London's transport bosses are telling travellers on the tube system to beat the heat by carrying a bottle of water with them when they venture underground.

But how many of us are refilling our bottles with tap water rather than pouring money down the tube -- not to mention the cost of recycling the plastic bottles -- by buying a new bottle of water each day?

Cue the National Hydration Council  whose eye-catching advertising campaign to encourage people to buy more "naturally sourced bottled water" -- on health grounds -- featured prominently on the underground network earlier this year.

The worrying thing for the bottled water lobby is not that people are doing what would appear to be the most sensible thing and refilling their bottles from the tap, but that Britons are replacing bottled water with sugary drinks instead.

We're told that sales of bottled water fell by 7 percent last year, with 71 percent of that decline the result of people buying sweet drinks instead. Good news for the soft drinks industry perhaps, but a worry for health officials.

Meanwhile, beneath the streets of London, the hot and flustered faces of fellow tube passengers shows just how dire it is on board the capital's underground trains when the mercury rises.

With a decent air-conditioning system on most lines a distant prospect, Transport for London (TfL) could show it cares by offering each of its cash-strapped passengers a free TfL water bottle and the opportunity to refill them at its stations.

There’s no shortage of references these days in corporate and government reports to earnest, new steps to fight climate change. Often they promise to make carbon emissions cuts equivalent to taking millions of cars off the road…

For example, take Europe’s fourth biggest single source of carbon emissions, Britain’s Drax coal plant. It said in March that as a result of efficiency improvements it had cut carbon emissions equivalent to taking 195,000 cars off the road.  But of course that was a cut against a theoretical projection of rising emissions — not an absolute cut.

Take a similar announcement from Canada this week. The oil industry in Alberta is busy trying to extract oil from tar sands. That is a far more polluting, energy-intensive way than just sucking the stuff out of oil wells, because steam must first be injected into the sand to make the oil flow. Now Alberta is experimenting with a technology, called carbon capture and storage, with three test projects which by 2015 would “achieve annual carbon dioxide reductions equivalent to taking about a million vehicles off the road”, the province says.

Funnily enough, 2015 is also the year when a U.N. panel of climate scientists says global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide must stop rising to limit global warming to 2-2.4 degrees celsius, a widely perceived threshold for dangerous effects (page 20 here). It seems a little disingenuous — in that wider context — for  Alberta to talk of taking cars off the road from test projects to trim carbon emissions under a wider programme to expand one of the most polluting forms of oil drilling known to man.

The wider context does seem relevant if we’re not to pat ourselves on the back as catastrophic climate effects creep up. And it may be especially relevant this year, as climate talks and rhetoric ratchet up ahead of a meeting in December in Copenhagen, meant to seal agreement on a new climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Unfairly or not, any discussion of the Republican party’s environmental record by clean energy advocates often includes a mention of the White House solar panels ditched under Ronald Reagan. Green-minded members of the Grand Old Party, on the other hand, would rather point to the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon. Either way, in what’s clearly a sign of the times, renewables featured high on the minds of three former GOP secretaries of state who popped up at various energy conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area this past week (One can only assume the timing was a coincidence).

George Schultz, who served under Reagan, probably surprised at least a few people when he counted himself as among those EV1 owners still regretting GM’s controversial scrapping of the electric car earlier this decade.  A Stanford professor and Hoover Institution fellow for the past two decades, Schultz had enjoyed driving it around campus. “I could even drive it up to San Francisco. I couldn’t go too many other places, but it’s a very useful car,” he said. “I was sorry to see that car taken off the market, it worked just fine.” Speaking at a meeting of energy economists last week alongside Chevron’s David O’Reilly, Schultz went on to join the oil company CEO in endorsing a carbon tax as more efficient than the cap-and-trade system favored by Congress.

On Monday, Condoleezza Rice also favored a carbon tax when she addressed the Silicon Valley Energy Summit at Stanford, where she too is a professor and Hoover fellow, while stressing the importance of not picking winners in the push for greener energy. “At this stage, we need to have an open field for all renewable alternatives to change the energy mix,” she said.

