Henrik Fisker, the storied car designer who has shaped Aston Martins, Fords and BMWs, told the Reuters Autos Summit this week that he now wants a starring role in the green revolution.

But he also wants to make the world safe for sports cars for generations to come.

"Being a car enthusiast and loving cars, to be quite honest, I could not imagine a life without a beautiful, fast sports car," Fisker said. "I needed to do something to make sure that I could drive one of those nice cars, my children could drive one of those beautiful, fast cars."

So what was Fisker's inspiration? What was the epiphany when he realized that the world was ready for the upcoming Fisker Karma, a $90,000 plug-in hybrid with 50 miles of all-electric fun?

Leonardo DiCaprio...in a Prius.

"A couple of years ago it started, by people who were maybe a little ahead of their time. You saw some movie starts like Leonardo DiCaprio buying a Prius.

"He could have bought any car in the world, and I remember seeing that on television and thinking to myself, you know, when you've got a guy who could buy any Ferrari or Rolls Royce and he's buying a Prius, you know something is changing dramatically."

(Henrik Fisker photo by Rebecca Cook of Reuters; Leonardo DiCaprio photo by Mario Anzuoni of Reuters.)

When it comes to competition in the auto business, it’s the unknown that keeps the top U.S. Honda executive, John Mendel, up at night.

Mendel, speaking to the Reuters Auto Summit in Detroit, said he is always concerned about the conventional competitors. But what he is really afraid of is a company that “changes the game.”

“What keeps me up regarding new competition is someone significantly changing the game,” Mendel said.

People mention an autoseller taking up dealers dropped by General Motors, Chrysler or Saturn.

“What if they didn’t have a dealer network,” Mendel said. “What if they used big-box retailers and contracted with Jiffy Lube to have your car fixed?

“That could be a really new metric, which suddenly changes the whole cost structure for distribution significantly,” said the Honda executive.

That has been tried before, by Sears, in the 1950s, but was killed by the complex state franchise laws that protect dealership networks.

Would such an idea work if tried by the Walmarts or the Costcos of the world? Should the U.S. state franchise laws be changed to allow it?

Mendel was a featured guest at this year’s Reuters Autos Summit, which runs through Thursday in Paris and Detroit.

Papa Hemingway probably didn’t see this coming.

When he wrote “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway described the summit of that African mountain as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”

It’s still wide, but may not be white much longer, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that says the remaining ice fields atop Kilimanjaro in Tanzania could be gone in 20 years or less, a casualty of climate change. Changes in clouds and precipitation play a minor role but the scientists say it’s mostly due to global warming.

Here’s the trail of data released by the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research:

– 85 percent of the ice that covered the mountain in 1912 had been lost by 2007, and 26 percent of the ice there in 2000 is now gone.

– A radioactive signal marking the 1951-52 “Ivy” atomic tests that was detected in 2000 some 1.6 meters (5.25 feet) below the surface of the Kilimanjaro ice is now lost, with an estimated 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) missing from the tops of the current ice fields.

– Elongated bubbles trapped in the frozen ice at the top of one ice core show surface ice melted and refroze, apparently the only time there’s been sustained melting in this core in the last 11,700 years.

– Even a 300-year-old drought some 4,200 years ago didn’t melt the ice, though it did leave an inch-thick layer of dust.

These observations confirm that the current climate conditions at Mount Kilimanjaro are unique over the last 11 millennia. The same changes are happening on Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori Mountains in Africa, in the South American Andes and in the Himalayas.

Read more about it here.

Might be something for climate negotiators in Barcelona and on Capitol Hill to think about.

Photo credit: Lonnie Thompson, Ohio State University (Ice fields atop Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro glow golden in the last of the afternoon sun.)

If you head east to El Centro from San Diego, Interstate 8 takes you through arid scenery, climbing to 4,000 feet through barren mountains so fast that your ears pop. Then comes the oasis.

As you head down rapidly out of the mountains once more toward El Centro you hit a sign that tells you that you have reached sea level. Green fields and palm trees, stacks of hay drying in the fierce sun -- 90 degrees Fahrenheit even in November -- surrounded on all sides by rocky hills and the desert.

We knew before coming here that this was an agricultural region, but the lush greenery amid such a scorched landscape took us by surprise. This is where much of America's lettuce, spinach and other vegetables come from in the winter. There are also large cattle feed lots here too, which launch a frontal assault on your olfactory system long before you see them.

But you don't have to wander far from the fields to find the desert and its fine reddish, beige sand and realise just how incongruous the lush green fields are. Particularly when you feel the sun beating down on you when much of the northern hemisphere is already feeling the first cold of winter.

This is all made possible by water rights this area has from the Colorado River. As this part of the desert is below sea level in some parts, the water flows downhill and an irrigation system delivers it to 500,000 acres of farmland.

