I was headed out for a run one morning in April during FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference in Laguna Niguel, CA, when I spotted Theodore Roosevelt IV jogging on the beach. Having a good run? I asked him. Yes, he told me, and he’d been swimming, too, in the big waves that crash onto the beach and draw hordes of surfers every day.

Legacy matters, I guess. Ted Roosevelt, as he’s known, is the great-grandson of our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, who was famous for his love of what he called “the strenuous life“—he boxed, rode horses, fought in the Spanish-American war, went big-game hunting and explored the Amazon. Ted Roosevelt, who is 68, played football at Groton, played ice hockey and rugby and rowed on the lightweight crew at Harvard; after graduation, he served two tours of duty as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam.

Like TR, Ted is a Republican, a conservationist and an independent thinker–which makes him part of a dying breed of moderate WASPy Republicans who are fiscally conservative and socially progressive.

Ted argues that environmental protection is good for America’s economic growth and strength. He describes climate change is “this century’s greatest challenge.” He believes that nature is worth preserving, not just because of its usefulness to humans but for its own sake.

Not surprisingly, he has been critical of Republicans on the score of the environment for many years.

Unexpectedly, he faults environmentalists for being insufficiently concerned with the economic insecurity of middle-class and working-class Americans and the vitality of rural communities.

So what’s to be done? Can conservatives be persuaded to once again embrace conservation? Can environmentalists make a commitment to social and economic justice part of their agenda?

Last week, I went to talk with Ted Roosevelt about climate change and politics, and in particularly about the prospects for a bipartisan approach to the issue. We met at Barclays Capital in New York, where he is an investment banker and chairman of the company’s Clean Tech Initiative.  He advises big and emerging companies on the economic opportunities created by a wide range of clean technologies, not just in energy, but in water, agriculture, transportation and new materials, in the U.S. and around the world. (Recently, he met with China’s premier, Hu Jintao.)  He joined Barclay’s in 2008 after it acquired some of the assets of Lehman Brothers, where he’d worked since 1972. A well-connected environmentalist, Ted is chair of the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, a member of the governing council of the Wilderness Society, a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, a board member of the World Resources Institute, and a director of the Al Gore-founded Alliance For Climate Protection.

Ted told me that he’s been concerned about climate change for about 25 years, ever since the natural history museum devoted an exhibit to the issue. “That was the first time I’d looked at it from a scientific perspective,” he said. Despite uncertainties that are unavoidable when projecting climate into the future, he says, “the science of climate change has become more ominous.”

“As a banker, I look at it as a risk management issue,” he said. “The costs of dealing with (climate change) are not immaterial today, But if you delay, you are forced to pursue strategies of adaptation and not mitigation that are going to have much higher costs.”

“A farmer may have alfalfa stored in his barn,” he said. “His barn is probably not going to be hit by lightning, but he buys fire insurance anyway.” Ignoring the risks posed by climate change is simply not prudent, he says.

Until recently, many prominent Republicans shared that view–Senators McCain and Warner and Governors Schwarzenegger, Pataki and Crist, among others. Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty made commercials urging action on climate. (Here’s Newt’s, here’s Pawlenty’s.) All have left office or changed their minds or both. Writing last fall in The National Journal, Ronald Brownstein said: “It is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here.”

This is why Ted Roosevelt is lonely. Even before the party establishment hardened its opposition to climate regulation, he bemoaned the fact that Republicans seem to regard the environment as, “at best, a peripheral concern and, at worst, as sentimental excess.” In one speech, he said:

It seems to be beyond the scope of many on the right to say, for instance, that species extinction, as a result of unrestrained human activity, is immoral and indefensible; that our refusal to seriously engage in a global effort to address climate change is unethical and imprudent.

And yet, he says, the GOP alone can’t be blamed for the failure of cap-and-trade legislation to pass Congress. Coal-state Democrats opposed the bill, in part because environmentalists didn’t pay enough to the fact that higher energy prices “would have had a pretty regressive effect on the bottom of the pyramid.” Cap-and-trade was a terribly complicated regulatory scheme, he noted, and “because it was a such a large program, people were scared of it. Distrust of government had become an issue.”

Environmentalists may have overplayed their hand, too.  “We in the environmental community probably make a mistake in always talking about the worst case,” he said. “We need to clearly recognize what the limits of our knowledge are.”

What’s needed now, he told me, is a combination of quiet conversation and incremental change. Noting that major environmental laws in the U.S. have always passed with bipartisan support, he’d like to find a way to rebuild bridges between environmentalists and Republicans.

“It’s going to have to be a slow, deliberate process. Reaching out. Learning how to listen. It probably has to be done, in the early phases, below the radar,” he said.

In terms of policy, the best approach will be ideas that are “transparent, fair and not overly ambitious.” Republicans and Democrats alike have expressed interested in providing loans for clean or low-carbon energy development, through clean energy banks at the federal or state level. “Could we have a conversation around a carbon tax, to help us deal with the budget deficit?” he asks.

Clearly none of this will be easy, but until Republicans and environmentalists can find common ground on the climate issue, there’s little chance of progress. For now, Ted Roosevelt is one of the very few who can move easily between both camps.

