Business is business, they say, but I’m often reminded that business is personal, too.

Back in about 2005, Lee Scott, who was then Ceo of Walmart, traveled with Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, to the top of Mount Washington, to visit a weather research station and meet with environmental scientists, including Steve Hamburg, who’s now the chief scientist at EDF. On their way, Scott stopped to visit with a New Hampshire maple farmer who told him that warmer weather was threatening the maple syrup business his family had operated for four generations. By the end of the trip, Scott had seen the impacts of climate change for himself – and seen how they could evolve into business issues for Walmart.

Mike Duke, Scott’s successor as Ceo, took a climate-change field trip of his own a few years later. He spent the night in an ice hotel on a glacier in Sweden, where he heard about the impact of climate change on the arctic. A doubter before then, he was convinced. Meanwhile, another Walmart exec went to Turkey to meet with cotton farmers, visiting a conventional farm — where cotton plants are intensively treated with herbicides and pesticides — and an organic farm where workers and the land were treated better.

Jib Ellison

These trips were arranged by a former river rafting guide named Jib Ellison, whose consulting firm, BluSkye, has guided Walmart on its remarkable journey towards sustainability. A colorful character–he once arranged rafting trips with Americans and Russians to help ease Cold War tensions–Ellison is the hero of a lively new book, Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (HarperCollins, $27.99), by Edward Humes, an award-winning journalist. It’s the first book about the greening of WalMart, and a valuable one, particularly for its insights into array of overlapping forces that drove the makeover of Walmart.

About those field trips, for example, Humes writes that the WMT execs

…returned home–as Ellison had planned and hope–moved by what (they) had seen, felt and heard. As never before, Wal-Mart’s leaders had seen the face of climate change, pesticides and air pollution–and it was the weathered face of a maple farmer, it was the vanishing snow lines of ancient glaciers, it was the clothing and skin of children dusky from pesticide residue. “You don’t get that in a briefing paper,” Ellison remarked to Scott. The CEO nodded.

Now, business isn’t just personal, of course. Scott began exploring sustainability back in the mid-2000s because Walmart had s terrible reputation, particularly in places (like Chicago and LA) where it had no stores and wanted to open some. Once Ellison got in the door, thanks to his friendship with Peter Seligmann, the founder of Conservation International, who introduced him to Rob Walton, Walmart’s chairman, he was able to show Scott that the company could save money by going green.

This argument, Humes shows, quickly became the primary driver of the sustainability campaign inside at Walmart : Plain and simple, the company’s leaders came to understand that pollution is another just word for waste. WMT’s culture hates nothing as much as waste. A cleaner, greener, more efficient Walmart, the excutives saw, would be able to deliver low prices to customers and profitable growth to shareholders.

Humes ticks off a series of quick wins at Walmart that are now familiar to those who have followed the company: Smaller packages for toy trucks and laundry detergent, auxiliary power units for trucks in the company fleet, LED lighting and greener refrigerants in the company’s stores. The fact that these are oft-told tales points to a weakness of Force of Nature: It’s not a deeply reported book, and thus delivers few surprises and suffers from a couple of blind spots.

Because Ellison is obviously the key source, others who played big roles in changing Walmart – in particular Leslie Dach – are overlooked. Dach, a former environmental lobbyist, Democratic Party operative and PR exec who is now Walmart’s executive vice president, gets a laudatory paragraph, but the story of how this quintessential outsider (a green, liberal, urban Jew) become a force to be reckoned with in Bentonville should have been told in Force of Nature. Working closely with Scott, Dach led a broader cultural revolution at Walmart which is today is less insular, less defensive, more open and collaborative company than it used to be. Environmental Defense Fund has had two full-time people in Bentonville for years, but they barely show up in the book.