Without this water the fields would no doubt revert to desert in short order.

Some 97 percent of the water diverted to the area around El Centro goes toward farming and city manager Ruben Duran says the city is looking at ways to conserve water in a place where "mild dehydration is a natural state for most people."

But while people here talk in terms of conservation and wise use of water, they can also remind you that water rights in El Centro and Imperial County have been upheld twice by the Supreme Court and that no one can take them away.

"Water is always a concern," said Tim Kelley, head of the Imperial Valley Development Corporation, a public private partnership set up to diversify the local economy. "But those water rights belong to us. And if you don't like it, you can take us to court."

Photos by Lucy Nicholson

When California’s SunPower and China’s Suntech strode onstage at an industry conference last week, onlookers braced themselves for a bit of sabre-rattling, or at least an animated debate about two global superpowers’ role in solar energy.

Some bet on an entertaining battle of words just a day after Robert F. Kennedy, Jr took to the stage at the Solar Power International conference in Anaheim, California and said that the United States was in an “arms race” with the Chinese to make solar panels.

Instead, Tom Werner with California-based SunPower and Zhengrong Shi at Chinese panel maker Suntech were all smiles and even bordeline chummy — on the surface at least — preaching cooperation rather than competition.

 Asked about the potential for U.S. manufacturers to do business in China, SunPower’s chief executive Werner said the country would be a “huge opportunity.”

“Understanding the market and being proximate to the market is always an advantage … Partnering with a Chinese company would be a distinct advantage,” Werner said.

“I look forward to seeing Dr. Shi some time in the next few months and you can help me meet the right people,” Werner added, as he extended his hand.

“We will work together,” Shi said as the audience laughed and applauded their handshake.

Earlier in the session, Shi said U.S.-based First Solar’s plans to build a massive solar plant in China shows that “the Chinese market is also open to all technologies, to all manufacturers. Anybody can participate in the market.”

But Werner did slip in later that, while he believed there was indeed an “arms race” brewing, he said the only way to win wasn’t by dropping the price.

“Do you really think the solar customer is completely satisfied and it’s all about price?” he told reporters after the panel.

    When you’re looking for shrinking packs of multiyear ice in the Arctic Ocean, bizarre things tend to happen. Top Canadian scientist David Barber knows this first hand, as he explained in a presentation in Parliament on Wednesday. Barber said that to all extents and purposes the multiyear ice in the Arctic had already vanished, which could open up the region to shipping and mineral exploitation.

    Barber, who holds Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, boarded the icebreaker Amundsen last month and steamed north from the Arctic port of Tuktoyaktuk to look for the Beaufort Sea pack ice, the “thickest, hardest, meanest, multi year sea we have left in the northern hemisphere”.

    According to up-to-date satellite maps provided by the Canadian Ice Service, the Amundsen should have started ploughing into progressively thicker ice almost from the start. Soon after the ship set sail Barber went to bed, and then woke up at 2 am in a panic.

    “I looked on my screen and we’re doing 13 knots. We do 13.7 knots in open water and we’re right here (in an area where the maps show there should be thick ice) somewhere, doing 13 knots,”  he said.

      “And I just panicked, I thought ‘Oh My God, Stephane the captain is not on the bridge and the first officer has gone crazy, he’s driving this thing way too fast through the sea ice’. So I go up on the bridge and talk to the guys and they say “There is no ice here’.”

    The ship sailed for hundreds of miles, first to the north and then eastwards, “trying to find multiyear sea ice that would even slow us down”. All they found was so-called rotten ice — a thin layer covering small chunks of multiyear ice.

    Eventually the ship found a 10-mile floe of “nice typical traditional Beaufort Sea pack ice” close to the Canadian Arctic archipelago. As they were about to attach the ship to the floe Barber looked out and saw a crack open up right in front of him. “I went ‘Wow, that’s kind of weird’.”  Even weirder, he and a colleague then saw the ice move up and down as a swell hit it.

    “And as we watched, literally, without any exaggeration, the entire multi-year floe broke up in five minutes,” he said. Barber blames waves which started off the north coast of Siberia and then rolled across the Arctic Ocean, pushed along by a low pressure system and unencumbered by rotten ice.

    No wonder he says that “I’ve never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic”.

((Broken Arctic sea ice as seen from a window in from a U.S. Coast Guard C130 flight over the Arctic Ocean September 30, 2009. REUTERS/Yereth Rosen))

The solar power sector and the natural gas industry need to build an alliance to get more government support and take over the energy sector from incumbents like Big Oil and King Coal, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said on Wednesday.

The environmentalist spoke at the Solar Power International Conference being held in Anaheim, California, this week.

