BrightFarms builds hydroponic greenhouses in cities to grow lettuces, tomatoes and herbs for supermarkets. Retail chains are intrigued: They can satisfy their consumer’ appetite for local food, and be assured of a predictable supply of healthy, fresh vegetables. While hydroponic farming isn’t new, BrightFarms has developed an innovative business model that should enable the company to finance its expansion.

The result is that BrightFarms is growing (pun intended) at a nice clip. This month, it announced plans to build a greenhouse in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Here’s how my story  begins:

Most of the organic baby greens sold in Washington DC supermarkets are not “green” at all. They’re grown in the Salinas Valley in California, which has been called the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet. Then they are shipped in refrigerated trucks roughly 2,800 miles across America.

Paul Lightfoot thinks there’s a better way to get fresh lettuce, tomatoes and herbs into the hands of supermarket shoppers. Lightfoot is chief executive of a startup called BrightFarms, which builds and operates urban, hydroponic greenhouse farms. The company operates a greenhouse farm in Philadelphia, it’s building another on a massive rooftop in Brooklyn, and it is developing farms in St Louis, Kansas City, St Paul and Oklahoma City.

You can read the rest here.

Paul Lightfoot

The aptly-named Paul Lightfoot, by the way, is a marathon runner, which naturally predisposed me to like him and BrightFarms. He joins a distinguished group of “green” marathon runners including Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy, Paul Polman of Unilever, “Speedy” Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, Tony Hansen of Fortune Brainstorm Green, Jason Graham-Nye of gDiapers, DOE solar guru Christina Nichols, ethical sourcing expert Melissa Schweisguth, Natalie Bailey of the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group and Sheryl O’Loughlin of the Nest Collective. If I’ve forgotten anyone, by all means let me know by email or in the comments.

Cooking for Solutions is a delightful annual conference, fund-raiser and celebration of seafood sustainability produced every spring by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m just back from the 2013 event, and there is reason to feel good about the progress the seafood industry is making.

Consumers, chefs and, most importantly, major retailers in the US and Europe are more aware than ever that the choices we make about what kinds of fish to eat–and not to eat–have an impact on the health and sustainability of global fisheries.

The result is that, in the last decade or so, virtually every major retailer and food service company in the US and EU has adopted a seafood sustainability policy. Some are stronger than others, but the issue is on the agenda and not going away.

“Large corporations may very well turn out to be our angels of salvation,” said Matt Elliott, an oceans expert at California Environmental Associates, which last year published a landmark report on global fishing practices.

You could say that seafood is having its Portlandia moment. I’m referring, of course, to the hilarious scene on the cable TV show in which a couple interrogate a waitress about the chicken on the menu. (“How much room did the chicken have to roam?”) Chefs who gathered last week in Monterey told me that they are asked by diners if their salmon is wild or farm-raised, and whether their shrimp is local or imported from Asia.

By themselves, consumers can’t drive changes in fishing practices. But when consumers make themselves heard, and emerge as part of a larger ecosystem that includes activist NGOs such as Greenpeace, business-friendly environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, certifying bodies like the flawed but important Marine Stewardship Council and brands like Whole Foods Market and Darden, change happens. Regulation of the oceans–a public commons if ever there was one–is important, but markets, too, can drive sustainability.

The world-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium has done as much as anyone to raise awareness about seafood choices–and it has done so relatively quickly. It was in 1999 that the aquarium launched its Seafood Watch program and began distributing wallet-sized cards that rate seafood items as green (“Best Choices”), yellow (“Good Alternatives”) and red (“Avoid”).  Since then, the aquarium has distributed more than 40 million pocket guides; its smartphone app has been downloaded nearly a million times.

Seafood Watch is an unavoidably blunt instrument. It rates species, not individual fisheries or fish farms, of which there are thousands. It can also be confusing. Consumers who pay close attention know to avoid Chilean Sea Bass. [An aquarium campaign called “Take a Pass on Sea Bass” surely helped.] But shrimp, salmon and tuna are all rated as “best,” “good” and “avoid,” depending on how and where they are caught or farmed. It’s asking a lot of even caring consumers to have them consult a pocket guide or smartphone each time they visit a supermarket or dine out.

So Seafood Watch has evolved, to engage with chefs and companies. “We started as a consumer awareness movement, and we have been forced–and it’s been a ‘good’ forced–to shift,” said Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly, the director of Seafood Watch. Big companies employ people who do nothing but buy seafood, and a lot of it, and they can influence fisheries management. In the late 2000s, the big food service companies Compass and Aramark and giant retailer Walmart all adopted seafood purchasing policies in which they promise to favor sustainable practices.