Bumble Bee Foods is a survivor. Founded in 1899, Bumble Bee, which is headquartered in San Diego,  owns two of the last three canned tuna factories in the U.S. (in southern California and Puerto Rico) and one of the last two canned clams plants (in Cape May, N.J.). The company went bankrupt in the late 1990s but it has emerged stronger, and it’s now North America’s largest branded shelf-stable seafood company.

But Bumble Bee’s tuna business, which accounts for more than half of its revenues of close to $1 billion, has a new worry: If the world’s fisherman can’t agree to  intelligently manage capacity, tuna stocks could well be threatened.

Chris Lischewski

“We’re at maximum sustainable yield,” says Chris Lischewski, Bumble Bee’s president and CEO.

Bumble Bee itself doesn’t own fishing boats–it’s a processor and marketer of  seafood–but its future obviously depends on a reliable supply of fish.

I met Chris a week ago at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference, where I led a panel on sustainable seafood. (Tomorrow, I’ll blog about Josh Goldman of Australis, who also spoke.) A former management consultant who has run Bumble Bee since 1999, Chris told me that he didn’t worry much about fish supplies until the mid-2000s when it became apparent to him that global efforts to regulate tuna fishing weren’t working.

In response, Bumble Bee with the World Wildlife Fund and industry rivals, including Starkist (a unit of Korean fishing conglomerate Dongwon) and Chicken of the Sea (now owned by a Thai parent), created the nonprofit International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) in 2009. Chris now chairs its board, and he has had to become an expert in fisheries management.

He told me that responsible operators in the seafood industry and mainstream environmentalists share a common goal, for the most part: They want to preserve the world’s wild fish. That doesn’t mean they always agree, of course. Greenpeace Canada, for example, spanked Clover Leaf, a unit of Bumble Bee, in its recent seafood rankings. Chris says that’s partly because Clover Leaf didn’t respond to a Greenpeace questionnaire.

His bigger concern is that tuna fishery regulation is ineffective. Partly that’s because tuna are tough to regulate: They never stop moving, they are widely but sparsely distributed around the world and they can travel thousands of miles, onto the high seas, beyond the reach of any nation. Tuna fishing is regulated by regional fisheries management organizations, or RFMOs, made up of many countries (19 in one central Pacific group), some of which control fishing grounds, others that own the boats. Policing the high seas is a big challenge, Chris told me. “There’s absolutely nothing that stops new boats from coming in,” he said.

As a result, with no effective catch limits and major improvements in fishing technology, the numbers of tuna being drawn from the sea has skyrocketed in recent decades. An ISSF report on the status of the world fisheries for tuna says:

Between 1940 and the mid-1960s, the annual world catch of the four principal species of tunas that are processed for the stable shelf-life market (skipjack, yellowfin, bigeye and albacore) rose from about 300,000 tonnes1 to about 1 million tonnes, most of it taken by hook and line. With the development of purse-seine nets, now the predominant gear, catches have risen to more than 4.3 million tonnes annually during the last few years.

The Marvelettes were perhaps right, way back in 1964, that there were  Too Many Fish in the Sea. No more.

The ISSF, according to Chris, would like to get the world’s countries to agree to “control and limit the number of vessels” fishing for tuna.  Its member companies process about 70% of global tuna production, so they have clout. Retailers, for example, could be encourage to buy only from ISSF companies; Walmart Canada has already agreed to do so. If it works, this will be an example of big companies doing what government cannot.

Chris Lischewski, with a 38 lb king salmon that didn't end up in a can

I asked Chris how Bumble Bee will grow its revenues and profits if tuna catch is going to be limited.  He said there’s a possibility of expanding the supply of fish through aquaculture, and that Bumble Bee can acquire more of the tuna supply if it can persuade its customers to pay more for canned tuna.

“My big challenge is that Americans think tuna is cheap protein,” he said. Ten five-ounce cans of Bumble Bee chunk light sell for $15.45 at Amazon, less in some supermarkets. “It’s too cheap,” he said.

To persuade shoppers to pay more, the tuna industry has launched an ad campaign called Tuna the Wonderfish that touts the health benefits of tuna (lots of Omega 3′s) and offers free recipes for tuna burgers and tuna fajitas. Here’s one of their clever TV ads:

These ads  focus on tuna’s benefits, not its price. It’s all but certain that customers will have to pay more for tuna in the future–demand will continue to grow, driven by health and wellness concerns, and supplies will be limited, if Lischewski and the other processors get their way.

If they don’t, supplies could one day become very limited, and that would be a tragedy.

Who says environmentalists are all gloom and doom? In terms of sheer fun, the 2011 edition of Brainstorm Green, FORTUNE’s conference about business and the environment, topped them all.

Chuck Leavell at Brainstorm Green

Along with  earnest talk about climate policy, nuclear power, investing in green and electric cars, there were early morning surfing lessons from Laird Hamilton, spectacular images from National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, fabulous sustainable food from star chefs (including Rick Moonen of rmSeafood and Michel Nischan of Wholesome Wave) and even dancing to the music of a band put together by Chuck Leavell, the keyboardist for the Rolling Stones, tree farmer extraordinaire, author of a new book (Growing a Better America) and all-around good guy.

What we all learned can’t be condensed into one blog post, but here are a few of my notes and quotes from our jam-packed 48 hours in Laguna Beach:

The future of coal: Lively debate here, with Michael Morris, the straight-talking CEO of coal-burning utility American Electric Power saying that without new government policy, coal will continue to be burned in massive quantities, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

“China, India, Indonesia, Australia, Russia, they’re all building coal plants. And they will continue to build coal plants,” Morris said.