Just down the road in Palo Alto the next day, the secretary of state under George Bush Sr., James Baker, ranked climate change alongside nuclear proliferation, the economy and wars as a leading global threat. “I’m not going to talk about the science of it, ’cause I don’t understand it,” he told a meeting on clean energy arranged by law firm Baker Botts. Yet he felt, as an outdoorsman, that good stewardship of the planet was vital, even if he saw the current climate change bill in Congress as flawed. He suggested it should be passed, but left unsigned by the president until big developing countries like China and India made similar moves against carbon, holding the bill back as a bargaining chip. “That’s Negotiation 101,” he later told Reuters.

Photo credits: Above: General Motors publicity photo of the EV1 passenger car. Below: REUTERS/Ron Sachs/Handout (Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks to supporters of the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital in Washington, in this handout image from May 3, 2009)

Sometimes, even electric vehicles aren’t good enough for the die-hard green car set.

An electric car advocacy group on Tuesday criticized California’s influential air quality regulator, the California Air Resources Board, for allowing BMW’s one-year pilot program of electric Mini Coopers to earn the same credit towards the state’s clean vehicle program as standard production cars.

California is requiring that automakers, collectively, put 7,500 zero-emissions vehicles, or ZEVs, on its roads.

But Plug In America on Tuesday said there is a “gaping loophole” in the program that “could deal a blow to the proliferation of plug-in vehicles.”

Specifically, the group targeted BMW’s leasing program of 500 electric Mini Coopers, which it calls MINI Es.

“CARB is allowing BMW to game the system by accruing the maximum number of ZEV credits with the least amount of effort,” Plug In America legislative director Jay Friedland said in a statement. “In order to receive full credit, these vehicles must be offered for sale.”

CARB plans to revisit the regulation next year and will be looking at ways to accelerate the commercialization of electric vehicles, according to spokesman Dimitri Stanich.

In the meantime, “we’ve urged BMW to consider extending that one-year lease,” Stanich said.

BMW officials were not available for comment.

Shares in the suffering utility Pacific Ethanol shot up over 8 percent on Tuesday, reaping the rewards of cheaper ethanol prices, thanks largely to what is expected to be a bumper crop year for U.S. corn. Units of Pacific Ethanol that owned four ethanol plants filed for Chapter 11 protection last month, stung by volatile prices for corn, low fuel demand and the credit crisis.

A senior company official at India’s Suzlon Energy said the wind power company was looking at selling assets and shares to lower its debt, dealing a major blow to its shares, falling 11.44 percent in Tuesday trading.

America's social and religious conservatives are turning up the heat as they galvanize heartland opposition against the latest example of President Barack Obama-inspired "socialism" -- a climate change bill that aims to reduce fossil fuel emissions, which most scientists have linked to climate change.  

The Democratic Party-led House of Representatives passed the bill on Friday. It would require large companies, including utilities and manufacturers, to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases associated with global warming by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, from 2005 levels. It must still go through the U.S. Senate, where its ultimate fate remains uncertain despite the Democratic majority there.

Conservative Christians, a key base -- if not THE base -- for the out-of-power Republican Party, are among the biggest skeptics of human-induced global warming. In the eyes of many environmentalists, they were part of an "unholy alliance" with the energy industry that enjoyed its zenith under former president George W. Bush, who pulled America out of the Kyoto Protocol aimed at cutting emissions in the developed world. The Bush administration was widely seen as hostile to any attempt to cap emissions as well as the science behind it.

Conservative Christians are sounding the alarm bells about the climate bill, which represents Obama's first major legislative victory and which Republicans see as a major opportunity to gain political ground ahead of the 2010 congressional elections. You can see our coverage of this issue here.

Republicans are calling it a "job killer" while the Cornwall Alliance -- a conservative Christian coalition -- has described its cap and trade provisions, which allow companies that pollute less than their limit to sell some of their permits to others struggling to meet such green requirements, "as the largest tax hike in history." Analysts have said such arguments may appeal to voters especially against the backdrop of the current recession.

Conservative Christians are distributing an online petition called We Get It! which reads in part: "Our stewardship of creation must be based on Biblical principles and factual evidence. We face important environmental challenges, but must be cautious of claims that our planet is in peril from speculative dangers like man-made global warming."

Taking aim at other religious groups that have lobbied for emissions-cap measures on the grounds that the poor will suffer most from climate change, the Cornwall Alliance says the poor will be ill-served by cap and trade and its impact on the economy. In its "Talking Points" on cap and trade it says it is "a regressive tax ... . Because the poor spend a higher proportion of their monthly income on energy than do others, they pay more of their disposable income for the increase in energy costs."