Still, Force of Nature gets the story right, for the most part. Humes does a great job of explaining Walmart’s reach and influence, while pointing to the limits of a sustainability program that, to this day, remains driven largely by eco-efficiency. As he writes:

…Wal-Mart, as long as it looks anything like the Wal-Mart we know today, is never going to be truly green or wholly sustainable. Because any gains it makes in efficiency, conservation and clean energy will be matched by the continued growth of a company that, since the day Jib Ellison arrived in Bentonville in 2004, has grown 43% to $408 billion in annual revenue in 2010.

This needs to be the next step on Walmart’s journey–to figure out, with the help of its suppliers and partners, how growth and consumption can be aligned with sustainability. If it can do that, Walmart will become a force of nature in every sense of the word.

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.

Fred Krupp is like a Timex watch.

He takes a licking but keeps on ticking.

Those of you old enough to remember the commercials when Timex tortured its seemingly indestructible watches, using high divers, water skiers, dishwashers, jackhammers, and the propeller of an outboard motor, know what I mean.

Except that the instruments of torture that Fred has endured as he has labored, literally for decades, to get climate change legislation through Congress include coal-state Senators, Republican obstructionists, Washington trade associations, a largely indifferent press corps  and left-wing green groups that accuse the Environmental Defense Fund, which he leads, of selling out to big business.

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire his persistence.

It can’t be easy to calmly discuss the need for cap-and-trade legislation and the challenge of getting 60 votes in the Senate while oil is fouling the Gulf of Mexico, global temperatures are rising and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are reaching dangerous levels.

Yet that’s Fred–calm, rational, pragmatic and seemingly undeterred by the fact that there appears to be only an outside chance that climate-change legislation will be passed this year, that next year looks a whole lot worse and that the congressional clock is ticking down.

Today, EDF invited reporters to the Washington offices of the Glover Park Group to hear Fred and Steve Cochran, the group’s chief lobbyist, make a last-ditch plea for a scaled-back bill, one with an emissions cap that initially covers only the utility industry.

They conceded for the first time publicly that EDF won’t get the economy-wide cap that it really wants and also, for the first time, gently criticized  President Obama and urged him to back up his climate-change rhetoric with action.

First, the EDF crew admitted that for now we’re not going to get a cap on carbon emissions that covers most polluters, even though that’s what the science of climate change says is needed and that’s what the green groups and the business-backed U.S. Climate Action Partnership, have been seeking for the past three years.

“A comprehensive, economy-wide cap and trade system is not going to be passed by the Senate,” Fred said. A cap that covers the coal-spewing utility  industry would impact  about 40% of the U.S.’s carbon output.

Second, he said, the only way we’re going to get even an admittedly insufficient bill will be if President Obama and the White House staff support one and put their shoulders behind it. This, regrettably, the administration has yet to do.

“We need the president to lead,” Fred said. “For all the good things he’s done, which we acknowledge, he’s got to roll up his sleeves and put together a bill.”

If the president and his staff get deeply involved–as they eventually did with the stimulus package, health-care legislation and financial industry regulation–a climate bill is “absolutely doable,” Fred said.

Neither of those things can have been easy to say–the first is admitting a sort of defeat, the second is admitting disappointment in a key ally.

Indeed, even while calling upon Obama to act, Fred and Steve went out of their way to praise him.

“This is the first time in history we’ve ever had a president who cared so deeply about climate change, and he has done an awful lot, more than any president has done before,” Fred said. They cited strong EPA mileage standards for cars, money for clean tech in the stimulus package and last month’s Oval Office speech on energy and climate.

“But the truth is we need him to do one more thing,” Fred continued. “We need him and his staff to directly engage in the politics and policy to actually produce a bill.”

“If he doesn’t do that, without his leadership, then everything he has done so far will lead to nothing.”

While EDF has proven willing to compromise, the group won’t support legislation without a carbon cap. After reading this thought-provoking argument from my friend Jesse Jenkins of the Breakthrough Institute, I asked whether EDF could accept a package of bipartisan measures that include renewable portfolio standards, energy efficiency rules, a broad electric-car initiative, money to stimulate clean energy research and “cash for dirty-coal-plant clunkers” program, absent a cap.