As for the long-planned efforts to capture and store CO2 from coal plants to make them cleaner, much of it funded with your tax dollars, Morris said: “The capture works. The storage works. But it’s not inexpensive.” So absent a price on carbon emissions, why would anyone do it, he was asked. “They won’t,” he replied.

Alan Salzman, ceo of Vantage Point  Venture Partners, took a more optimistic view. His firm invested in Brightsource Energy, which is building a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert.

“It’s as big as any power plant, coal, nuclear or anything else,” he said.

The cost of renewable energy will drop faster than most people think, Salzman said: “People tend to look backward and take a static view.” Plasma TVs cost $12,000 not long ago, he noted, and now they are on sale at Costco.

Meanwhile, opposition to coal plants will only grow.

“Coal,” Salzman declared, sounding like the Sierra club’s Mike Brune, “is the new tobacco.”

Walmart’s culture change: Walmart’s ambitious sustainability efforts have paid off in many ways, some unexpected, said Leslie Dach, the company’s executive vp.  They’ve helped the company save lots of money. They’ve driven sales of environmentally-preferable products, like CFL bulbs. They’ve dramatically improved Walmart’s reputation, making it easier for the company to enter new markets and attract employees.

Leslie Dach

Maybe most important, though, is the fact that the sustainability work has changed the way Walmart thinks about itself.  “It’s really been transformative inside in helping us take a broader look at our role in the world,” Dach said. Before, he said,  “we weren’t meeting the world’s expectations of us.” Now, the company takes an expansive view of its impact and responsibility on a range of issues—from climate change to health care to agriculture to working conditions in China. It’s far from perfect but, as Dach put it, “that’s a different corporate culture than the company ever had.”

Facebook, Twitter and radical transparency:  News, information and opinion spread faster than ever, secrets are fewer, cameras are everywhere and all of that creates risks and opportunities for business, said Aron Cramer, the president and ceo of BSR and author of Sustainable Excellence.

To be sure, businesses have had to communicate and react to what’s being said about them since the muckracker days but the pace of activity has quickened, to say the least. “Yes, we had revolutions before we had social media, but we had travel before we had airplanes,” Aron said. “These changes have huge impact for business.”

Smart companies see ways to turn transparency to their advantage. Ben Packard, the vice president for global responsibility at Starbucks, talked about how the company had crowdsourced its approach to a thorny problem—how to make a recyclable hot cup. Starbucks admitted it didn’t have a solution, and invited suppliers, competitors,  recycling experts and government officials to help devise one. It seems to be working, Ben said.

AT&T has an all-but-uncensored Facebook page, filled on many days with complaints. “The telecom industry is one of the most talked-about industries in social media, and it’s not all unicorns and rainbows,” said Charlene Lake, senior vice president of public affairs and chief sustainability officer.

But rapid, unfiltered access to what customers are saying is valuable. Executives get early warnings of problems that may arise. The company has an opportunity to resolve complaints, and correct misinformation. Nearly 40 people work on AT&T’s  Facebook page, Charlene said, and she checks in regularly, for better or worse.

“It’s painful when the negative posts are wrong,” she said. “And it’s painful when they are right.”

Brainstorm Green 2012: The powers that be at FORTUNE tell me that we’re going to stage the conference again next year. I’m delighted. It was great to see so many old friends and meet some ones. I had an email today from a friend who wrote: “It feels more like a gathering or ‘family reunion’ than just a conference.” I can’t think of a better compliment, and  I look forward to joining many of you again a year from now.

It’s been another action-packed day at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment. Lively conversation about the future of coal (it’s not going away), sustainable seafood (about which more another day), geoengineering and marketing to the green consumer.

The “green consumer” panel featured SC Johnson’s CEO H. Fisk Johnson, Steve Wenc of UL Environment and marketing guru Suzanne Shelton. It was moderated by my friend and colleague Joel Makower, the founder and editor-in-chief of GreenBiz. They all agreed that much of corporate America has moved ahead of its customers when it comes to embracing green products.

Wait, it gets worse: Joel and Suzanne argued that consumers fool themselves about their green behavior. They buy a CFL bulb or green cleaning product or perhaps a Prius and then decide they’ve done their part for the planet. They tell pollsters that they consider sustainability factors in their purchasing decisions and describe themselves as “conscious consumers” but the reality is quite different. They’re greenwashing their own behavior, Joel noted.

Is this bottle necessary?

Fisk told a story that illustrates this sometimes-depressing reality. SCJ has come up with a concentrated form of Windex that it sells in a small plastic pouch.  Customers can snip off the top of the pouch, pour  it into a refillable bottle and add water to get the equivalent of a 32-ounce bottle of Windex. The company saves money on packaging and energy, less carbon is emitted into the environment, less waste goes to landfill and a few pennies of savings can be passed along to the consumer. Everyone wins.

Everyone, that is, is the developing world where this Windex concentrate is sold. It’s not sold in the U.S., Fisk said, because Americans don’t care about saving a few pennies and they don’t want to deal with the inconvenience of mixing a small package of concentrate with water. They won’t make a small change that has a significant impact.

