anticipated for 2007. A new green building award joins five other categories: energy efficiency; renewables; smart power; transportation; and air, water and waste. Entries are due by the end of next month and finalists will be announced in July. Eighty-eight percent of last year's finalists surveyed remain in operation, and nine percent have raised funds independently.

Greenvolts of Berkeley, Calif., has come a long way since taking the renewable energy prize last year. The solar energy start-up counts $1.5 million in seed money and awards, an office in downtown San Francisco, a 2,500-square-foot factory, six patents pending, two contracts in the works with utilities and three exclusive licensing deals. CEO Bob Cart learned about the Clean Tech Open last June, threw together a "goofy prototype" in his garage and submitted his proposal in the nick of time for the deadline. Greenvolts' mirrored solar power system adjusts to the sun's movements and uses a tiny fraction of the material of most solar panels.

If the mantra for realtors is "location, location, location," maybe green entrepreneurs should chant "timing, timing, timing." The theme of early birds with big dreams getting attention and funds continued throughout the evening. But clean tech is also the most complicated business sector, said Raj Atluru, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

"Unless you have a fundamentally disruptive technology, find another marketplace," he said. Atluru receives a glut of proposals related to solar power and biofuels but sees fresh opportunities for businesses that focus on green building materials, energy storage and using waste for energy. He called clean tech the most passionate and fourth-largest sector receiving venture capital investment. Draper Fisher Jurvetson logged more than 1,000 clean-tech business plans last year, up from only 50 in 2002.

Many at the launch event credited California's carbon-reduction and energy-efficiency laws for nourishing the clean-technology sector.

"We didn't set out to be climate martyrs; we set out to be climate pioneers," said Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the National Resources Defense Council's energy program.

Brad Barton, the Department of Energy's first commercialization director for renewable energy, also applauded federal fuel-efficiency laws. But California Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi brought darker clouds into the otherwise radiant picture.

"Where's payday?" he asked, adding that the most innovative businesses can't do a whit about dwindling natural resources and rising oceans as long as the government makes fossil fuels the center of its energy policies. "The president very much reminds me of this horse," Garamendi told me. "No matter how hard I kicked it and how hard I whipped it, it wouldn't move."

Garamendi called for powerful companies to get political and said he favors carbon cap-and-trade laws such as those in the European Union. Because he was taking four flights in two days to attend this event, audience members suggested that Garamendi buy carbon credits to atone for the air travel.

Other green-technology business competitions include Ignite Clean Energy at MIT and the Cleantech Innovation Challenge at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Philips Electronics has come up with a new logo to help consumers identify environmentally friendly and safe products.

(Credit: Philips Electronics)

The new "Green Tick" logo will label gadgets with "significantly better energy efficiency than the nearest competitor products in the same category as well as having other environmental benefits such as the use of flame-retardant materials," the company said.

Products bearing the logo have been certified by external auditors as being 10 percent more energy-efficient than other products on the market within a given consumer electronics category, according to Philips.

Currently, 7 of Philips' flat TVs carry the Green Tick logo, with the company aiming to double the number to 14 by the end of 2007. Philips says it will continue to increase the range of Green Tick products to include DVD recorders, home theater systems, wireless solutions, portable accessories and other devices.

If you're lucky, as I have been in several cities, you might occasionally flag down a rare taxicab bedecked by its driver with disco balls, mood lighting, tinfoil hearts, or even a menagerie of stuffed animals. This week, San Franciscans got the option to hitch a ride in a novelty taxi of a different sort, as start-up Green Cab's single hybrid Honda Civic hit the road. Next month the fleet could total five gas-electric taxis painted in low-toxic green paint.

"It's not only environmentally friendly, it's good financially for the driver," said Green Cab co-founder Thomas George-Williams. Fuel for the hybrid Civic costs $8 per shift, a fraction of the $45 to quench a gas-guzzling Crown Victoria, he said.

Mark Gruberg and Thomas George-Williams high-five their launch of Green Cab.

(Credit: Green Cab San Francisco)

Eight taxi drivers who wanted to improve their working environment while providing an ecofriendly service launched Green Cab, which provides them workers' compensation and will soon offer health insurance. Thirty drivers have joined the hiring wait list. George-Williams said he hopes to establish a model for other cities.