Greenpeace, which has been rating the retailers since 2008, reports progress. The “US seafood retail industry has improved significantly” since then, Greenpeace says. Last year, for the first time ever, Greenpeace gave two companies–Safeway and Whole Foods Markets–a “good” rating, citing their “progressive policy development, public support for conservation measures, and elimination of unsustainable seafood inventory items.”

A thorough foundation-funded fisheries report, called Charting a Course to Sustainable Fisheries, had this to say about the “market transformation” strategy:

Over the last 15 years, the power of the market has served as a catalyst for certain fishery reforms. We now have the ability to define and certify sustainable seafood, educate consumers, engage businesses, and channel that interest toward fishery reform. Soon, a critical mass of engagement will be reached, with major markets making sustainability a condition of entry. We anticipate that Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification of wild seafood is likely to grow to 15-20% of global fisheries, temporarily reaching a plateau at that level.

To be sure, as CEA’s Matt Elliott pointed out in Monterey, most of the world’s wild fisheries remain in a precarious state. Some corporate policies are weak; others are taking effect gradually. Most important, the strategy of using “progressive consumerism” to drive change has yet to take hold in the developing world where seafood consumption is growing rapidly.

“To what extent can we influence the future trajectory in China?”  Elliott asked. “Right now there are dozens of organizations trying to figure out whether there is a path forward.”

The encouraging news, though, is that when it comes to managing the world’s seafood supply, we know what works. Good science, consumer activism, corporate responsibility and smart regulation can help prevent overfishing and allow depleted stocks to recover. Best of all, over time, sustainable practices will deliver more and not less fish to our plates.

Solar panels on the roof of the Wildwoods Convention Center

I’ve never been to Wildwood, New Jersey. Most likely, I’ll never go. But with a click or two on my laptop, I just invested $100 in a 487 kw solar project on the roof of the Wildwoods Convention Center in Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, thanks to Mosaic.

Like Kickstarter, which enables ordinary people to support a variety of projects that grab their attention, Mosaic is an Internet crowdfunding platform.  But Mosaic for now focuses exclusively on solar energy and, unlike Kickstarter, it promises its investors a return–in my case, a 4.5 percent annual yield over the next 110 months.  That’s a lot better than 10-year US Treasury bonds that currently return just 1.66 percent a year, and a whole lot better than my money market fund at Vanguard which current returns 0.01 percent. [Of course, investing in solar is also more risky than buying a money market fund--see the addendum below.]

What’s more, I get to support solar power–which won’t work on the roof of my own home in Bethesda, Md., because it is surrounded by tall trees.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Mosaic since last September when I met one of its founders, Billy Parish, in Washington, D.C.  Billy subsequently came to Fortune Brainstorm Green this month, and we caught up the other day by phone. Since Mosaic began offering solar investments to a broad public in January, the company has raised about $2.1 million from about 1,500 investors. That’s impressive.

“The idea is that people should be able to invest in, and own clean energy,” Billy told me. “We need trillions of dollars in the coming decades to invest in clean energy. We just substitute the crowd for the bank.”

Think about it–Mosaic is financing distributed energy, using distributed funders, collected over the Internet, the ultimate distributed platform. This is decentralized power at its best.

Billy Parish

Billy, who is 32, dropped out of Yale about 10 years ago after spending a summer in India, and visiting a glacier in the Himalayas which feeds the Ganges River.

“I was already thinking about climate and energy, and it all came together,” he said. “Here I was on the other side of the world seeing that the source of fresh water for billions of people was at risk. It was, hey, we are all connected. This is the challenge of our generation.”

He joined the Energy Action Coalition, a student organization, and worked on organizing young people through most of the 2000s until turning his attention to the solar business. Based in Oakland, CA, Mosaic was started by a group of young activists, and currently has about 15 full-time employees, including, importantly, Greg Rosen, a former vice president of solar finance at Union Bank who is the firm’s chief investment officer. He vets all the projects that get financing from Mosaic.

For lenders, the process is simple. Investors can browse solar projects on the Mosaic website and, after registering with the company, put a minimum of $25 into a project. (The biggest investment so far has been $250,000, Billy told me.) The solar projects makes money by selling electricity, typically through long-term guaranteed contracts. Investors are paid back with interest each month. As the website notes, Mosaic investments are “not guaranteed or insured by any governmental agency or any third party, and investors could lose some or all of their investment.”

Most of the solar projects on the site today are fully funded, but more are on the way. “We’re feeling really good about the pipeline of projects that we’ll be bringing onto the platform,” Billy said.

Because of SEC rules, Mosaic is currently available only to accredited investors, who meet minimum standards of income and assets, in most of the US. In California and New York, the company can make its investments available to anyone. So far, Mosaic has investors in 42 states, ranging in age from 18 to 95.