Aside from being lazy, consumers tend to be confused and habitual. They are confused by a plethora of eco-labels and competing claims.

“They consumer still does not understand what is green and what is not,” Fisk said.

Shoppers rely on the labels on products for information about sustainability, but they don’t trust the companies that make them, Suzanne said. They don’t have the time, the energy, the desire or focus to think about the consequences of their purchasing decisions.

“We just grab the same stuff off the shelf that we always grab off the shelf,” Suzanne said. “Where’s the moment where we can shift from automatic behavior to conscious choice?”

Discouraged by all this? Don’t be. Habitually modest but seriously green companies like SCJ are starting to talk more about their sustainability work. The company has to do so, Fisk said, to keep up with competitors like Clorox, Seventh Generation and Method. Better-educated consumers will be the result.

Besides that, objective guidance from third parties will help guide those consumers who care. UL Environment has begun to study consumer products. Good Guide is getting traction. The Sustainability Consortium is cranking up. All that will bring clarity to the question of which products are green. (See The Business of Rating Business.)

Finally, some very clever companies are going beyond education to reward consumers for greener behavior. Recyclebank is one. OPower is another. (See OPower, peer pressure and climate change.) Retailers like Walmart and Whole Foods are looking for ways nudge consumers towards better choices, or to make better choices for them.

In the end, it doesn’t take a majority of consumers to move a market, just a significant minority.

So remember how the song goes: The darkest hour is just before dawn.

Fred Krupp

What a different just a few years can make. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time not long ago when Congress appeared to be on the verge of a bipartisan agreement to regulate global warming pollution.

Republicans John McCain, John Warner, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty all supported efforts to put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Gingrich and Pawlenty went so far as to appear in commercials with the Environmental Defense Fund supporting climate regulation. And now?  “It was a mistake, it was stupid, it was wrong,” Pawlenty says.

The radical shift in the political climate means that big NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club now must fight merely to  preserve the status quo in Congress.

Environmental groups are playing defense rather than offense in Washington, said Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund,  during a panel today on climate policy that opened FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference.

He noted that House Republicans have voted to block funding not just for EPA’s efforts regulate carbon pollution (efforts that are required by a Supreme Court decision) but also for EPA efforts to control, on public health ground, mercury pollution from cement factories.

On climate issues, Fred said: “It’s hard to have a meaningful exchange of viewers, a serious conversation in Washington.”

That’s a big, big problem because, as he noted, every major piece of environmental legislation in the U.S has been enacted with bipartisan support. Fred himself was a leading advocate for the  late 1980s cap-and-trade system–to regulate sulfur dioxide pollution–that was put into place by President George Bush and his EPA chief, Bill Reilly.

I moderated the panel on climate policy that included Fred, Jim Rogers, the ceo of Duke Energy, Connie Hedegaard, the EU commissioner for climate and Michael Shellenberger, the president of the Breakthrough Institute. It was, unfortunately, a little grim. All of the panelists agreed that despite nearly 20 years of talk at the highest levels of government and business about global warming, global carbon emissions continue to grow. They’re up by 40%, roughly, since 1990. Neither China nor the U.S has agreed to put a cap on  emissions or tax fossil fuels.

What’s the best path forward, I asked? No one had a simple or single answer. Shellenberger argued for a shift away from making fossil fuels more expensive towards policies that will make clean energy cheaper, by investing government funds in clean energy R&D, both through government grants and military procurement. His Breakthrough Institute has thought and written a lot about how to make this happen, but it’s likely to require more, not less, government spending, which is a hard sell in today’s Congress.

Connie Hedegaard

Hedegaard noted that the EU is going forward with cap-and-trade — a regulatory scheme in which governments set a declining cap for  carbon emissions, and then auction or give away permits to pollute, which can then be traded among companies — and that its market could soon be linked to others. She was on her way to a meeting with Gov. Jerry Brown of California to talk about linking California’s cap-and-trade regime to the one in Europe and to another under development in China.  “Is cap and trade too complicated?” she asked. “It might be for the Americans. it’s not for the Chinese.”

Rogers lamented the fact that, at least for the moment, the nuclear accident in Japan will slow down the development of new nuclear plants in the U.S.  He said nuclear is a safer energy source than coal, without even taking climate change risks into affect. “Nuclear is clearly part of the climate solution,” he said.

The session flew by quickly, and I neglected to thank all four panelist for the time, energy and brainpower they have all devoted to trying to do something about the climate threat. I wish that together we’d come up with better answers to the question of  “where do we go from here” but it occurs to me now that that was too broad a question.

A better question might have been, how do we make the environment a bipartisan issue again? Or, how can  “greens” engage with Republicans around climate? Because until that happens, environmentalists will continue to play defense in DC. I had a brief chat about this at Brainstorm Green with the rarest of creatures, a moderate Republican–Theodore Roosevelt IV–and I hope to address that questions soon.

To my surprise, I’ve become visible enough in the world of “green business” that students and young professionals  frequently approach me because they want to learn more about sustainability, corporate responsibility or clean energy. Unfortunately, I can’t take the time to speak with all of them, so we typically exchange a couple of emails, and that’s it.