Green Cab is the latest sign of the growing greening of taxi, limousine, and rental-car services around the country. Some 180 hybrid and natural gas taxis currently roll the streets of San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom wants all cabs to have alternative fuel systems by 2010. Yellow Cab and Luxor Cab introduced hybrid Ford Escape SUVs to their fleets here in 2005. And since New York City taxi companies followed suit later that year, Treehugger.com has reported that hybrid riders tend to tip better.

But George-Williams isn't worried about competition from larger cab services. "They can't call themselves green because they're yellow," he joked.

For those who like to ride in style, ecofriendly chauffeur services are also on the rise. Bauer's corporate limo services are expanding nationally from their core green service, shuffling around Google employees in luxury electric and natural gas limousines. The Eco Limo operates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C.; Vail, Colorado, visitors can sip organic beer and wine inside a posh, biodiesel Ford Excursion airport ride from Green Limousine.

Travelers looking to get behind the wheel while lessening their carbon footprint might pick a gas-electric Civic, Toyota Prius, or Highlander from EV Rental in six California cities and Phoenix, Arizona. Fox has hybrids in most of those cities as well as in Florida and Colorado. Tourists can zip around Maui or Los Angeles in a biodiesel Volkswagen rented from Bio-Beetle. The ever-expanding car-sharing companies Zipcar and Flexcar offer hybrid models that members can rent by the hour in more than a dozen cities.

Large car-rental corporations are slowly going green as well. Enterprise offered biodiesel options last year to customers in Portland, Oregon, and is introducing Saturn hybrids to three California cities. Avis and Hertz have focused on adding tens of thousands of vehicles that achieve at least 28mpg, about half the touted urban efficiency of a Prius.

And for when that rental car--green or not--breaks down, the Better World Club pitches itself as an ecofriendly foil to AAA and offers help for those stranded with an auto or a bicycle.

You can hardly walk by a newsstand, Web site or TV station these days without getting the message that going green can save greenbacks and the Earth at the same time.

For Earth Day, big metro newspapers featured green specials, while MTV's Pimp My Ride converted a muscle car to run on biofuel. Magazines as varied as Outside, Vanity Fair and Knit.1 printed green issues this spring (whether they used recycled paper is another matter).

Over the weekend, two more big-media outlets released green offshoots designed to show a mainstream audience that every day can be like Earth Day. The WaPo's new Sprig and Hearst's The Daily Green Web sites target news and how-to tips at a non-granola-crunching crowd.

"You don't have to drop off the grid and live in the woods if you care about design and quality of life...Once you raise people's consciousness about this, it doesn't get unraised," said Mark Whitaker, who led the launch of Sprig as chief editor of Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive, which also publishes Slate.com.

That message is only likely to get louder as more advertisers realize they can use green media to reach shoppers willing to pay more for organic milk or a hybrid car, and who might even contribute to a carbon-neutral fund to soothe their eco-guilt.

Behold the fertile garden of green media:

The Sundance Channel is broadcasting Robert Redford's The Green series of shows. AOL founder Steve Case has backed the Lime network, with a presence online, on cable TV and on satellite radio. Next year the Discovery Channel's PlanetGREEN will play 24/7 on cable. Lifestyle magazines with a green angle include E, Verdant, Good, Sublime, Shift and Plenty.

Green blogs that attract large readerships include WorldChanging and Treehugger--which even has a green index to track how much the media mention green topics, as well as Hugg, its version of Digg. (And CNET has produced green tech pages for more than a year.) There are tons of little and big blogs about sustainable investing, urban planning, design, clothing, cars and living entirely off the grid. What will become of the little guys as more big-budget media step on their pesticide-free turf? Could Sprig threaten, say, Ideal Bite, which also serves quirky green-lifestyle tips to women? Will veteran eco-activist groups like Co-op America get less or more attention? And is preaching to the masses with shopping tips just a lite form of environmentalism?

"We plead guilty as charged," Whitaker of Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive told me. "We think you can accomplish more getting 95 percent of the people to become 5 percent more green than by getting 5 percent to become 95 percent green."

Polls may show that more Americans are caring about--or at least believing in--global warming. Thomas Friedman recently called for a "Green New Deal" in The New York Times magazine. But in the crucial years to come, how many more consumers of green media will pollute less and pay more for greener goods? How Americans rise or sink to the challenge may depend, as it does with advertisers, on the number of greenbacks involved.