No, they replied, because if the U.S. doesn’t limit its CO2 emissions, it will be impossible to persuade other big countries like China to follow. Besides, an EDF analysis [PDF, for download] of the energy-only Bingaman-Murkowski bill that came out of a Senate committee and included some of those measures showed that it would actually permit emissions to increase over the next decade or so.

“What we absolutely will insist on is an enforceable, declining limit on carbon pollution coming from these big smokestacks,” Fred said.

For all the setbacks of the past couple of years, and even this week–several reporters mentioned that the White House now seems to be shifting its focus to immigration–Fred won’t allow himself to believe that the long crusade to stop global warming will fail.

Repeating a mantra of all the green groups, he said climate-change legislation is inevitable.

“There are a lot of reasons in this world to be cynical,” he said.  “But are you so cynical as to believe that human beings are going to pollute the planet to the point where we can’t survive anymore?”

Well, no, but it’s getting harder all the time to see how we–not just the Congress, but China, India, Russia and the rest of the world–are going to act quickly and firmly enough to do what needs to be done to curb global warming.

Fred and those Timex watches may be indestructible but human life on this earth, alas, is not.

Talking about the Gulf oil disaster in a speech last week at Carnegie Mellon University, President Obama said we need an energy-and-climate bill because

the only way the transition to clean energy will ultimately succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future — if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed.  And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.

Now, many businesses have already embraced this idea because it provides a level of certainty about the future.  And for those that face transition costs, we can help them adjust.  But if we refuse to take into account the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction — if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and the national security costs and the true economic costs — we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.

The House of Representatives has already passed a comprehensive energy and climate bill, and there is currently a plan in the Senate — a plan that was developed with ideas from Democrats and Republicans — that would achieve the same goal… the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.  (Applause.)  I will continue to make the case for a clean energy future wherever and whenever I can.  (Applause.)  I will work with anyone to get this done — and we will get it done.

“We will get it done.” Wow. Sounds good. The question is, when will the president’s actions match his words?

“He hasn’t begun to fight,” declares Eric Pooley, the author of The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers and Fight to Save the Earth (Hyperion, $27.99), a terrific new book on the politics of global warming.

“I hope he will,” Eric adds. After spending three years closely following the campaign to get climate and energy legislation through Congress, Eric says: “The missing ingredient here has been presidential leadership.”

How true. And even in this speech–which has won praise from environmentalists–Obama manages to avoid using the words “global warming” or “climate change,” as David Roberts noted in Grist. Bold leadership this is not.

Eric Pooley

Eric is my former boss at FORTUNE, and he’s now the deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He’s a good reporter and a smart guy but I have to say that I wasn’t planning to reading this 481-page book (including notes and an index) about the repeated, failed attempts to get a climate bill through Congress. Why suffer through that again? But once I began reading, I couldn’t stop. Eric found a way to tell the story by bringing the climate crusaders to life–especially Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense Fund, Jim Rogers of Duke Energy and Al Gore–and by taking readers behind the scenes on Capitol Hill and into the  strategy sessions of the green groups that have labored, not merely for years, but for more than a decade to get the U.S. government to impose a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Hard to believe that a book about Congress, climate policy, utility companies and environmentalists, with Al Gore in a lead role, could be a page turner, but there you have it.

Better yet, even as someone who has paid attention to the politics of climate, I found fresh insights in The Climate War. Among them:

If what you care about is curbing global warming, the whole brouhaha over whether permits to emit CO2 should be auctioned or allocated–a major debating point among politicians, business people and policy wonks–is pretty much irrelevant. That’s because the allocations-auctions debate, besides being hard for the public to grasp, and therefore off-putting, is about who should pay for the transition to clean energy. Should customers of coal companies pay more than those of nuclear power or hydro plants? Should government or private industry finance research into so-called clean coal, or subsidize  high-cost solar power? Those are important political questions but as Eric writes:

The “targets and timetables”–the mandatory declining limit on global warming pollution — was the point of the enterprise, and whether the EPA ended up selling or giving away allowances had no impact on that.