Leo Xiao

Occasionally, though, the student is unusually persistent, which is how I found myself having breakfast this morning at 6:45 a.m. in Laguna Niguel, Ca., with Leo Xiao, a 30-year-old immigrant from China who is studying for an MBA at UCLA. I’m here for FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference, which begins later today, (Monday, April 4) and is available online here.

In any event, Leo Xiao learned that I would be in California for the event. He invited me to speak at UCLA. No thanks, I said. He offered to drive me from LAX to Laguna Niguel so we could talk. That won’t work either, I said. He offered to pay me $200 for a meeting, Absolutely not, I told him. But he was so relentless that I agreed to meet with him if he wanted to drive the 65 miles or so from LA to Laguna very early in the morning, which, not surprisingly, he did.

“Once I decide I want to learn something, I’m pretty committed,” he told me, unnecessarily. “I’m single minded.”

We had a good talk. Leo’s interested in the business of delivering and financing solar energy for homes, and he wanted to dig into issues surrounding the business model, management and risks associated with several start-ups that deliver solar to the home–Sun Run, Solar City and Sungevity. He asked a lot of good questions. It turns out that he’s working on his own iPhone app about solar for the home, but he couldn’t say much about it because he’s in “stealth mode.” Leo has a degree in computer science from UC Riverside, and he spent about a year and a half working at Zynga, the social gaming company the developed Farmville, before business school. He told me, proudly, that Zynga had used its platform to raise money for earthquake victims in Haiti. “Social games can be about more than killing time,” he said. “They can have a social benefit.”

I tell this story for a couple of reasons. First, I want to recognize Leo’s persistence, preparation and desire to learn. Second, I want to say that any immigration policy that makes it hard for people like Leo to work in the U.S. is nuts. He’s been educated here and would like to stay–”I love Silicon Valley,” he told me–and surely his brains and energy will add value to our economy. Free labor markets, like free trade, generate wealth and growth.

The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates.

“Leading an examined life in business is a pain in the ass,” said Yvon Chouinard.

Chouinard, the legendary founder of Patagonia, spoke yesterday at Brainstorm Green, FORTUNE’s conference about business and the environment.

He was talking about the challenge that companies will face as Wal-Mart and its partners in a broad-based sustainability consortium go forward with their sustainability index, a bold  effort to measure the environmental impact of tens of thousands of consumer products. It may not be easy for companies to track–and disclose–the pollution caused by their products, but it’s a vital step in the right direction.

Brainstorm Green is, in part, about the examined life: We try to take an honest look at the environmental impact of business, and see what progress if any we’re making towards a more sustainably economy. For three days this week in beautiful Laguna Niguel, CA., we brought a diverse group of business and environmental leaders together to talk about ways in which corporate America can help solve  environmental problems. We discussed electric cars, renewable energy, nuclear power, the smart grid, energy efficiency, water, sustainable supply chains, oceans, engaging employees around green, food and agriculture, green marketing, geoengineering and what sustainable consumption might look like.

We had a great lineup of speakers, more than 100 in all, including Chouinard, Bill Ford, Lee Scott of Wal-Mart,  Stewart Brand, the explorer Sylvia Earle, Lew Hay of FPL, NRG Energy’s David Crane, Bill Gross, Starbucks’ Cliff Burrows, Scott Griffith of Zipcar, Sally Jewell of REI, the leaders of the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club..

This year, we added a new, er, twist to the event, as you can see here.

For the first time, we featured animals at Brainstorm Green, thanks to the fabulous Julie Scardina of Sea World. She brought a menagerie—hawks, an eagle, a lemur, an adorable baby kangaroo, flamingos, and a 14-foot-long boa constrictor  that took a liking to FORTUNE’s managing editor, Andy Serwer.

Photo by Brad Markel

That was hilarious–you can see watch it unfold on video here–but not so funny were the reminders from Julie that climate change and habitat destruction are putting the squeeze on numerous species of animals that play valuable role in the earth’s ecological systems, particularly in the tropics.

Discouraging, too, was much of the conversations about what’s going on, or  not, in Washington. (Chouinard was among those who said government will never solve the climate crisis. It will take activism and business, he argued.) I moderated a panel with the NRDC’s Frances Beinecke, Mike Brune of Sierra Club, David Yarnold of EDF and Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy in which they said there’s no better than a 50% chance that Congress will pass comprehensive energy and environmental legislation in the next 12 months. Lots of people at the event expressed hope that Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham could break the logjam with a bill that will combine a cap-and-trade system regulating the utility industry (though it won’t be call cap and trade), a tax on gasoline (which will be called a fee, and returned in some manner to consumers), no immediate regulation of industrial emissions (to defuse opposition from manufacturers) and incentives for nuclear power, energy efficiency and renewable energy. It will be far from perfect but better to get started than to do nothing.

Whether they succeed or not, Kerry, Lieberman and Graham deserve kudos. “They’re showing a great deal of creativity. And how often do you hear creativity and Washington in the same sentence?” asked FPL’s Lew Hay.

The conference closed, thank goodness, with a couple of encouraging conversations.

Listening to Chouinard, John Fleming of Wal-Mart and Tom Miller of the consulting firm BluSkye talk about the sustainability index reinforced my belief that this could be a big, big deal. It may or may not drive consumer behavior–it’s hard for me to believe that people will buy this or that brand of orange juice or jeans based on the carbon footprint or toxic chemicals that went into them–but it will force consumer products companies across America to measure the environmental impact of what they sell.