It also puts its faith in such matters in the hands of a higher power.

"Cap and trade rests on an unbiblical world view. It assumes that a minuscule change in atmospheric
chemistry (carbon dioxide rising from about 3 in every 10,000 to about 5 in every 10,000 molecules in the atmosphere) could cause catastrophic climate change, putting human and other life at risk. That belief is contrary to the Biblical teaching that a wise Creator made the Earth (Genesis 1–2) and on observing it saw that it was 'very good' (Genesis 1:31)."

Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and a leading figure in the social conservative movement, devoted much of his nationally syndicated radio show on Saturday to the topic, calling cap and trade a "regressive tax to the max." Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, said in his blog last week that it "would increase an already staggering national debt by 26 percent by 2035" -- a figure taken directly from the Cornwall Alliance's estimates.

Some evangelical Christians also have said that the social upheaval that analysts have linked to climate change may be signs of the second coming of Christ. Perkins has outlined such a scenario in his recent book "Personal Faith, Public Policy."

One thing is clear: this issue has the potential to really stir up the Republican Party base. But will it stir it enough to have an impact when the Senate considers the climate bill or when Americans go to the polls in 2010?

(Photo: A demonstrator for clean energy holds up a sign during a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington March 2, 2009. Moves to cap greenhouse gas emissions and promote green energy have some conservative Christians seeing red. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

Microsoft Corp Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie – the guy in charge of the company’s $9 billion research budget and deep thinking — sat down with Reuters to talk about clean energy — carbon free, not necessarily renewable, in his view. Following are a couple of excerpts.

Mundie talks about why wind and solar power may not be huge players on the renewable energy scene.

Mundie discusses his affinity for novel nuclear approaches.

Mundie shares his thoughts on clean energy road blocks.

Video editing by Courtney Hoffman

Other than pounding on the bathroom door, there is little one can do to get family members (read teenagers) to take shorter showers. But with mandatory water conservation possibly coming down the pipeline in California’s third year of drought,  one Denver-based company said it has the invention that will help households get through these dry times: the Shower Manager.

The Shower Manager can be programmed to run for five, eight or 11 minutes at full flow. After a warning beep it cuts the flow by two-thirds, just enough to rinse. Five minutes have to pass before it can be reset – an eternity in a shower.

One satisfied customer, Lisa J, was quoted by the company as saying her kids ”call it the Shower Nazi.” The Web site claims a family of four (including two teens) can save $400 annually in water and heating costs - compared to the product’s online price of $125.

There is a cheaper alternative to promoting — though not enforcing — shorter showers. For $15.50, you can get a shower timer in the shape of a duck, a turtle or a star. One person on flickr showed their duck timing a 3 minute shower, prompting the comment (from a teen?): “Woah! I would have a hard time with three-minute showers.”

Photo credit: Reuters/Mark Blinch (A woman takes a shower in a Toronto gym.)

A “gold-rush-like” buzz has spread across Germany in the last week over tentative plans to invest the staggering sum of 400 billion euros to harvest solar power in the Sahara for energy users across Europe and northern Africa. Even though European and Mediterranean Union leaders have been exploring and studying for several years the idea of using concentrated solar power (CSP), the Desertec proposition suddenly captivated the public’s attention a week ago when German reinsurer Munich Re announced it had invited blue chip German companies such as Deutsche Bank, Siemens and several major utilities to a July 13 meeting on the project. The 20 companies aim to sign a memorandum of understanding to found the Desertec Industrial Initiative that could be supplying 15 percent of Europe’s electricity in the decades ahead.

Germany’s deputy foreign minister, Guenter Gloser, has been the government’s point man for the project. I had the chance to talk to him about it.

Question: How did this project to turn the sun in the Sahara into electricity for Europe and north African countries get started?
Guenter Gloser: About 15 months ago Germany and France proposed including the solar plan into the list of projects for the Union for the Mediterranean. There were institutions that had already done research and we thought: ‘Why don’t we use this sun belt where there is such an abundance of sunshine as a source of renewable energy?’ Together Germany, France and Egypt put forth this solar plan as one of the six projects for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and underscored the fact that it could benefit both sides. It was not an idea where just countries north of the Mediterranean will benefit but rather those countries south of it as well as across the EU would also benefit.

