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.

The U.S. government has pumped more than $100 billion into Detroit over the past year to keep automakers General Motors and Chrysler alive. But some of the sector’s remaining capitalists are having a hard time stomaching a $25 billion Department of Energy loan program intended to spark new developments in electric cars. 

Start-ups Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors have won about $1 billion in combined funding, while longtime players Ford and Nissan have received substantially larger loans from Washington to work on vehicle electrification — a technology the White House and many in the industry hope will reduce the United States’ dependence on imported oil and lower emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas. 

Funneling federal money to new entrants to the automaking world does not sit right with Tim Leuliette, chief executive of parts supplier Dura Automotive. 

“If there’s a real market for electric vehicles, the OEMs will do it,” Leuliette said, using industry jargon for automakers. “We don’t need to have people who have never built a car in their life take $1 billion of our tax money and say ‘I can do it too.’” 

Government funding muddles market signals, Leuliette argued at the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit.

“When government writes a check, it says the smart money investors are hesitant to fund it,” Leuliette said. “When markets say it’s now wise enough … there’s more than enough money.” 

For his part, the founder of Fisker Automotive — which aims to build plug-in hybrid cars at a former GM plant in Wilmington, Delaware — said government funding is a logical way to kick start a technology that private U.S. companies have been slow to focus on. 

“Do we just sit and wait for the Chinese and the Japanese or Europeans to develop this and then we join later? Or do we actually this time around, try to take the lead?” said Henrik Fisker, whose plug-in hybrids would be able to travel for short distances on just the electricity stored in their batteries, which can be charged off the electric grid. 

“This is a moment in time, we cannot let this pass. We already let the hybrid pass - Toyota in the consumer’s mind, invented the hybrid and owns the hybrid - the average consumer doesn’t know that GM has more hybrids than Toyota,” Fisker said. “If an American company comes first with a plug-in hybrid, and we will be followed closely by the Chevy Volt in another segment, I think that is where America then has a chance in the consumer’s mind to take the lead, and not only in the U.S., but worldwide.”

Some politicians may be accused of dragging their heels when it comes to dealing with climate change, but you can’t say members of the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism’s executive board aren’t clocking in the hours.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an emissions trading scheme under the Kyoto Protocol worth $33 billion last year according to the World Bank, allows companies and countries to outsource their greenhouse gas reduction efforts by investing in clean energy projects in emerging countries like China and India, where making emissions cuts costs less.

Projects are submitted to the CDM for registration and a staff of over 100 examine and scrutinize each one to ensure environmental integrity.

The whole scheme is supervised by a 20-member executive board, chaired by Lex de Jonge of the Netherlands’ environment ministry.

“The members are all employed by governments and assigned to the board. They don’t get a salary from the UN but they receive a daily subsistence allowance to pay for meals, hotel and travel costs,” de Jonge said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

“As chair of the board, I spend 75% of my time on CDM issues and 25% on domestic issues relating to my actual job,” he added.

The CDM’s executive board holds some 7 to 8 week-long meetings a year, up from 5 meetings in 2005, the year international emissions trading really began to take shape.

“They’re quite long days. We start at 9am and it’s seldom that we finish before 7 or 8pm. The worst I’ve ever seen was we worked until 3am,” de Jonge said.

Between board meetings, de Jonge said members must attend meetings for other related panels or working groups to which they belong. These extra-curricular duties can take an additional 6-8 weeks a year. Factor in the additional work required to prepare for these meetings and you’re looking at months, not weeks.

“If you add it all up, between 25 and 40 percent of a member’s working year is devoted to the board, and that is sometimes difficult for board members because they have other jobs to attend to,” de Jonge explained.

Would you work this much for climate change?

To read our Summit interview with Lex de Jonge, click here

Scientists may face an uphill battle in trying to warn the world about the looming perils of global warming, but one of Britain’s top academics wouldn’t trade places with the politicians tasked with negotiating a new global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“Although the science (of climate change) is difficult and still uncertain, it’s a doddle compared to the politics,” said Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, Britain’s science academy.

Thousands of international delegates will convene at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December. All early indications suggest those talks, seen as critical to agreeing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol after it expires in 2012, will be anything but a cake walk.

That said, Rees thinks UK policymakers have done a good job so far.

“We must give (the UK) government credit for its leadership in this area, going back to the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 when climate change was pushed up the agenda,” Rees said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit this week.

“The UK punches above its weight in the debate on climate change even though we only produce 2% of the world’s emissions,” said Rees, likening Britain to some sort of environmental boxer.

Rees thinks that because the UK has the high-tech know-how, it should strive to provide more than 2% of the solution to the climate problem by upping investment technologies to help replace fossil fuel burning.

“The level of research and development into new energy technologies is far lower than the scale of the challenge demands … The R&D on renewable energy should be closer to what we spend on health or medicine, but it’s tiny, tiny compared to that.”

“Without new technologies, we’ll never meet out 2050 targets,” he said, referring to Britain’s goal of cutting carbon emissions by 80% by mid-century.

Should the UK assume a larger climate role relative to its size or greenhouse gas contribution? Should it spend as much on researching renewable energy as it does developing cures for disease?

To listen to an excerpt of our interview with Rees, click here

To read the Reuters Climate Summit interview with Rees, click here

(Reuters photo - British boxer Amir Khan)

Bill Weihl, Google’s Green Energy Czar, sat down at Reuters’ Global Climate and Energy Summit in San Francisco and talked about Google’s solar thermal project, infrastructure costs and where he sees the energy mix heading in 20 years.

Here he chats about emerging clean tech hubs and what the United States should do about investing in renewables.

(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman)

John Woolard, the chief executive of solar thermal energy company BrightSource, sat down at Reuters’ Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco to talk about energy efficiency, project financing and the future  of carbon-free power.

His advice: build fast!

(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman)

A new U.N. deal to step up the fight against climate change is to be agreed this December in the Danish capital ‘Copenhagen’, or should that be ‘København’?

British and American English speakers often differ about whether to pronounce it “Copen’hay’gen” or “Copen’haa’gen”. And interviews for the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy summit this week are bringing varieties in between.

But what do Danes reckon? I called up an expert:

“We’d normally say “Copen’hay’gen in English,” said Ida Ebbensgaard,” spokeswoman for Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard who will host the Dec. 7-18 meeting.

Or maybe delegates from the 190 nations can try saying the word in Danish — “København” (…pronounced something like “Sjobenhaavn”).

  (Photo: Denmark’s Little Mermaid statue)

For most of us, printing e-mails or making copies is just part of the daily routine in the office. But, the paper we use does come from somewhere. Last week, we had the opportunity to visit Stora Enso’s Nymolla Mill in southern Sweden to get an exclusive look at how MultiCopy paper is made. Nymolla is an integrated mill (it produces pulp and paper on the same site) and most of the wood used is sourced locally. Also interesting, the mill is the only one I could find in the world that emits zero carbon dioxide from fossil fuels during the paper making process. Check out my look inside the Nymolla Mill.

Inside Sweden’s greenest paper mill from Reuters TV on Vimeo.

Rich Kinder, CEO of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, says the Obama Administration’s push to develop alternative energy sources such as wind and solar are not the answer to reducing the nation’s dependence on oil or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Click below to hear where Kinder thinks the U.S. should be focusing its attention.

Kinder: wind, solar not the answer from Reuters TV on Vimeo.