In other words, the attacks on the bill as a giveaway to polluters from the likes of MoveOn.org were mostly a sideshow.

People (including me) who complained that Waxman-Markey bill, which stretched to more than 1,000 pages, was laden with favors for special interests, giveaways to industry and needlessly complex missed the point. Time magazine’s Joe Klein, for instance, called the bill “a demonstration of all that’s wrong with the legislative process in latter-day America.” To the contrary, says Eric:

Despite its flaws and contortions, it was a demonstration of much that was right. The bill didn’t get complicated because legislators were cutting unsavory deals with corporate lobbyists. It got complicated because lawmakers and, yes, corporate lobbyists were working together with environmentalists and labor unions to arrive at a grand bargain that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions without punishing consumers or corporations.

Indeed, Henry Waxman, the architect of the measure, emerges as one of the heroes in the book because he was able to win the support of powerful legislators from coal country (Rick Boucher) and Detroit (John Dingell) for his bill. With Ted Kennedy gone, it’s not clear there’s anyone with the skills needed to carry such a complex  bill through the Senate.

Transformational politics, not transactional politics, may be needed to get climate legislation done. In today’s political climate, the compromises and complexities of Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Lieberman, along with the dubious rhetoric of “green jobs” and “energy independence,” may well be the best hope for getting climate legislation passed.

An imperfect bill is better than nothing, Eric says:  “You’ve got to take a step before you can run a race. You need to start.” Even putting a modest price on carbon will unleash investment, and demonstrate that a cap on emissions will not squeeze middle-class families or imperil the economy.

But if the incremental, pragmatic, lets-make-a-deal approach fails yet again–and it’s my belief that it probably will–what’s called for a bigger vision, one that calls upon Americans to sacrifice for the common good and the well-being of future generations. This appeal to our better natures would, of course, have to be accompanied by old-fashioned, grass-roots political organizing in communities, churches and on campuses to build a movement to stop global warming.

Only then will we be able to close what Eric describes as “the gulf between what the science said was necessary and what the politics said was possible.”

With apologies to Bill McKibben and Al Gore, the person best equipped to lead such a movement is Barack Obama. He has the skill, but he has yet to show that he has the will. One of the most striking things about The Climate War how not just Obama but Steven Chu, Carol Browner and Lisa Jackson barely get a mention. (Van Jones, now gone, does appear in a cameo role.) Partly that’s because Eric didn’t get much access to the White House, but mostly it’s because they have had little impact on the big job of getting legislation passed.

The Gulf Oil disaster could be the crisis that’s needed to galvanize action. We’ll soon see. When Eric began working on The Climate War, he expected to write about the passage of a bill sometime before the summit last December in Copenhagen. Now, he says, “maybe there’ll be an ending in the paperback.”

Until now, Walmart’s bold sustainability efforts were marred by a glaring omission.

The $405-billion a year retailer has worked hard since 2005 to save energy, reduce waste and sell more sustainable products.

But it resisted pressures to reduce or hold steady its own greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, its carbon emissions have grown, as the middle graphic below shows. (There’s a cleaner version in WMT’s responsibility report, here.) When it comes to global warming, Walmart would appear to be doing more harm now than it was three or five years ago.

Today, Walmart made its first major commitment to reduce greenhouse gases–although, in typical WMT fashion, rather than set a tough goal that might affect its own growth curve, the company plans to turn up the pressure on its thousands of suppliers to reduce their emissions.

Here’s how a press release from Walmart and its lead environmental partner, Environmental Defense Fund, explained it:

Walmart today announced a goal to eliminate 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from its global supply chain by the end of 2015. This represents one and a half times the company’s estimated global carbon footprint growth over the next five years and is the equivalent of taking more than 3.8 million cars off the road for a year.

The footprint of Walmart’s global supply chain is many times larger than its operational footprint and represents a more impactful opportunity to reduce emissions.