Mosaic itself got started with government help–a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy “Sunshot” initiative, aimed at getting the cost of solar below $0.06 per kilowatt-hour by 2020. (Mosaic helps accomplish that by lowering financing costs.) The company has also raised about $6 million in venture funding, with Spring Ventures as the lead investor.

This week, Mosaic will roll out a social media campaign to spread the word about its work. Here’s a cool graphic about the Wildwoods project:

An addendum: A reader has pointed out to me that this column could be read as promoting an investment in Mosaic’s projects. I’m hoping Mosaic is successful, and I believe that it has excellent prospects. But I’m not an investment advisor. If you are considering investing in one of Mosaic’s projects, please read all the materials carefully, including the prospectus, which includes cautionary language like this:

THESE ARE SPECULATIVE SECURITIES. INVESTMENT IN THE NOTES INVOLVES SIGNIFICANT RISK. YOU SHOULD PURCHASE THESE SECURITIES ONLY IF YOU CAN AFFORD A COMPLETE LOSS OF YOUR INVESTMENT

Put simply, Mosaic has to pay higher interest rates than treasuries because it’s riskier.

Jerry Brown, being sworn in as California governor in 1975

Mostly it’s about how Brown cleaned up California’s fiscal mess. I was struck by the fact that, unlike most members of Congress, and our president, who generally tell people what they want to hear, Brown is a grownup who isn’t afraid to say what he thinks. Maybe that’s what happens when you turn 75 and you have been in politics forever. You get tired of pandering. Brown was first elected governor of California in 1975, for crying out loud.

Anyway, here’s my favorite passage:

Brown believes California has been led for too long by “I want.” His office at the Capitol is empty except for two photographs, some books, a couch, a coffee table, and a thick wooden table with a monastic bench. Many of his staff offices are empty, too, since he has barely any staff; the governor doesn’t employ a chief of staff or speechwriter.

This is a man who remembers World War II ration cards with fondness. “This idea you can have ice cream every night? Ice cream was for your birthday,” he says about his childhood. “It wasn’t an austere world. In fact, it was a normal world. It’s only austere juxtaposing the indulgence, the overconsumption, the profligacy—people don’t like those words because part of our economic growth is buying all this stuff.” Brown, who took a vow of poverty and chastity and lived in near-total silence while studying for the priesthood in the late 1950s, cites the Jesuit philosophy of tantum quantum: take what you need.

The best line: “Ice cream was for your birthday.” We need more leaders like Jerry Brown. The rest is here.

Alisha Staggs of EDF

Last month, I wrote three blogposts adding up to more than 2,000 words about Walmart’s supplier sustainability index. I did so because I think it’s a big deal, but skeptics remain. Some people simply can’t accept the fact that Walmart can do anything that’s good for its people or the planet.

In a guest post, Alisha Staggs of the Environmental Defense Fund reacts to my blogposts and argues that the Walmart index will, in fact, have a meaningful impact. Alisha works for EDF in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is based. She works on the supplier index and with The Sustainability Consortium, a broader coalition of retailers, brands and NGOs that is developing ways to identify and measure the most important environmental and social impacts of consumer products. Alisha is trained as a biologist and has an MBA from the University of Arkansas.

Here’s what Alisha has to say, and I’ll offer a concluding comment or two below.

In Marc Gunther’s recent article “Walmart’s index: a real life toy story,” he calls the Walmart supplier Sustainability Index, “the biggest environmental initiative in the company’s history,” and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) agrees. He also questions whether “Walmart is taking this too far”” and “how the world’s largest retailer is exercising its market power.”

With a 25-year track record challenging companies to make decisions that are good for the environment and the economy, we at EDF are used to asking these types of tough questions.

That’s precisely why we have an EDF office based in Bentonville dedicated solely to working together with Walmart to advance sustainability. Because we don’t take money from the company, we can push hard to achieve the kinds of transformational change of which it is capable.

When it comes to the Sustainability Index, we’re on board. And here’s why:

With over 100,000 suppliers, Walmart has the ability to use the Sustainability Index to move entire industries to go beyond what is required by law, benefiting consumers, workers and the planet.

The recent launch of the Index marks a highly anticipated milestone three years in the making for Walmart. Put it this way, if Walmart’s sustainability journey were a bestselling trilogy, we’d be starting the second book. In the first book, the goals were set, the groundwork built, some smaller battles were won and lost. ..but now we’re getting to the real action.  As the environmental advocate in the room, this is a book I don’t want to put down.

If you missed the first book (where were you?), Gunther gives a nice recap here.

