Next April, FORTUNE will again bring together some of the smartest people we know in sustainability for Brainstorm Green, the magazine’s annual conference on business and the environment.

This is will be our 5th Brainstorm Green–hard for me to believe, since I’ve been involved since the beginning–and we’ve again got a first-rate lineup of leaders from corporate America, the  environmental movement, the investment community and government, as well as a scattering of interesting writers, thinkers and doers about “green.”

Once again, the event will be held at the spectacular Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, CA. Dates are April 16-18, 2012.

Alan Mulally

New faces for 2012 from the corporate world will include Alan Mulally, the president and CEO of Ford; Rob Walton, the chairman of Walmart; Andy Taylor, the chairman and CEO of Enteprise (they buy more cars than anyone in America); C. Larry Pope, the chairman and CEO of Smithfield Foods (they make more hot dogs than anyone in America, as I wrote in Smithfield Foods: Sustainable Pork?); Vance Bell, the chairman and CEO of Shaw Industries (the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, see my blogpost, This carpet has moral fiber); John Faraci, the chairman and CEO of International Paper; Gary Hirshberg, the CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm; Russ Ford, the executive vice president of Shell; Bea Perez, the chief sustainability officer of Coca-Cola; and Trae Vassallo of Kleiner Perkins.

Other newcomers will include former EPA chiefs William K. Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman; he’s now with private equity firm TPG, and chaired the BP oil spill commission, she’s an energy and environmental consultant and nuclear-power advocate. We’ll talk politics and climate with  John Podesta, the chair of the Center for American Progress and former chief of staff to President Clinton. John Warner — the Ph.D. chemist, not the former U.S. Senator — will explain the promise of green chemistry.  Bonnie Nixon will deliver insight into The Sustainability Consortium. And I certainly hope that Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and geographer, will counsel us on how to avoid Collapse.

Frances Beinecke

Although we meet just once a year, I like to think of Brainstorm Green as a community, albeit an ephemeral one. That’s largely because many of those who came for the first Brainstorm Green, back in 2008, have come back again and again. In particular, we are joined every year by the leaders of our programming partners–the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International. EDF’s Fred Krupp, NRDC’s Frances Beinecke, TNC’s Mark Tercek and Glenn Prickett and CI’s Peter Seligmann will all be back in 2012.

Many other Brainstorm Green “alums” will return, too. In no particularly order: David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy; Fisk Johnson, the chairman and CEO of S.C. Johnson; Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy; Mike Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club; Scott Griffith, the chairman and CEO of Zipcar; David Neeleman, the founder and CEO of Brazil’s Azul airline; Ted Roosevelt IV of Barclay’s; Dara O’Rourke of Good Guide; and water expert Will Sarni of Deloitte.

[I'm also hoping that the incomparable Chuck Leavell -- keyboardist with the Rolling Stones, award-winning tree farmer and all-around good guy -- will return in 2012. My FORTUNE colleague Brian Dumaine, who is co-chair with me of Brainstorm Green, also functions as our musical impresario, and he tells me he's doing his best to persuade Chuck to come back.]

As always, there will be plenty to talk about–the shale gas boom, the future of renewable energy, the continuing “greening” of corporate America, the 2012 election, consumer behavior around green, corporate water strategies, electric cars, etc. The theme of the conference is, how can business help profitably solve the world’s big environmental problems?

The program remains in flux, so if you want to propose a speaker or call our attention to a new topic, please do so here at the Brainstorm Green website. You can also request a delegate invitation on the registration page. I hope to see many of you in Laguna Niguel in April.

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.

So the verdict is in on the UN climate negotiations that just wrapped in Copenhagen and it’s all but unanimous:

Carl Pope, Sierra Club: The world’s nations have concluded a historic–if incomplete–agreement to begin tackling global warming.  Tonight’s announcement is but a first step and much work remains to be done.

Frances Beinecke, Natural Resources Defense Council: We have taken a vital first step toward curbing climate change for the sake of our planet, our country and our children…. There’s still more work to be done.

Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund: A lot of hard work remains, but a lot of hard work is finished. The new positive steps taken here…president the U.S Senate and President Obama with a n historic opportunity.

Jonathan Lash, World Resources Institute: “Much more is needed, but today marks a foundation for a global effort to fight climate change.

Elliot Diringer, Pew Center for Global Climate Change: The Copenhagen Accord is an important step forward in the international climate effort…it lays the foundation for a system to hold countries accountable. …Much remains to be negotiated.

Hmm..  I thought the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio or the 1997 Kyoto Protocol or the 2007 Bali Roadmap were first steps. Shouldn’t we be taking the second, third or fourth steps by now? Or, if you prefer the foundation metaphor, shouldn’t we hurry up and build the house, before sea levels rise and storms intensify?

This isn’t to suggest that the 15,000 or 20,000 people who descended on Copenhagen during the last two weeks wasted their time. What is being called the Copenhagen Accord sets a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. It promises billions of dollars of aid for poor countries. It points the way towards a resolution of the fundamental conflict between U.S. and China over their so-called “common but differentiated” responsibilities to deal with global warming. That’s important–when it comes to climate and the global economy, the G-2 of the U.S. and China tower over the rest of the world. The leaders of Europe, Japan and other countries at the summit were largely left to rubber-stamp the deal, as The Washington Post reported.

The trouble is, none of this is good enough. Nations can now set own emission reduction targets. (Earlier versions of a political agreement being discussed in Copenhagen had called for specific reductions by 2020 and 2050.) It does not set a deadline for signing and binding treaty. (Until fairly recently, that deadline was supposed to be now.) Sure, aid is promised to poor countries, but aside from some token amounts, no one can be sure where the money will come from.

This isn’t a strong deal. It isn’t  a weak deal. It’s not a deal at all.

It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Having said that, I understand the thinking behind the first-step-much-work-needs-to-be-done analysis coming from the inside the Beltway environmental groups. With the climate debate now shifting from Copenhagen to the U.S. Senate, they need to tread carefully. They can’t be overly critical of President Obama or undecided senators; they need to suggest that something real was accomplished in Copenhagen, to help persuade legislators that the U.S. can enact strong climate regulation without giving a competitive edge to China or India. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club made this argument explicitly, saying: “Now that the rest of the world–including countries like China and India–has made clear that it is willing to take action, the Senate must pass domestic legislation…”

But, again, the rest of the world has not committed to anything.

For a reality check on where we stand, let me refer you to the Climate Scoreboard put together by scientists at MIT, the Sustainability Institute and Ventana Partners, with the support of Nike, Citigroup, Fidelity Investments and others, which uses computer simulations to  model the long-term climate impacts of decisions being undertaken today. Please see the Climate Interactive blog for more detail.

Put simply, we’re not going where we need to go.

A big part of the problem here, as Bill McKibben has written eloquently, is that the world’s governments treat climate change as just another political problem–and it’s not.

Think about the health-care agreement reached this weekend. It’s the product of a series of compromises, some of them quite ugly, but it has the support of President Obama and Democrats in Congress because they believe it’s the best they can do, for now. Maybe they’ll come back to “reform” health care again in a few years. It’s a step, even a big step, in the right direction.

This is how politics usually works. It’s incremental. Even on great moral issues like civil rights, governments move piece by piece–first the military was desegregated, then came schools, then  voting rights, finally housing and employment bias were barred, if I remember my history right. This approach gives people time to get used to change. It’s the mindset behind first-step-much-work-needs-to-be-done.

But incrementalism isn’t going to do the job when it comes to climate change. Every day that goes by when we emit more global warming pollutants into the atmosphere than nature can take out, the job gets harder to do. So a small but inadequate step, even one in the right direction, can actually leave us worse off than before.