You can think of this as the biggest carbon offset in global history, and I’m being only partly facetious when I say that.

Walmart wants to grow–the company is expanding in the U.S., and elsewhere in the world–and it will likely grow its own carbon footprint, directly and indirectly, as it sells more stuff and builds new stores, most in suburbs and rural areas, surrounding by acres of parking.  But the companies that supply WMT–that is, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Clorox, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, General Mills, Sony, Apple, HP, Dell and hundreds more, all of whom must be wondering about their carbon emissions right now–will be asked to make things more efficiently, use less energy, buy more recycled content and the like.

As Leslie Dach, a top Wal-Mart executive, put: “It is really a Wal-Mart approach to solving a problem…The size and scale of this company can be put to use to make a real difference in the world.”

That’s no doubt a good thing. Better, as one of my sources told me, to improve practices at 10,000 factories around the world than simply to make WMT’s operations more efficient.  “Sensational” was how Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense Fund, described it, during a lovefest with Walmart CEO Mike Duke, which was webcast on Treehugger, of all places.

Duke praised EDF, saying: “Our NGO partners have pushed us and been patient with us.”

Krupp returned the favor. EDF has planted two staffers in Bentonville, Arkansas, to work closely with WMT, and he said: “I don’t think there’s any better money we are spending anywhere.”

Specifics about how the carbon reduction effort would work were few, understandably so since it is new.  “This is uncharted waters,” said Elizabeth Sturcken of EDF. (Here is her excellent analysis, with some detail on initiatives in packaging and around dairy products.) Right now, there’s little data available to measure the carbon impacts of the products that Wal-Mart sells, particularly if you want to include how they are made, shipped, used and thrown away, as WMT does.

Walmart said it would start with the products that have the most “embedded carbon” and seek GHG reductions thatn are “economically viable.” The company has already had success getting suppliers to use smaller packages, from concentrated detergents to lighter-weight DVD cases.

Walmart itself, though, wants to get bigger. Duke was straightforward about this. “We are a growth company,” he said. “We want to add square footage. That’s the reality of our business.”

Critics are unsatisfied. Here’s reaction from Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher with the New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance:

By focusing on suppliers, Wal-Mart continues to deflect attention from the enormous greenhouse gas implications of its own business model. Wal-Mart is rapidly expanding in China, Mexico, and other countries, where it is destroying neighborhood businesses and replacing them with an auto-oriented form of big-box shopping that is highly polluting. Under Wal-Mart, local and regional systems of economic production and distribution are giving way to global supply chains, which almost invariably means longer distances and greater fuel consumption.

She’s got a point, but the story is more complicated, for a couple of reasons. (Warning: geeky analysis ahead.) First, look at the graphic on the far right, above. Walmart is reducing its GHG emissions per unit of sales, meaning that it’s more efficient. So, if its competitors are not doing as well in terms of efficiency, and if it takes market share away, then it’s possible that WMT can sell more stuff and the planet will be better off. For example, if Walmart sells lots of Fair Trade coffee, and the locally-owned convenience store around the corner sells less conventional coffee, that’s a good thing. Local isn’t necessarily better.

Second, and paradoxically, Walmart is actually becoming more local. For example, Walmart has made a concerted effort to buy more from local farmers. Corby Kummer has a terrific article about this in the current Atlantic, in which he asks: Will Walmart and not Whole Foods save the Small Farm and Make America Healthy? The company, he reports, “wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states.” Best quote in the story is from Michelle Harvey of EDF who says: “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.”

True enough. Nevertheless, in my ideal world, Walmart would set a cap on its own emissions, sell used goods as well as new, nudge people to buy vegetables instead of meat, and share profits with its workers.  In today’s world, Walmart will try to grow (profits) and shrink (pollution) at the same time. That’s about all we can ask of a big company until we, collectively, can find a way to decouple economic growth from environmental harm. That’s a job too big even for Walmart.

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.