For the first time, environmental outcomes truly worthy of Walmart’s scale seem achievable: Major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Improved efficiency across supply chains and sectors. Improvements in water quality and human health. The list goes on.

Beginning this year, Walmart will use The Sustainability Index to influence the design of its U.S. private brand products and will require its buyers to set specific sustainability objectives that will be tied to their annual reviews. For example, Gunther zooms in on Walmart’s senior buyer for baking commodities, Tim Robinson, in another recent story to show how this is happening in real time. Of course, Robinson’s story is one of many.

By the end of 2017, Walmart will buy 70 percent of the goods it sells in U.S. stores and U.S. Sam’s Clubs from suppliers who use The Sustainability Index to evaluate and share the sustainability of products.

And while we see the Index moving in the right direction, EDF continues to ask the tough questions. How do we keep the momentum going across hundreds of buyers and thousands of suppliers?  How do we avoid unintended consequences?  How do we track and measure the true impact of progress on the ground? What is the full potential of the Index?  Is incremental change enough to get us where we need to be by when we need to be there?

These are the questions to be answered in the second part of this sustainability story, and I have my fingers crossed for something truly epic.

–

Just a couple of thoughts on this. First, just as a point of clarification, although EDF does not take corporate donations from Walmart, Environmental Defense is a grantee of the Walton Family Foundation, getting about $13.7 million in 2011, according to this accounting. Sam Rawlings Walton, the grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, sits on EDF’s board of trustees.

Second, while the index could lead to “major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” among Walmart suppliers, as Alisha writes, it should be noted that Walmart’s own GHG emissions are rising in absolute terms as the company adds new stores. See the chart here. Walmart says it has reduced GHG emissions by 20% since 2005, but that figure (which is impressive) refers to the stores, clubs and distribution centers that were opened in 2005, and excludes new facilities. So Walmart is struggling, as most companies do, to figure out how to grow its business and simultaneously reduce its impact.

That said, I’ve spent enough time with people at Walmart and talked to those who do business with the company to be convinced that the company is serious about sustainability, and that this supplier index is going to have ripple effects throughout the consumer products sector. EDF’s efforts to hold Walmart accountable can only help in that regard.

I believe in environmental protection.

I believe in limited government.

Can those beliefs be reconciled?

I believe they can, even though environmental problems are often seen, correctly, as a form of market failure. We can’t allow businesses or individuals to pollute public goods such as rivers, or the air, or the earth’s atmosphere. The question is, how do we best correct those failures?

My preference is for strong and simple regulation or taxation, designed to (1) recognize the power of competitive markets to generate wealth and aggregate information to devise the best solutions to problems and (2) minimize, as much as possible, the ability of powerful interests to game the system, i.e., crony capitalism.

These are, obviously, complicated questions, perhaps best left to environmental economists. But I took a crack at the issue of clean energy policy in a column just published by Ensia, a lively, online environmental magazine published by the by the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

The column ran under the headline A Market-Friendly Approach to Energy. Here’s how it begins:

The world needs clean energy. Clean energy subsidies? Maybe not.

Consider the Fisker Karma, an electric car with a base price of $95,900.  A friend of mine bought one. He earned $7 million last year, and took advantage of a $7,500 U.S. federal tax credit available to buyers of electric cars.

Fisker itself got government help, too, in the form of $192 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. So did A123 Systems, which sold battery packs to Fisker; it got $129 million in energy department grants and another $125 million in tax credits and grants from the state of Michigan.

None of this helped Fisher, A123 or, more importantly, the planet.

The column goes on to argue against the vast array of subsidies to clean energy and fossil fuels favored today by the federal government and many states, and instead proposes a carbon tax. (Ideally, a revenue-neutral carbon tax.) A carbon tax would discourage dirty energy and promote  clean energy, without favoring solar or wind or biofuels or nuclear or electric cars.

The column concludes:

…Contrary to popular wisdom, we don’t need a comprehensive national energy policy any more than we need a comprehensive food strategy to stock supermarket shelves or a comprehensive laptop strategy to keep Apple or Dell in business. What markets do very well is separate winners from losers. As the economist Michael Giberson put it: “When values are diverse and knowledge is dispersed, letting a thousand energy strategies bloom really is the best approach.” To do that, we have to get the government out of the way.

You can read the rest here. While you’re at it, take a look at the excellent journalism being published by Ensia.

General Motors’ Dan Akerson at Brainstorm Green

Dan Akerson, the chief of executive of General Motors, loves the Chevy Volt. Bea Perez of Coca-Cola is backing inventor Dean Kamen, who wants to take a water-purification machine to the global south. David Crane, the chief executive of NRG Energy, would like to see solar panels on half the rooftops in America.