Question: What is the current status of the project?
Gloser: We agreed to move forward with the project and want to go forward step-by-step towards its implementation. But obviously neither the EU nor the Arab League will be the principal players but rather private investors. Our task for this project is to create the political framework — for example with setting up of the feed-in tariffs, ensuring the infrastructure is built and ensuring that the renewable energy can be transported to Europe. The political framework can also make it possible to expedite the approvals process. But what is also very important is that the energy produced is also available for countries in the region. For example, Morocco can take advantage of its solar and wind conditions on the Atlantic coast to build solar power plants or wind energy parks to provide energy for its domestic market and to sell energy abroad as well. Even countries such as Algeria, which has fossil fuel reserves, could also use the sun belt for solar thermal power for some of their energy needs — and prolong their fossil fuel reserves.

Question: Is there not risk involved in such large-scale investment in a region with a potential for political instability?
Gloser: It’s a cooperation that will contribute towards diversifying energy sources, geographically and in terms of energy sources. It’s a truly fascinating project because it’s a win-win for everyone. And the third winner will be the people and institutions that finance this project. Neither the EU nor the countries in the south are capable of financing this on their own. So the question is: can third-parties bringing financing be involved. Energy security is an important issue everywhere. There are energy sources we have today that at times have been somewhat at risk. There’s no contradiction in saying that it’s important to diversify a country’s energy source as well as diversifying the types of energy it receives. It’s not that there is no risk whatsoever but it’s important to keep in mind that there are also some risk factors for other sources of energy that we are now importing.

Question: What impact do you think a project like this could have in the Mediterranean Union?
Gloser: I think the partnership approach that we have taken could well have a positive influence of stability for the countries taking part as well as the neighbouring nations. The EU has been enlarged and come closer together in the past decades but there hasn’t been as much of that among Arab countries. Perhaps it would be possible through certain projects, such as this solar energy project or water projects or transportation routes, to increase the cooperation among those countries.

Question: There have been fears expressed that Europe would be exploiting natural resources in Africa, raising fears of a new sort of ‘colonisation’. What would you say to those fears?
Gloser: It is not in any way an issue of the north dominating the south. It is not only the north that is interested in acquiring renewable energy but rather other users are interested. And if that mutual need for energy leads to a project that satisfies all sides then that is in my view a good route to take. I don’t think there’s any justification for the notion of this being an ‘energy colonisation’ or anything like that at all. It’s a mutually beneficial project.”

Question: How high is the interest in other countries? Some cynics would say Germany’s expertise in renewable energies gives it a big advantage.
Gloser: So far the countries in the south and north have been in agreement about the project. Now the task is to identify the next steps. There are countries in both the south and north that are more interested in the project than others — because, for example, they already have had positive experiences with renewable energy. That is not only Germany but also Spain and other countries. And on the other side of the Mediterranean there are countries that will have more interest at first than others.

Question: Some might see this project somewhat cynically as a vehicle to help German companies that already have such a considerable head start in know-how with renewable energy. What would you say to them?
Gloser: Obviously there are some important players (in Germany). But they are not only in Germany. Certainly we have built up a renewable energy sector in Germany, thanks to the right political framework a decade ago, that has created an enormous number of jobs. But Spain has also had an enormous development in recent years and in Denmark the wind energy sector has reached a large dimension with considerable know-how. But beyond those countries there are many other countries with companies and suppliers for the industry.

Question: Are there problems on the horizon being overlooked?
Gloser: In my eyes the biggest problem right now is that the expectations have possibly been raised too high. I’m someone who’s thought: that’s a great idea and why don’t we take advantage of all these things at hand: know-how, sun belt, political cooperation, development, stability, security, partnership. There are so many positive aspects that come together. Now it’s time to come up with some realistic timetables and see how we can move forward step-by-step to make this project a reality.

PHOTO: Mirrors are seen channelling sunlight onto a tube filled with oil during the dedication of Acciona’s Nevada Solar One power plant in Boulder City, southeast of Las Vegas February 22, 2008. The 400-acre, 64-megawatt, concentrating solar power (CSP) plant is the third largest in the world, according to Acciona. The plant produces energy to power about 14,000 homes. REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus

Ever been told by a ruthless boss that, “as Charles Darwin said, it’s survival of the fittest”?