That’s how author and sustainability guru Paul Hawken responded when I asked him during FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green why a small-is-beautiful guy agreed to work for huge companies like Wal-Mart and Ford. And I like to think that’s why nearly 300 business executives, NGO leaders, activists and government types came to our conference on business and the environment earlier this week. They were a diverse and occasionally disputatious group, which is exactly what we want: We had speakers from Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, as well as Big Oil , the nuclear industry and American Electric Power, the nation’s No. 1 emitter of global warming pollution. But while there was disagreement over what path to take, there was broad consensus that business needs to find ways to become more sustainable.

Here are some of my takeaways from the event. One caveat—the quotes below were taken down on the run and may not be word-for-word perfect but they are close.

Bill Clinton doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. Where do you find the former president these days? Occasionally, mucking around in the waste of cities like Lima, Mexico City and Lagos. “Whenever I think of an urban landfill, I see it not just as an eyesore and a contributor to global warming but a source of great wealth,” Clinton said, during the closing plenary. His Clinton Global Initiative on climate change, he explained, is training scavengers in Lima to be recycling workers, given them a salary and health care and encouraging them to become part of a “new industry in glass and metals.”

Clinton’s speech was a state-of-the-union style laundry list, long on details/solutions. He got all charged up about energy efficiency (hard to do) as he talked about retrofitting the Empire State Building, described extensive efforts to get cities to curb their carbon emissions and explained how he is helping to  make college campuses more efficient. “The most important thing you can do if you are not a member of the U.S. Congress,” he told the crowd, “is to show that the change we are all seeking is good economics.” He had a couple of odd ideas, suggesting that the states of Nevada and Arizona or maybe a Caribbean nation become “energy independent” to show the world that it’s possible. Clinton looked good, by the way—he wore a pair of Texas cowboy boots and hustled out of the hotel after his speech and a photo session to squeeze in a round of golf.

Some big problems, corporate America can’t solve. Fisk Johnson of SC Johnson, Jeff Hollender of Seventh Generation, Bill Valentine of HOK (big architecture firm) and Carl Bass of Autodesk (design company) joined me for a panel called Re-Imagining Consumption. The question put before them was simple but important: How can companies grow their revenues and profits while shrinking their environmental footprint? I thought we’d get into a conversation about cradle-to-cradle products that companies sell, or new business models like ZipCar. But we veered into a discussion of overconsumption after someone mentioned he oft-cited fact that Americans make up roughly 5% of the world’s population and consume 25% of its resources. That’s obviously a problem, and since companies are invented to solve problems, I ask them if there is a business opportunity there. They couldn’t see one although Bill Valentine said HOK often asks its clients whether they really need a new building, Carl Bass said  Autodesk is incorporating sustainability questions into its software, and Fisk and Jeff both talking about “greening” their products and packaging.  The truth us, it’s hard to imagine even progressive companies (except for recycling firms) coming up with products, services or new business models around buying less stuff. This tough job is probably best left to parents or religious leaders.

Environmentalists should reconsider nuclear power. I’m told there was a long and animated dinner conversation one night during which two leading thinkers of the sustainability movement—Janine Benyus of biomimicry fame and Ray Anderson of Interface–peppered Alan Hanson, an executive from Areva, the big French nuclear power company, with probing questions about nuclear power. I was pleased to hear that because I’ve thought for some time that environmentalists need to rethink their almost-religious opposition to nuclear power. (I’m going to write about this in more detail next week.)

If the problem of climate change threatens the very existence of human life on this planet (and it does), shouldn’t we reconsider nukes? Of course we should. We’re going to need baseload power and while a combination of efficiency, renewables and battery storage might get us where we need to go under a best-case scenario, I don’t want to bet the planet’s future on a best-case scenario. It’s likely we’ll face a choice between nuclear and so-called cleaner coal. I’m not sure where I come down on that.