They all spoke at Fortune Brainstorm Green, the magazine’s conference about business and the environment conference, last week in Laguna Niguel, CA. I’ve been co-chair of Brainstorm Green since its launch in 2008, and, as I wrote the other day, I’ve felt uncomfortable at times when the tone of the event becomes too celebratory, given the scale of the environmental problems we face. Having said that, today I want to showcase a few business executives who are emerging as sustainability leaders.

One is Dan Akerson of GM, the stodgiest and most bureaucratic of the US automakers. A newcomer to Detroit–he is a Naval Academy graduate who made a fortune in private equity at Carlyle, before taking over at GM in 2010–Akerson that his predecessors had been “part of the problem, rather than the solution” when they stood in the way of  regulators who wanted to raise fuel-efficiency standards for cars, and he said the auto industry had been slow to recognize the threat of climate change. Hours after he spoke at Brainstorm Green, GM became the biggest company and the first automaker to endorse the climate declaration from CERES and its BICEP (Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy) coalition.

At our conference, Akerson delivered a spirited defense of the plug-in electric Volt, which has racked up disappointing sales, largely because it is expensive–about $39,000 before a $7500 federal tax credit. Even so, he said:  “We’re losing money on every one of them.” GM hopes to remedy that with the next generation Volt which, he said, should cost $7000 to $10000 less and become profitable. A nifty trick if GM can pull it off.

The good news is that Volt owners, Akerson among them, love the car. He said:

…It’s been incredibly well received.  To give you an idea, in a Consumer Report two years running in a row, you know they ask for your rank at 5 for great, 4 for good, three average, down the line.  They’ve never had a car; they’ve never had a product that’s ranked 92 percent either a four or a five.  No threes, and all these tens of thousands of customers, no twos, no ones.”

Impressive.

The plain-talking Akerson had lots more to say–about cars powered by natural gas, about an upcoming Cadillac EV,  about the new energy-efficient Chevy Cruze. Here’s a transcript of his remarks.

Coca Cola’s Bea Perez and Dean Kamen

Why would Coca-Cola distribute thousands of water purification machines, known as the Slingshot, to poor countries in Africa and Latin America? Bea Perez, the chief sustainability officer of Coca-Cola, put it simply: “Water is the single most important issue that we face around the world.”

Coca-Cola wants to grow, the growth will come in the developing world, and, as Bea explained, the company has to

make sure that before we even open up a new operation that we’re mindful of what’s happening in that community and that we’re putting in the water infrastructure, helping to replenish those communities, and bring them access to fresh, clean drinking water first.  Then, down the road we can have a viable business.

Kamen, best know for inventing the Segway, has worked for more than a decade on the Slingshot. (The name derives from the Biblical legend of David and Goliath, in whichDavid felled Goliath with a slingshot. Water-borne diseases are the Goliath. I’m not sure whether Kamen or Coca-Cola are David.) The machine can produce roughly 30 liters of water an hour using no more energy than that required by hair dryer, Kamen explained, and he brought it to Coca-Cola because, as he put it,

They’re not really a soft drink company.  That’s their sideline.  They are the world’s largest logistics footprint.  They bottle their product in 206 countries…If there’s one product you can buy anywhere it’s a Coke.

I mean 50 percent of all the hospital beds in the world have people in them, because of bad water.  So, Coke, you could become the world’s largest healthcare provider, just help me get these machines out.

Perez and Coke’s CEO, Muhtar Kent, agreed to give it a try. They tested the machines in Ghana, made some fixes, and now have committed to roll them out on what sounds like a modest scale, at least for now–to Mexico, Paraguay and South Africa. Working with the Inter-American Development Bank and Africare, Coca-Cola and Kamen hope to scale the project up, but details remain sketchy.

By the way, Bea and Dean Kamen were joined on stage by will.i.am, who’s got a very cool and ambitious recycling project called Ekocycle underway with Coca Cola. Will.i.am is the founding member of the Black Eyed Peas, and auteur of the uplifting Obama campaign video Yes We Can (which feels so last century, but maybe that’s just me.)

Will.i.am at Brainstorm Green

It’s hard for a utility-company executive to get much attention at conference alongside the likes to will.i.am, Harrison Ford and the CEOs of GM and P&G, but there was a lot of talk at Brainstorm Green about David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy, largely because David always seems to be brimming with ideas.

In the courtyard of the Ritz Carlton, where the conference was held, NRG displayed its latest creation, a solar canopy, which is essentially a gazebo with solar panels on top. The company plans to sell the canopies to homeowners for their patios or pools and to businesses like supermarkets or restaurants that want to provide shade to their customers and electricity to themselves. ”This is to get people thinking about the fact that there are options beyond rooftop solar,” Crane told Fortune’s Brian O’Keefe.