And while some certification and labeling programs today confuse as much as they illuminate, there’s enough muscle behind this plan to suggest that it will emerge as a near-universal standard. “We need one standard, one version of the truth,” said Fleming, Wal-Mart’s chief merchandising officer.

Eco-labels could report on the carbon footprint, water use, toxics and social impact of products, Fleming indicated. “We’re moving into a world that is increasingly more transparent, everything from politics to business to retail prices,” he said. That’s all to the good.

Photo by Martin LaMonica, CNET

Then Bill Ford closed out the event, and he was a big hit.

What he and CEO Alan Mullaly have done to turn around the iconic American automaker is truly impressive, but he wasn’t ready to take any credit. “We’ve got to run scared every day,” he said.

A heartfelt environmentalist, Ford was a man ahead of his time back in the 1990s and the times have finally caught up with him. Ford Motor is pushing ahead with all-electric cars, hybrids, cars that run on biofuels and more efficient internal combustion engines. For the first time, he said, Ford will be able to make money manufacturing small cars in America.

Ford  sounded most excited about the coming of electric cars, and said the company was less interested in hydrogen-powered vehicles, which Detroit has been talking about (and researching) for years, with little to show for it. “It’s an interesting technology, but moving to the back burner as electrification gains momentum and credibility,” he said.

He explained that, in contrast to Toyota with the Prius, Chevrolet with the Volt and Nissan with the Leaf, Ford will not create a vehicle that will be purely hybrid or electric. Instead, the company will offer hybrid or electric versions of the vehicles in its lineup that are also available with gasoline engines.

That will make it easier to adjust production to meet customer demand for electric cars, but it will leave Ford without a signature “green” vehicle that consumers will be able to buy as a badge of the environmental commitment.

Ford also talked about providing “mobility,” which is different from the business of selling cars and trucks. Noting that there will soon be more than 40 cities in the world with 10 million people or more, Ford Motor needs to find ways to help people in those cities get around. He praised Zipcar’s car-sharing business model as an example, and said that in Hong Kong people use a stored-value card known as Octopus to pay for transport on the subway, buses and taxis.

“The notion of shoving two cars in every garage in every part of the world doesn’t work,” Ford said. People are “going to need very different mobility solutions.”

Ford, by the way, arranged to have lunch one day with the brilliant and iconoclastic Steward Brand, whose book, Whole Earth Discipline, had people talking during the event. Chouinard, another iconoclast, had dinner with Eduardo Castro-Wright, a top exec at Wal-Mart. Sally Jewell of REI led a hike along the beach with, among others, Curtis Frasier of Shell and Frances Beinecke. And organic rice farmer Jessica Lundberg shared ideas and business cards with Monsanto’s Jerry Steiner.

Those are the kinds of connections we love to make at Brainstorm Green.

REI's Sally Jewell, brainstorming along the Pacific Coast in Laguna Niguel

FORTUNE’s third annual Brainstorm Green conference about business and the environment starts today (Monday), and one new twist this year is that you can play along at home.

For the next three days, many of the plenary sessions at the event, which is being held at the Ritz Carlton in Dana Point, Ca., will be shown on the web. People who sign up to attend online will be able to ask questions, I’m told. This is an experiment, an effort to see how a virtual conference will work and, of course, to expand FORTUNE’s business. (Hint: You can tune in for free this year, but that may not be the case in the future.)

As the co-chair and creator of Brainstorm Green, I’m obviously biased but I think we’ve got a great lineup again this year. I’m going to take a break from blogging for a few days to focus on the conference. Here are some  highlights:

Today (Monday) at 3:05 p.m. (all times are listed as Pacific Time, so this is  6:05 in the East), Lee Scott, the former CEO of Wal-Mart who is now chair of the executive committee of the Wal-Mart board, will talk about Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts with John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc. John is a great interviewer who once wrote a book about Sam Walton, so this session should be a treat.

Following that session, at about 3:50 p.m.,  I’ll be asking some of America’s most important environmental leaders: What Do Environmentalists Want? Joining me will be Frances Beinecke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy, David Yarnold of the Environmental Defense Fund and Mike Brune, the new head of the Sierra Club. We’ll talk about the outlook for climate legislation in Washington, as well as such hot topics as nuclear power and geoengineering.

Later Monday, I’ll talk to Sally Jewell, the CEO of REI, about “sustainability as a team sport.”

David Sokol

On Tuesday at 9:15 a.m., David Sokol, the chairman of MidAmerican Energy Holdings and a director of Chinese electric car company BYD, will talk with FORTUNE managing editor Andy Serwer. Sokol is a fascinating guy, a plain-spoken Midwesterner who may be in line to succeed Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, so we are calling the session Warren Buffett’s Power CEO.

We’ll follow that with a panel called Renewable Energy—Hype and Reality. I’ll be speakng with Jeff Broin, the CEO of POET, the big ethanol company; David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy; Bill Gross, the founder of eSolar; Katrina Landis, who runs the alternative energy division at BP; and Martha Wyrsch, president of Vestas Americas.

Later on Tuesday, we’ll webcast panels on nuclear energy and electric cars as well as one-on-one interviews with Lew Hay, the chairman and CEO of FPL Group and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who is never dull.