“The alliance is just forming,” Kennedy told reporters after his remarks. He added that the natural gas industry has been “hiding under oil and they think Big Oil is going to take care of them. But they’re realizing Big Oil is never going to let them make a profit” and that companies like Chesapeake are realizing “that their future is with the environmental community and the renewable community.”

He said the team-up also makes sense because power from natural gas can help balance out solar and wind-generated electricity on the grid, eliminating the problem of inconsistency on sunny days, for instance.

Kennedy argued that the solar power industry needs to alert the U.S. government that the country is in an “arms race with the Chinese.”

“It’s not an arms race over tanks and planes. It’s an arms race over who’s going to build solar panels and who’s going to build them the most efficient. We’ve got to start treating this as an arms race,” Kennedy said.

He added that the Chinese have outspent the U.S. government in the renewable sector and that “they know that this is the future and they want to put us out of business. They are going to put a lot of us out of business, a lot of solar panel makers out of business because they’re going to flood the market with their paneling.”

Reporting and writing by Laura Isensee

The headline in the Gulf News English language daily reads 'UAE tops world on per capita carbon footprint'.

For a place so reliably bathed in sunlight, the Dubai property explosion seems to have generated enough construction noise to drown out the environmental debate raging elsewhere in the world.

For the first-time visitor, the scale of the global construction superlatives - The Palm, made from reclaimed land jutting out defiantly into the Gulf, the skyscrapers built in a region where there is no shortage of space - is staggering.

The amount of environmentally 'sinfull' concrete poured over the last decade is ncalculable. Billboards lauding the benefits of solar power look like a bit of an after thought.

Climate change was just beginning to take hold as an issue for property developers when the economic downturn struck and put paid to nascent environmental ambitions.  "Green is not cheap," says Markus Giebel, chief executive of Dubai property group Deyaar Development. "Dubai was on the right track, but there's no money now. People are thinking about survival."

Even if a deal is reached among political delegates at the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, it is unlikely to set out specific emission targets, says Mike Hulme, author of "Why We Disagree About Climate Change" and a professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

"What we've done with climate change is to attach so many pressing environmental concerns to the climate change agenda that trying to secure a negotiated multilateral agreement between 190 nations is actually beyond the reach of what we can achieve," he argues.

Hulme, who will take part in a debate hosted by the Institute of Economic Affairs in November about carbon emission policies and economic activity before he heads to the Copenhagen conference, discussed his views with Reuters.

Taiwan, hit by its worst typhoon in 50 years in August, has found a culprit for the disaster that killed about 770 people and begun using it to get precious attention overseas where the island is usually overlooked in favour of its giant political rival China.

Global warming is taking blame for Morakot, which was freakish as Taiwan’s only major typhoon of the year and because it lingered instead of blowing straight through. The island’s foreign ministry says that as global warming’s victim it should get to participate in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change  in time for its December talks in Copenhagen. Sixteen countries have already voiced support.

“We are a victim of this problem. It’s closely related to the public’s economic interests,” said Yang Kuo-tung, director general of the foreign ministry’s treaties and legal affairs. Morakot’s incessant rain caused agricultural losses of T$16.47 billion ($510 million).  ”It’s no laughing matter.”

But Taiwan’s bid for participation faces a new kind of storm despite recent detente with China, a powerful veto-wielding Security Council member. China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since 1949 and blocked more than a decade worth of applications to enter the United Nations on grounds that the self-ruled island lacks statehood.

Taiwan dropped an the annual bid to join the whole United Nations this year  to avoid upsetting China, but figures that knocking at the door of a small U.N. agency would cause little stir, especially with the woes of Morakot in its back pocket. Taiwan would both teach and learn as a Convention participant, Yang said.

But although China-Taiwan ties have improved via trade talks since mid-2008, officials in Beijing have resisted opening international organisations to Taiwan. Unless it whips up a powerful public relations storm that generates the kind of populist momentum at home and abroad that followed Taiwan’s colourful, music and video-enhanced U.N. bids, the island won’t make it for the Copenhagen talks and may wait up to two years before it can participate in the Convention, political analysts say.

“I don’t think ordinary people know about this organisation,” said Alex Chiang, international politics associate professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “You have to let other people know we’re qualified for participation. That’s the job for the government, telling people about it. They haven’t done much for public relations.”

((Pictures — Top right: Motorcyclists stop at an intersection in Taipei September 23, 2009. Taiwan is known as the one of the highest motorbike-density country in the world and motorbikes are responsible for a big share of Taiwan’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to local media. REUTERS/Pichi Chuang. Left: Damaged buildings are seen after Typhoon Morakot swept Kaohsiung county, southern Taiwan August 11, 2009.  REUTERS/Stringer))