David Crane of NRG Energy

David told me about an early-stage project that NRG is working on with Dean Kamen (yes, he’s a busy guy) who has developed a portable Stirling engine that can turn a variety of fuels, including natural gas, into electricity. NRG hopes to deploy about 200 of these engines–they are quiet and don’t emit greenhouse gases–in homes, combining them  with rooftop solar, to see if they can provide a source of clean, reliable and affordable power independent of the electricity grid.

On a lively panel about energy with ex-DOE honcho Andy Karsner, Shell’s Marvin Odom and David Hawkins of NRDC, Crane made a forceful pitch for solar energy, saying studies show that it makes economic sense to put solar on the roofs of 50 million American homes. The costs of solar modules have dropped by nearly 90% in the last five years, he said, and although NRG owns some utility-scale solar plants, the big opportunity for solar is in distributed energy.

Meanwhile, Crane’s NRG has worked out a deal with Nest, Tony Fadell’s company that makes “learning thermostats,” to market the devices to its customers, and offer them rebates. Fadell’s talk about Nest was another highlight of Brainstorm Green.

Lastly, I want to say a quick word about Mountain Hazelnuts, a company that exemplifies the potential of business to deliver social and environmental value, and to make money for its owners. Mountain Hazelnuts is on its way to planting 10 million hazelnut trees in the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, employing hundreds of Bhutanese in its processing facilities and providing a livelihood to as many as 15,000 farmers–a significant number in a country of about 800,000 people. Mountain Hazelnuts is the creation of an entrepreneur named Daniel Spitzer and his wife, Teresa Law; they were voted the best “Great Green Idea” at Brainstorm in 2012, and came back last week to update us on their progress. I hope to tell their story in more depth, before long.

Harrison Ford at Fortune Brainstorm Green

The 2013 edition of Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference was, by most accounts, a hit. We had a record number of attendees, including more than 50 CEOs of companies and nonprofits, big and small; plenty of entertaining and informative conversation; and a healthy dose of fun, with celebs like Harrison Ford, will.i.am and (my favorite) ultra marathon runner Scott Jurek. As co-chair of the event since the first Brainstorm Green in 2008, I love to reconnect with colleagues and sources, meet new folks and learn from and, occasionally, by inspired by our top-notch speakers. The theme of the conference has been a constant: How can business profitably help solve the world’s most important environmental problems?

Unavoidably, the challenge of an event like Brainstorm Green (as well as a conundrum for anyone who writes about corporate sustainability) turns on the question of how much to cheer or jeer the efforts of companies that are trying to “go green.” My job, as I see it, is to do both–to applaud the leaders, to prod the laggards, and to do my best to tell one from the other. That’s difficult balance to do in a conference setting where the mood is one of bonhomie, where the speakers are our “guests,” and where the presumption is that everyone is doing the best they can. The trouble is, that’s usually not good enough.

Mark Tercek at Brainstorm Green

As Mark Tercek, the CEO of The Nature Conservancy, who I interviewed at Brainstorm Green, put it in his excellent new book, Nature’s Fortune:

Nearly every precious bit of nature–teeming coral reefs, sweeping grasslands, lush forests, the rich diversity of life istelf–is in decline. Everything humanity should reduce–suburban sprawl, deforestation, overfishing, carbon emissions–has increased.

Sad but true.

So if corporate America is changing for the better when it comes to the environment–and no doubt, many companies are–the pace of change is too slow and the ambitions of business leaders are too modest. Incremental change is not getting us where we need to go.

Eco-efficiency, recycling when it makes economic sense (but not when it doesn’t), the occasional solar panel on a retailer’s roof (but a continued dependence on fossil fuels), modest targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions  – they’re not getting us where we need to go.

Why not? What struck me at Brainstorm Green is that companies aren’t getting much help. They’re not getting help from the US  government, which, above all, needs to take action to curb carbon emissions, and they’re not getting help from consumers, who, for the most part, are unwilling to pay extra for “green” products or services, or to reward the more responsible companies with their business.

Under those circumstances, it’s probably naive to expect any but  a handful of most forward-thinking companies to demonstrate environmental leadership. Which is why only a handful or two of companies are truly pushing the envelope — Patagonia, Unilever, Nike, Coca-Cola on water, Starbucks, Google on energy and climate, Walmart with its supplier index, and a handful of others, all of whom were represented at Brainstorm Green. Others are going only so far as they have to go.

Tom Steyer

“Counting on the good will of private enterprise, which I have tremendous respect for, will not work,” said Tom Steyer, the investor, environmentalist and philanthropist, during a panel on Wall Street and sustainability.