One metaphor that helped me understand this is a bathtub: The faucet (industry, transportation, deforestation) is pouring more water in to the tub than the drain (nature’s ability to absorb CO2) can take away, and there’s no way to make the drain any bigger. Just turning down the faucet a little doesn’t help; the water level in the tub can keep rising, albeit not as fast as before. The longer the faucet pours in more water than the drain can take away, the more radically we have to turn it down to stop the tub from overflowing.

McKibben explains it this way:

Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible “with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”  That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.

And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble—because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.

Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we’re over the edge already.  We’re no longer capable of “preventing” global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.

There’s the argument for Flopenhagen.

As for Hopenhagen, well, I saw a lot of things to get excited about during my week in Copenhagen.

Denmark itself, for one: The nation gets 20% of its energy from wind, it’s rolling out a national system for charging all-electric cars and roughly 55% of the people of Copenhagen ride a bike every day, most to go to work. You won’t be surprised to hear that they are thinner as a group than those of us in the U.S.

Speaking of wind, Tulsi Tanti, the founder of Suzlon Energy, told me that China is the world’s biggest and fastest growing market for win energy. His company is manufacturing turbines in China, and he says the government there is committed in a serious way to clean energy — even if it doesn’t want to be held to absolute limits on emissions.

Finally, the kids. There were thousands of them in Copenhagen. They are committed to organizing to stop climate change, they are smart, they are idealistic, they are not pragmatic and they are not fans of the first-step-much-work-needs-to-done approach. For more, check out 350.org or Avaaz or the Youth Climate Movement.

You know how people say we need to save the earth for our kids? I’m starting to think that it’s the other way round, that they are going to have to save it for us.

Some people had to wait for a very, very long time to register for the UN climate talks at the Bella Center in Copenhagen where the meetings are being held. The Danes are very democratic so VIPs stood in line with the rest of us.  I ran into Frances Beinecke, president of The Natural Resources Defense Council. Temperatures were in the 30s, and tempers were rising.

The UN did not enhance its reputation for efficiency or crowd control today.

Frances and NRDC founder John Adams ended up waited for eight hours, according to her blog, where she wrote:

Little matter. After three decades at the climate change ramparts, I figured, what was another eight hours at the Danish barricades?

An insider told me later that the only thing that made the long wait bearable was that Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense was waiting behind them in line.

William Clay Ford Jr.

Before I head to Copenhagen this week for the global climate extravaganza, I want to bring you the latest news about Brainstorm Green, FORTUNE’s conference about business and the environment. I’m delighted by the caliber of leaders and thinkers who have agreed to speak at the event, which will be held April 12-14 in Laguna Beach, CA.

Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor, who was a huge hit last year, will be back in 2010. Ford (the company) is one of the few bright spots in the U.S. auto industry, as you know, and while it took a long while coming, the firm seems committed to hybrids, electric cars and other environmentally-friendly technologies, including wheat-straw reinforced plastic and other bio-based materials. Hybrid sales are taking off, as the company recently reported:

Ford Motor Company’s year-to-date hybrid sales are 73 percent higher than the same period in 2008, fueled by the introduction of hybrid versions of the 2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan

More than 60 percent of the sales of Fusion Hybrid are by non-Ford owners – with more than 52 percent of those customers coming from import brands.

Stewart Brand

One of the best books that I’ve read in a long time is Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand, so I’m thrilled to announce that Stewart will be featured at Brainstorm Green. In the book, he brings a fresh perspective to nuclear power (he’s for it), geo-engineering (he’s intrigued) and megacities (they are both green and engines of economic growth). You can be sure he will challenge conventional wisdom at the conference.

Three powerhouse leaders of the enviromental movement–Frances Beinecke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense and Mark Tercek of the Nature Conservancy–are also planning to attend. Fred and Frances have ben at the event before, and they both plugged into the Washington scene, which will surely be a topic this spring, while Mark, formerly of Goldman Sachs, will be able to offer great insight into the role of markets in solving environmental problems.

Sylvia Earle

New to Brainstorm Green this year will be Sylvia Earle, the well-known American oceanographer. Dr. Earle was chief scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 1990-1992, and she has been a . National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. We’ll be talking about the health of the world’s oceans, from a business perspective. Other voices on that topic will include Kim Lopdrup, president of the Red Lobster seafood chain.