On Wednesday, I’m going to lead a discussion about sustainable consumption. The basic question: How can a company or an economy grow its business, generating things we want like jobs and wealth, while at the same time limiting or shrinking its environmental footprint, so we get less of what we don’t want, like pollution and greenhouse gases. Tackling that topic will be Cliff Burrows, the president of Starbucks U.S., Scott Griffith, the CEO of  Zipcar and Robin Johnson, the chief information officer at Dell.

Also on Wednesday, my co-chair Brian Dumaine will moderate a penal on sustainability indices, notably the one being led by Wal-Mart. Andy Serwer will interview Yvon Chouinard, the legendary co-founder of Patagonia. And Andy will wrap up with a conversation with Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor.

It’s going to be a great three days, I hope. I’ll take lots of notes and report back when I come up for air.

Algae are so good at producing oil from sunlight and carbon dioxide that there are, by some accounts, as many as 200 companies trying to make biofuels from algae. Some are obscure, little more than a couple of guys playing around with pond scum. Others are attention-grabbing, like Synthetic Genomics, the company led by pioneering scientist Craig Venter that  joined forces with ExxonMobil in a $300 million research program.

Solazyme, a private company based in South San Francisco, stands out from the algae crowd, for a number of reasons.

First, there’s the sheer variety of its products. Solazyme makes fuel for  the U.S. Navy. It makes a heart-healthy, vegetarian, protein-rich microalgae power that goes into Garden of Life supplements and vitamins sold at stores like Whole Foods. And it recently announced a deal with Unilever to use algal oil in renewable,  sustainable personal care products like soap. Its algae are multi-talented.

Then, there’s the fact that Solazyme, unlike other startups, is “producing large volumes of oils and fuels, and we have been for a while,” says its CEO, Jonathan Wolfson. What’s large volumes? An annual rate of tens of thousands of gallons, including a little over 20,000 gallons of shipboard fuel during the first half of this year for the Navy,  part of an $8.5 million contract signed last year.

Finally, Solazyme raised a Series C financing round of about $57 million during the credit crunch, much of it from existing investors including Braemar Energy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, the Roda Group and Jerry Fiddler, the firm’s chairman–all of whom stuck by Solazyme through some  early stumbles.

Jonathan Wolfson, with algae

I met last week with Wolfson, the company’s 39-year-old co-founder and CEO, whose passion and brainpower are apparent as soon as you meet him.  (If you doubt it, come meet him at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment where he’ll be speaking next month.) Because I’m not a scientist, it’s all but impossible for me to know whether Solazyme’s technology is superior, or whether it will be able to make oil at costs that make economic sense. But others who focus on the industry  (like Biofuels Digest, as well as the U.S. Department of Energy) see the company as promising. Algae-based transportation fuels have a lower carbon footprint than diesel or gasoline, and they can be sources in the U.S.

Founded in 2003, Solazyme traces its beginnings to Emory University, where Wolfson and Harrison Dillon had just arrived as freshman in the fall of 1989. They met on the first day of school.

“What do you want to do?” Wolfson asked, after they’d chatted a little. He figured the answer would be something like “go get a beer” or “check out the town.”

“I want to be a geneticist,” Dillon replied.

Wolfson, whose father was a medical researcher, was intrigued. During freshman year, the classmates agreed to start a biotech company someday.

Let’s be clear,” Wolfson says now. “These were  the delusional rantings of 18-year-olds. But ultimately it came to pass.” Wolfson got an MBA and a law degree, worked on an Indian reservation and started a software company before starting Solazyme with Dillon, who by then had earned PhD in genetics and his own law degree.

They got off on what they now say was the wrong track, growing algae in ponds, as most algal fuel companies do.  A couple of years and a few million dollars later, they told their investors that it wasn’t working.  Instead of growing algae in ponds using sunlight as an input, they decided to feed biomass such as sugar cane or switchgrass to their algae and grow them in tanks. This gives the company more control over the production process.

Wolfson says:

Pretty much everyone in the space disagrees, but the conclusion that we drew is is that…algae is by far the best thing on the planet at making oil but it’s far less economically efficient at capturing photons than higher plants.

We take algae, we put them in a tank, we feed them biomass, they make oil and we take the oil out. There’s a lot of technology in the process, but that’s basically what’s happening.

By genetically modifying the algae, Solazyme can produce a range of products, much as a standard oil refinery can make fuels and chemicals by refining crude oil. The company is exploring three distinct market segments: fuel oils, nutritionals (human and animal nutrition) and health sciences (cosmetics and nutraceuticals). “You have the whole world of chemistry at your fingertrips,” Wolfson says.

Can Solazyme do all those different things well? Wolfson says the company’s primary focus remains biofuels. It has a partnership with Chevron, but he can’t say much about that. Other partner like Unilever and a company called B&D Nutritional will help the firm gain entry to other markets.  “I’m very excited about food,” Wolfson says. “We can make natural oils. Think about a super heart healthy algo oil with a oil profile similar to olive oil but less saturated fat. We’re not selling it yet, but we’re making it.” The company has even tried making  low-fat honey mustard and cookies.

Whether Solazyme is biting off more than it can chew (pun intended) remains to be seen. The company has about 80 employees. Its biggest production facility is a plant in rural Riverside, Pa., (owned by a pharmaceutical company)  where it is expanding with the help of a $21.8 million DOE grant.