So, for example, while banks are willing to seek out opportunities in clean energy–financing solar power or energy efficiency projects–they will not  turn away from money-making deals to finance coal plants or oil exploration in Canada’s Tar Sands. And why should they, so long as coal and oil companies and their customers, i.e., you and me, can freely emit all the carbon pollution they want into the atmosphere.

As Amanda Starbuck of the Rainforest Action Network told me by email, after joining in a breakout session titled “Are Big Banks Green, or Brown or Both”:

I think we concluded at breakfast this morning that big banks are significantly brown, only a very little green, and that the current generation of CSOs (chief sustainability officers) have a serious challenge on their hands to fundamentally shift the banking industry from short term thinking to long term investment, if we’re to rise to tackle environmental threats on the scale of climate change. RAN will continue to push!

That’s good, but until the reputational costs of financing coal exceed the benefits–an unlikely prospect–we can’t expect banks to turn away from coal. It will take either strict EPA rules or a steep price on carbon or even cheaper natural gas to get rid of coal plants in the US.

Bob McDonald of P&G

Meantime, well-established public companies  have few incentives to turn away from business as usual so long as business as usual delivers shareholder returns. Bob McDonald, the CEO of Procter & Gamble, delivered what amounted to a corporate commercial–yes, we all know by now that Tide Cold Water has big energy-saving potential. The fact is, the most disruptive innovations in laundry detergent in recent years have come from Method, a startup, and rival Unilever runs circles around P&G when it comes to sustainability.

As Method founder Adam Lowry noted, Method was the first company to concentrate its detergent into smaller bottles (ahead of Small & Might All, then owned by Unilever) and it now offers the most ultra-concentrated detergent on the market. Method also makes some bottles for its dish and hand soap out of ocean trash. Of course, until a whole lot more mainstream consumers embrace Method, its cleaner, greener products won’t have the impact they should.

Linda Greer of NRDC

The most sobering presentation of the conference came from Linda Greer, the plain-spoken director of the health and environment program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who described manufacturing in China as an “environmental apocalypse” and said western multinationals have ignored “egregious pollution problems” there. They may report on greenhouse gas emissions but they ignore the horrors of air and water pollution to which they contribute. Greer did not name names, alas, but we’ll invite her back next year to learn more about who’s doing a good job of dealing with conventional pollutants and health risks in China, and who’s not.

Now, all the news at Brainstorm Green was not bad–not by a long shot. Indeed, there were presentations and conversations that were encouraging and, yes, inspiring. I was impressed by GM’s CEO, Dan Akerson. David Crane of NRG remains the most creative utility executive around. I learned about some great green startups, and about an innovative partnership between Coke and inventor Dean Kamen. And  I loved hearing the story of a small company called Mountain Hazelnuts that is having a big impact in Bhutan. So I promise more cheers (and no jeers) in my next blogpost, in a day or two.

According to the Animal Welfare Institute:

More than 95% of the approximately 280 million egg-laying hens in the United States are confined to barren battery cages where they are crowded and deprived of the ability to perform natural behaviors such as exploring, nesting, perching, dust bathing, or simply stretching their wings. Birds endure painful beak trimming, stand on wire floors that cripple their legs, breathe toxic air, and live their entire lives under unnatural, dim lighting.

A chicken lives its life on a footprint no bigger than an iPad. Imagine living the rest of your life just where you are sitting right now, crowded on every side by other humans, unable to move. You’d go insane, as Bruce Friedrich of Farm Sanctuary argues in this excellent essay. He calls eggs from caged hens “the cruelest of all factory farm products.”

If you’re indifferent to the suffering of animals, consider that factory-farmed chickens have a big environmental footprint, albeit not as big as beef or pork. I couldn’t find any peer-reviewed life cycle analyses of eggs but, according to Slate, egg-laying hens are fed lots of grain, they’re pumped with antibiotics and they generate a lot of waste.

(And, if you want to get really grossed-out, read this long story that the Washington Post published just last week about the use of toxic chemicals to kill bacteria in plants that process chickens for meat.)

Josh Tetrick

Josh Tetrick, the CEO and founder of Hampton Creek Foods, is convinced that there’s a better way. He wants to take America Beyond Eggs.

Beyond Eggs, according to Josh, is a healthier, safer, environmentally-friendly, plant-based ingredient for egg-based food products. And unlike the pricey, all natural, organic, free range eggs on sale at Whole Foods, Hampton Creek’s egg substitutes cost less than most of the eggs on the supermarket shelf.

“We’re about 18 percent less expensive than cheap, battery cage eggs,” Josh told me, when we spoke last week.