Since this is a FORTUNE conference, we’ll also be hearing from some of the most thoughtful and influential CEOs and business leaders in the world. I’ve already reported that Lee Scott, the former CEO of Wal-Mart who is now chairman of the company’s executive committee, has agreed to speak. So, once again, has Paul Hawken, the influential author and thinker who, among other things, has advised Wal-Mart. I’m hoping that Paul, who did a fabulous job for us last year, will have news to share about the innovative solar power company he’s been working hard on.

David Sokol

Other chairmen, CEOs or presidents we will be hearing from include Lew Hay of FPL Group, Jeff Smisek of Continental Airlines, Arne Sorenson of Marriott, David Sokol of Mid American Energy (and board member of BYD Automotive), David Crane of NRG Energy, John Replogle of Burt’s Bees, Sally Jewell of REI, Bill Roe of Coskata, Randy Zwirn of Siemens Energy, Kevin Surace of Serious Materials, Kevin Czinger of Coda Automotive and Naomi Porat of Zeta Communities.

We’ll also have investors Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Alan Salzman of VantagePoint Venture Partners, Wilber James of Rockport Partners, Anup Jacob of Virgin Green. We’re working on getting Obama administration officials. We’ll showcase some great green ideas you haven’t heard much about.

Meanwhile, we are organizing a series of panels that I think of as news-you-can-use, explaining how  how to think about, organize and implement sustainability practices in big companies. Just this week, for instance, Will Sarni, the founder and CEO of consulting firm Domani, agreed to help me organize a conversation about why your company needs a water strategy. (Will is literally writing the book on that topic right now.) And Justin Yuen, the dynamic young president of FMYI, will lead a discussion about how to engage employees around sustainability–how to get them excited, tap into their best ideas and measure progress.

One last treat: Have you ever seen Julie Scardina on The Tonight Show? She has been on the program more than 20 times! Julie is the “animal ambassador” of Sea World and Busch Gardens, as well as an expert conservationist. She will be a Brainstorm Green and, yes, she will be bringing some of her “friends” along.

Brainstorm Green will be held April 12-14, 2010, at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, CA. You can sign up to attend at the website. As the co-chair of the event, with my FORTUNE colleague Brian Dumaine, I’m also open to hearing proposals for just a few more speakers. (We could use an expert on geoengineering, for example.) No hurry–I don’t expect to be extending any more speaking invitations until after I return from Copenhagen in about 10 days.

Just last week, Frances Beinecke, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, gave a speech to a Chicago business audience and the first question went something like this: I read the Wall Street Journal, I still don’t believe in climate science and I want to hear the full  story.

Beinecke’s new book, Clean Energy Common Sense: An American Call to Action on Global Climate Change (Rowan & Littlefield, $9.95), is aimed at those who are skeptical–or at least curious–about the climate change debate. It’s a slim (106 pages), straightforward, easy-to-read argument that  that attempts to connect the climate issue to everyday concerns like jobs, the economy and national security.

“When you go out to Gary, Indiana, Cleveland or Chicago, people are still uncertain,” Beinecke said, as she unveiled the book at the National Press Club in Washington.” They’re not clear on what the science is, what the solutions are, what the threats are, what the impacts are.”

And so Beinecke, as you’d expect, makes the case that the problem is dire, the solutions affordable and the benefits tangible–new jobs, less reliance on imported oil and a livable planet.

To her credit, though, she’s willing to go beyond the what’s-in-it-for-you argument and describe the climate crisis as what it is–the overarching moral issue of the moment, and one requiring immediate action:

Global climate change is the single greatest environmental challenge of our time. And yet, it is far more than that. It is a humanitarian challenge. It is an economic challenge. It is a national security challenge. It is the great moral challenge of our time.

If only more political leaders would frame the issue that way, instead of appealing only to the narrow self interest of voters.