Keep in mind that algae’s a risky, crowded business. Sapphire Energy, a prominent competitor, got a $50 million DOE grant and a $54 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in January to expand its commercial-scale pond operation in New Mexico. Meanwhile, GreenFuel, another algae startup which raised venture money and signed a commercial production deal, shut down last year.

Here’s a diagram illustrating the production process at Solazyme:

Many books shaped my thinking about business, economics and the environment during 2009. Last year was the year that I discovered Nassim Nicholas Taleb and The Black Swan, to my great delight, as well as the year that I began to explore behavioral economics by reading Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. I enjoyed my friend Russell Roberts’ libertarian romance (yep) The Invisible Heart, and I learned a lot from The Myth of the Rational Market, a timely and readable history of the economics of markets by my ex-Fortune colleague Justin Fox.  The Good Soldiers by David Finkel is a searing up-close look at the surge in Iraq that should be read by any American citizen who wants to better understand the human costs of the wars being waged by our government.

But the book that I most want to recommend to readers of this blog is Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand. It’s brilliant, controversial, unconventional and lively. Nothing I read in 2009 changed my thinking more.

I’m not alone in my admiration for Stewart’s book. Paul Hawken calls it “likely one of the most original and important books of the century.…” Edward O. Wilson says it is “ominous and exhilirating.” Larry Brilliant says it is “an absolutely seminal work, extraordinarily well written, a tour de force of so many interconnected worlds and lives and studies.” Nice blurbs, no?

The praise is all the more remarkable because Whole Earth Discipline argues that we need nuclear power to combat global warming, that we need biotechnology to feed the world and that we need to take  geo-engineering seriously — ideas that are anathema to much, though not all, of the environmental movement that Stewart helped create roughly 40 years ago.

For those of you (younger readers) who aren’t familiar with his work, Stewart, who is a vigorous 72-year-old, is best known as the editor of Whole Earth Catalog, an influential compendium of all things countercultural, published in the late 1960s and 1970s, with a photo of the earth seen from space on its cover. After an LSD-induced experience that got him thinking about the curve of the earth, Stewart campaigned to have NASA release the picture. Later, he wrote:

It is no accident of history that the first Earth Day, in April 1970, came so soon after color photographs of the whole earth from space were made by homesick astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in December 1968. Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside… Humanity’s habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to.

Since then, Stewart has been a writer, a speaker, an organizer, a pioneer of online communities as a founder of the WELL (the “Whole Eart ‘Lectronic Link,” where I first discovered the power of the Internet), a consultant to companies and the owner of a tugboat in San Francisco where he lives with his wife, Ryan Phelan. He writes:

Because I’m an ecologist by training, a futurist by profession and a hacker (lazy engineer) at heart, my bent is scientific rigor, geoeconomic perspective, and an engineer’s bias, which sees everything in terms of solving design problems.

Fun fact about Stewart: He owns the table where Otis Redding reportedly wrote “Dock of the Bay.”

I’m not going to try to summarize Stewart’s arguments about nukes, GMOs or geo-engineering here, but let me try to give you a flavor of his thinking and writing.

On nukes, he says, given the urgency of the climate crisis,  it’s a little nutty to worry about how to dispose of radioactive waste hundreds or even thousands of years from now since we can’t predict technological progress between now and then (although we can sure there will be lots of it). And, as he notes:

Nuclear waste is minuscule in size—on Coke can’s worth per person-lifetime of electricity if it was all nuclear…Coal waste is massive—68 tons of solid stuff and 77 tons of carbon dioxide per person-lifetime of strictly coal electricity.

France, which built a fleet of 56 reactors in about 20 years because of an efficient licensing process, now has

the cleanest air in Europe, the lowest electrical bills and a $4 billion export business selling energy to all its neighbors, including Green Germany and nuclear Britain (2 gigawatts a year flows west under the English Channel). France shut down its last coal-fired plant in 20094. It emits 70 percent less carbon dioxide per capita than the United States.

I didn’t know that. Did you?

On biotech food, Stewart is characteristically blunt:

I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.

He has a great rant about “natural food” (see page 133) as well as a fascinating account of the debate over genetic engineering inside the environmental movement in the 1970s which, among other things, led the scientists Lewis Thomas and Paul Ehrlich to part ways with Friends of the Earth. Since the mid-1990s, as Stewart notes, we (meaning earthlings) have conducted “the most massive dietary experiment in history” with most everyone in North America eating biotech foods and most everyone in Europe doing without them. The results are in, and no difference can be detected between the test and the control group. He goes on to write about what he calls a “GE-inclusive organic agriculture” as well as the potential of foods engineered to produce health benefits.

There’s much more to recommend in Whole Earth Discipline. It turns out that Stewart is a fan of urbanization, having abandoned what he calls his “Gandhiesque romanticism about villages.” Slums in the global south, he says, are hotbeds of innovation and cooperation, they cure overpopulation and they are better for people and the planet than the subsistence farms seen by many as “soulful and organic.”

I’ll save Stewart’s ideas about geo-engineering for another blogpost. Meanwhile, read this book. And, if you can, join us at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference about business and the environment, where I’m delighted that Stewart Brand will be one of the featured speakers.

Whole Earth Catalog, 1968

Whole Earth Discipline, 2009