During a panel on nuclear power (read David Whitford’s account here) that focused on its costs, I learned that Steven Chu, the energy secretary, is an advocate for nuclear while Carol Browner, the climate czar, is an opponent. President Obama has punted on the issue—he hasn’t said much of anything, at least according to our panelists. While Browner’s the more powerful figure in D.C., Chu is a brilliant and impressive guy, not to mention the only cabinet member with a Nobel Prize. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when they and Obama get together to talk about nukes.

I’m still not convinced about green jobs. Van Jones, the White House green jobs czar, spoke at Brainstorm Green and he managed to be both inspiring and utterly charming. But he couldn’t come up with a clear-cut definition of a green job. That’s not surprising. Consider the farmer who grows corn for popcorn. He’s a mere farmer. His buddy up the road who grows corn for ethanol? Green job, I presume.

Clinton, too, has hopped on the green jobs bandwagon: “I’ve always believed that work is the best social program,” he said. “Saving the planet from the threat of climate change will create more jobs, more ideas, more interdependence than anything else we can do.”

Hmm. Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund said the best economic studies about the impact of a cap-and-trade program to regulate greenhouse gases project that the long-term impact on GDP will be very, very slight. But if GHG regulation has even a slight negative effect on GDP, how can it create more jobs?

It’s time to stop feeling guilty about business travel. Brainstorm Green was held at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California—a spectacular place overlooking the Pacific. We had some fabulous meals—prepared by organic chefs—and I got up early to run (a little) each day. At night, I opened the door to my hotel room and fell asleep to the sounds of the waves and an ocean breeze.

As it happens, we were at ground zero for the crisis in business travel. Next door was a St. Regisl where AIG held a meeting last fall that made national news and led to the cancellations of hundreds of business meetings. Luxury hotels and their working-class employees are suffering. What’s good about that?

More important, there was value in getting 300 people together in a relaxing place for a couple of days to talk about things that matter. We learned. We met new people. We built relationships. We showcased leading thinkers and doers, perhaps inspiring others. Maybe a startup that needed money raised some. We may live in an always-connected, everything-linked world, but you can’t do those things very well on email or over the phone or in a video conference.

No, not the Buffalo Bills. The exciting news is that Bill Clinton and Bill Ford have agreed to speak at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference, about business and the environment, next month.

Former President Clinton will speak on Wednesday, April 22–Earth Day, Wednesday. Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor, will be with us on the opening afternoon of the conference, Monday, April 20. We’ll be at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Beach, CA. Here’s the current agenda—always subject to change.

I’m feeling good about this year’s programs after months of planning. We’ve got some smart CEOs who are in the thick of the upcoming debate in Washington about climate change, people like Mike Morris of American Electric Power, David Crane of NRG Energy (who was terrific last year), Jim Rogers of Duke Energy and Peter Darbee of PG&E (another returnee, and a very forward-thinking exec). We’ll also welcome Fisk Johnson, the CEO of SCJ Johnson, one of the most progressive CEOs in America when it comes to environmental issues, and the pioneering Jeffrey Hollender, founder and CEO of Seventh Generation (and a board member of Greenpeace). Michael Kowalski, the CEO of Tiffany & C0., will describe the company’s pathbreaking effort to try to make the mining industry more responsible—no easy task. CEOs John Brock of Coca Cola Enterprises and Carl Bass of Autodesk will also speak, along with senior execs from GE, IBM, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, P&G, and Coca-Cola. We’ll have CEOs oif solar, wind and biofuels companies, too.

On our opening night, I’ll lead a conversation with Paul Hawken, one of my favorite writers on business and the environment. He’s always provocative, and his talk is being called, “Green is the New Business as Usual—and that’s a problem.” From the NGO world, we’ll have Fred Krupp and Gwen Ruta of Environmental Defense, Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy, David Hawkins of NRDC, Van Jones of Green for All and many more.

If past Brainstorm events are any indication, though, Clinton will steal the show. He came to a couple of the original Brainstorm events in Aspen after leaving the White House, and he was mesmerizing. Should be fun.