And, while Americans don’t like to hear it, she also goes straight at the issue of climate justice, writing:

The United States and other high-income nations produced, on average, 15 tones of greenhouse gases per person in 2005, according to World Bank calculations. That’s more than seven times the per-capita rate in low-income countries. And yet, it is low-income people who bear the sharpest risk and most immediate consequence of global climate change.

If that’s not unjust, then I don’t know the meaning of the word.

Beinecke has worked for NRDC for 35 years, since graduating from Yale with one of the first classes of women to do so and earning a master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry. (Yes, for Yale alums reading this blog, she comes from the family that gave its money and its name to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and she’s a former member of the Yale Corporation, which governs the university.) She has been president of NRDC since 2006, and has devoted herself passionately to the climate change issue for about a decade.

Her book does a couple of things well. First, it makes clear that the science of climate change, while uncertain in many respects, is unequivocal when it comes to the question of whether burning fossil fuels is warming the earth. While temperatures have leveled off for about a decade, she reminds us that “the 15 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1991.” That’s no accident. It should be a big worry. Then there’s this: “Artic ice is essential to the world as we know it, and the fact is it’s melting at an alarming rate.”

Second, the book makes clear that the cost of mitigating carbon emissions is manageable:

Clean energy legislation would cost the average American household $160 a day in 2020, according to the CBO [Congressional Budget Office], or right at 44 cents a day. The EPA estimates the average per-house cost at between $80 and $111 per year–or 30 cents, on the high side, per day. And the DOE has set the cost of this kind of legislation at $83 a year by 2030, or 23 cents a day.

Not a big price to pay for, oh, preserving civilization as we know it.

The book isn’t as specific about solutions. Beinecke writes that we need to do three things: Reduce global warming pollution (duh), promote alternatives to fossil fuels (OK, but which ones?) and help our country make a smooth transition to the clean energy future we need (well, yes, but how?).  NRDC supports a cap-and-trade system, which, in theory, would leave  specifics to the market, but legislation now making its way through Congress is laden with subsidies and prescriptive measures, ranging from efficiency standards for appliances and buildings to big bets with your tax dollars on so-called clean coal. Bipartisan negotiations among Sens. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman (who makes it tripartisan) bring such options as nuclear energy and offshore drilling into play.

I asked Beinecke whether nuclear power was part of the climate solution. She was a little vague, saying “it will continue to play a role.” Well, sure, but should environmentalists be pressing for more nukes? She replied:

…there are several issues that we care a lot about, like waste and security and proliferation, that we think still need to be addressed.  But the overall issue for nuclear has and continues to be cost.

Later, she told me:

We are not in favor of additional subsidies to the nuclear industry. They’ve been subsidized for the last 50 years. It’s a mature industry….Let it compete, on its own, without subsidies.

That’s not a bad answer, except that NRDC and other enviros favor subsidies for cleaner coal (which, to be sure, is newer), wind and solar (which have been around a lot longer). I’m reading Stewart Brand’s fascinating new book, Whole Earth Discipline, and will return to the nuclear issue soon. Ideally, since no one knows for sure which solution is best, and subsidizing all of the above is a cop-out, as well as expensive, we’d wipe out subsidies, put a steep price on carbon and let the market decide–which was the whole idea behind cap-and-trade before the bills in Congress grew past the 1,000-page mark.

If you’ve followed the climate debate, you need not read Clean Energy Common Sense. Read Stewart’s book instead, or Al Gore’s new tome. But if you have a friend or relative who is open-minded or disengaged, buy the book as a gift. As Beinecke says: “This is the time for people to pay attention.” And to act.

Two final notes. I’m delighted that Frances has agreed to speak at FORTUNE’s third Brainstorm Green conference, about business and the environment, which will be held April 12-14 in Laguna Niguel, CA. And here’s a shout out to my Bethesda neighbor Bob Deans, the former White House reporter for Cox Newspapers, who joined NRDC last summer (after writing this lovely farewell), just in time to help Frances write the book.

Frances Beinecke, president, NRDC