There’s just one catch. You can’t fry or scramble them–not yet anyway.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not a big market for  Beyond Eggs. Of the 79 billion (!) eggs that are laid every year, about 31% are used as ingredients in other products, according to Josh. He’s 33-year-old entrepreneur, a Fulbright Scholar and a former college football player who worked in South Africa, Nigeria and Liberia before focusing on the food system, and how to improve it.

Like Josh, I’m fascinated by food, agriculture and the environment and, in particular, the future of protein–how are we going to sustainably produce the meat, fish or vegetable proteins that people need? It’s a wide-open question with a variety of answers that are likely to include holistic ranch practices, better-managed wild fisheries, well-regulated aquaculture, people adopting vegetarian or vegan diets, and innovative products like Beyond Eggs and Beyond Meat (which I’ve been enjoying at home and will write about soon). We’ll be discussing the future of protein at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference this week with, among others, Josh Tetrick, Clarence Otis, who is CEO of Darden, the nation’s biggest restaurant chain, Ethan Brown of Beyond Meat and Jim Howell, the chief executive of Grasslands LLC. Recently, Bill Gates put together a presentation mentioning Beyond Meat and Beyond Eggs in which he explains “how food scientists are reinventing meat–and how it can benefit everyone.”

It’s not just Gates who sees opportunities to reinvent the food business. San Francisco-based Hampton Creek is being financed by the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, which has invested about $3 million in the startup. Beyond Meat has backing from Kleiner Perkins. Venture investors evidently believe there is money to be made in disrupting the conventional food and agriculture business.

Certainly Josh feels that way about raising egg-laying hens in cages. “Is this, like, 1910?” he asks. “You put nine to 10 chickens in a cage that’s so small, and they are fed lots of corn and soy. It’s so inefficient….It’s a huge, broken, absurd system that really needs innovation.”

The challenge, of course, is coming up with an egg replacement that’s healthier, greener, cheaper and provides all of the “functional characteristics that can replicate or surpass the eggs,” Josh said. Food scientists at Hampton Creek, which employs about 20 people and is less than two years old, have come a long way.

Their first couple of products will be ready for release in the next couple of months. One is Beyond Eggs, a shelf-stable powder which, when mixed with water, can be substituted for eggs in baking and other recipes. The second is Just Mayo, a mayonnaise made with its plant-based eggs. They’ll sell them to consumers through retail outlets–none have been announced as yet–and also as industrial ingredients to food manufacturers.

“Our biggest collaboration is with a Fortune 200 company,” Josh said, but the firm isn’t ready to be named yet.

The harder problem to, er, crack is developing a substitute for scrambled eggs, or eggs that wind up in an omelet or quiche. Right now, Hampton Creek can whip up a presentable batch of scrambled eggs but only if they are eaten right away; soon after coming out of the pan, the plant-based eggs collapse. “We’re still working on that,” Josh says.

The Faraday Porteur e-bicycle

As a way to get from here to there, bicycles have a lot to offer. Biking is good for your health. It’s good for the planet. It’s cheaper than driving or public transit. Getting people out of cars and onto bikes eases traffic congestion, too.

But, for a host of reasons, not everyone can bike for transportation. Electric bicycles will expand the number of people who can — by making cycling easier, a bit quicker and less sweaty (which matters if you are commuting to work.)

Outside of the US, electric bicycles are doing really well–much better than electric cars, it turns out. Can they make it America? That’s the topic of my story which has just been published on the excellent YaleEnviromment360 website.

Here’s how it begins:

Most Americans know about Tesla, the Chevy Volt, and the Nissan Leaf. But what about Evelo, the eZip Trailz, and the Faraday Porteur?

The first three are, of course, electric cars. They benefit from a lot of media attention and generous government subsidies, including a $7,500 tax credit for buyers in the United States. The latter are electric bicycles, and they attract neither.

Yet Americans bought as many electric bicycles as they did electric cars last year. About 53,000 electric bicycles were sold, according to Dave Hurst, an analyst with Navigant Research who tracks the industry. Electric car sales came in at 52,835.

Globally, electric bicycles outsell electric cars by a wide margin. An estimated 29.3 million e-bicycles were sold in 2012, with perhaps 90 percent of those selling in China, which has more electric bikes than cars on its roads. E-bicycles are popular in Europe, too, selling about 380,000 a year in Germany and 175,000 in the Netherlands in 2012. By comparison, about 120,000 electric caris were sold worldwide.

You can read the rest of the story here.

I hope electric bicycles find a market here. They should appeal to  young people in bike-friendly cities and to aging baby boomers (like me!) I tested an e-bike from Evelo last week (here’s my account), and I’m hoping to check out some other models soon.