Rather than answering that it was actually a one-time sub editor for The Economist magazine, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase, or fighting back with an equally wrong comment about someone being descended from monkeys, Darwin academics are calling for a moratorium on the everyday use and abuse of the great naturalist.

Two-hundred years after he was born, and 150 years after he published “On the Origin of Species”, it’s time to check the facts, as “most of what most people think they know about him is not true,” according to Darwin scholar John van Wyhe, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge.

Visiting Singapore for an anniversary talk about Darwin and his contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, who is also the subject of several myths, van Whye ran through a series of widely-believed Darwin misconceptions that make humankind look pretty slow on the uptake.

First off, he the pointed out that Darwin and Wallace, were not, really, such iconoclasts.

By the late 1830s, two decades before Darwin’s Origin, the scientific community had already accepted that the world was far older than could be allowed by a literal reading of Genesis, he said.

The “Bridgewater Treatise” by the Reverend William Buckland, the first person to scientifically describe a dinosaur, detailed geology and mineralogy’s relevance to theology by drawing cross-sections of the earth full of the fossils of extinct creatures, decades before the two came on the scene. 

Second, Darwin did not hold off publishing his theory for decades out of a paralysing fear of outraging his wife or conservative Victorian society, as the popular “Darwin’s delay” theory has it.

The more than 20 year gap between his return from the Voyage of the Beagle and publishing his theory of natural selection is better explained by the fact that he was simply “really busy”, according to Wyhe.

After completing several volumes of Beagle findings, he spent so many — eight — years writing about barnacles that, by the end, he wrote that “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before”.

The next myth concerns the 1858 letter and paper, from his now comparatively little-known contemporary Wallace, that jolted both into publishing action, and has been cited as evidence that Darwin stole Wallace’s ideas.

Wallace’s years of specimen collecting in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Papua New Guinea led him to independently articulate a theory of evolution that,  Darwin acknowledged in a June 1858 letter, was the most “striking coincidence” he had ever seen.

But rather than Darwin performing a nefarious, unattributed, Victorian equivalent of a cut and paste job from Wallace’s work, and racing to scoop the glory for himself, the two published a joint paper in 1858.

Anyone still not convinced doesn’t have to take my word for it.

Facts can be checked at Darwin Online, a complete archive of his works created by van Wyhe.

(Pictures - top Charles Darwin. Right: Darwin’s house, Down House in Kent, southern England, where he wrote “On the Origin of the Species” REUTERS/Tal Cohen)

No more Mr. Nice Green! San Francisco passed what it called the first mandatory requirement to throw carrot peels, moldy bread and other icky compostable material into separate bins in order to improve recycling. Total recycling would rise to 90 percent from a current 72 percent if all of the paper and scraps currently in the garbage were put in the right cans, the city said.

Mayor Gavin Newsom soft-pedaled the sticky side of the situation (although who wants any carrot in this story?). There is a $100 cap for fines on residences and small businesses, and the main goal is public awareness, he said in a statement.

The picture, by Reuters’ Daniel Aguilar, is of a dump in Mexico City, which is facing a crisis on where to put its garbage.

California’s environmental and other regulations are helping to send manufacturers running, but the state can capitalize on its green image (and should streamline regulations) a new study by the Milken Institute says.

The study found that Golden State manufacturing was already contracting at an astounding rate even before the latest meltdown, and that it was lagging some other Western U.S. states which had seen small upticks in jobs for people who make stuff.

In particular, high-tech manufacturing fell to 485,900 jobs in 2007 in California from 629,400 in 2000, the report said.

The report described the state as having “a regulatory regime that uses limits on production and mitigation of environmental impacts in manufacturing processes rather than encouraging higher, smarter, more sustainable forms of production.”

One solution among many proposed is to give manufacturers who build green a bit of marketing cachet — a Made Green in California designation. “California’s manufacturers can cultivate a high-value brand that emphasizes a sustainable product made through a sustainable process,” it said.

California’s cachet — and perhaps its manufacturing issues — are summed in Apple Inc’s “Designed by Apple in California” tag (one might infer the manufacturing location is NOT California).

Photo Credit: Reuters/ROBERT GALBRAITH