You can think about global warming as a now-and-later problem. Governments need to take unpopular actions now to deal with a problem that will do most of its damage later. Businesses need to look beyond the next quarter to the next quarter century.

This evening in Elsinore, Denmark, top executives from such companies as Coca-Cola, Duke Energy, Goldman Sachs and Google took the long view in a fitting venue: Kronborg Castle, a 15th century castle best known as the setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Sitting in a magnificent castle that’s been preserved for six centuries makes you wonder what impact the goings-on on Copenhagen this week will have on the world in 60 or even 600 years.

In that context, it seems prudent to invest now to insure against a climate catastrophe, no matter how distant–even if the short-term result is  a slight drag on short-term economic growth

As Tracy Wolstencroft, global head of environmental markets for Goldman Sachs, put it: “The economy is a wholly owed subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.” That is, if we ruin the environment, there’s no economy left.

Or, as Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola said: “It is absolutely imperative that our voices be heard and our commitments to low carbon be fully understood.”

It turns out there’s a big contingent from corporate America in Copenhagen.  Among the high-profile companies here: GE, Microsoft, Cisco, DuPont, Johnson Controls, Nike and North Face. (Here’s a column by Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, about efforts by some companies to lobby for a strong climate deal.)  Not surprisingly, most favor a global agreement to regulate carbon emissions.

A strong agreement, they said, will drive companies  to make the investments needed to usher in low-carbon economy.

As an example, Wolstencroft recalled that China’s five-year released in 2005 made a commitment to low-carbon energy. What followed, he said, was a $5.4 billion acquisition by Toshiba of Westinghouse’s nuclear energy business and capital investments  of another $5 billion in Chinese solar power companies, which have since emerged as world leaders.

“What we hope comes out of Copenhagen,” Wolstencroft said, “are even clearer rules that help give investors the confidence…to put money into clean technology.”

Clean tech, he said, is “one of the largest emerging markets the world has seen.”

Duke Energy’s CEO, Jim Rogers, also said that China has the ability to both plan long-term and act rapidly. “They lead in the production of solar panels and wind turbines,” he said. “They’re building 13 nuclear panels with more on the drawing board. They’re ahead in battery technology.”

Duke has a joint venture with a Chinese firm to build a coal plant that, if all goes according to plan, will capture and store carbon emissions.

“The Chinese can scale and deploy this faster than in the U.S.,” Rogers said. Duke’s investment in so-called clean coal won’t pay off in the short run, he said, “but we need a full-court press to make that a reality.”

Google, too, is investing in energy and climate projects with long-term horizons, said Dan Reicher, the firm’s climate guru. Its engineers have reconfigured Toyota Priuses into plug-in electric cars, and they are deploying Google Earth software to track deforestation.

Google’s Power Meter, which is being tested with utilities around the world, gives consumers real-time information about their electricity use, to incentivize them to conserve energy. Waving his cell phone, Reicher said: “I can get information about electricity use at my home in California on this smart phone.”

Several of the execs noted that many low-carbon technologies are available today, albeit at a price. Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from wind turbines, but wind-powered electricity costs more than coal-fired power. Denmark also has big plans for electric cars, but they require just-as-big government subsidies.

In theory, at least, there’s a future payback for those current outlays. Anders Eldrup, president and CEO of Copenhaven-based Dong Energy, which has 1 million customers in northern Europe and is shutting down many of its coal plants, says clean energy technology has surpassed agriculture as Denmark’s leading export.

While there’s no way to know for sure, my sense is that the companies here in Copenhagen don’t reflect the mainstream of corporate America, where big lobbies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers oppose the climate bills pending in Congress. They’d rather pay later than pay now.

That’s a big a gamble, of course. It’s been a long time since I studied Hamlet but, to the best of my recollection, at the end of the play, just about everybody dies.

Let's hope the Copenhagen climate talks are not much ado about nothing

Of all the companies in the U.S., Duke Energy is the 3^rd largest emitter of CO2. Of all the companies in the world, Duke is the 12^th biggest emitter. And if North Carolina-based Duke were a country, it would rank No. 41 in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, ahead of entire nations in Europe, Africa and Asia.

And yet…Jim Rogers, Duke’s longtime president, CEO and chairman, is pushing as hard as anyone in corporate America to get a climate-change bill passed by Congress. His company helped the U.S. Climate Action Partnership get going, and he was key in getting some (but not all) utility-company CEOs to support carbon regulation.

“We’re very focused on legislation getting done in the U.S. this year,” Rogers says.

Indeed, Duke is “operating today as if climate legislation has already passed,” Rogers says. The company is investing in nuclear power, cleaner coal, wind, smart grid technology, efficiency and solar energy. Rogers says:

We’re in the most transformative period in the history of the power industry, Our mission is to decarbonize our entire fleet.

I sat down with Rogers last weekend after he spoke at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s a pleasure to interview—he answers questions, he’s direct and he’s charming. (He used to be a newspaper reporter so he knows how to tell a story, too. You can listen to excerpts of our talk in a podcast at The Energy Collective, where I’m a lead blogger. ) By the end of our conversation, I had a better understanding of why Rogers and Duke have become advocates of a cap-and-trade scheme to regulate global warming pollution.

Rogers, who is 62, has been a utility-company CEO since 1988. He’s also been a consumer advocate (as an assistant attorney general in Kentucky) and a federal regulator (at the FERC) so he sees issues from different perspectives.  More important, Duke Energy is, for the most part, a regulated utility—meaning that its major investments and electricity rates must be approved by state public utility regulators. So if Rogers can convince those regulators that his investments in low-carbon power generation make sense, he should be able to make a good return.

“Moving to a low carbon world is an earnings opportunity for me,” Rogers said. “If I have to retrofit my fleet, that’s earnings growth.” That’s assuming, of course, that state regulators will permit him to raise rates for customers to cover the costs of renewable power, cleaner coal or new nuclear plants.

This helps explain why Rogers doesn’t try to pretend that the transition to a low-carbon world will be easy or cost-free. He needs to set the stage for future price increases that he knows are an inevitable. He says:

As we transform, as we invest in renewables, as we invest in smart grid, as we invest in retiring existing plants  and building new plants, the price of electricity is going to go up.

Certainly Duke’s plans are ambitious. The company wants to spend about $20 billion to build two nuclear plants, whose ownership would be shared with other utilities and major customers. “Nuclear is key to our ability to produce baseload electricity with zero greenhouse gas emissions,” Rogers says.

Duke also plans to build two coal plants, at a cost of $5 billion, one in Indiana that would be designed so that it could capture and store carbon, the other a conventional but highly-efficient plant in North Carolina. The North Carolina plant, called Cliffside, has generated lots of opposition, but Rogers says it’s needed to enable him to shut older plants that generate more local pollutants.

“I have to balance affordability, reliability and clean,” he says.

Duke also would like to invest about $1.5 billion in gas combined-cycle plants, which have lower emissions than coal plants, another $1 billion on wind farms spread across 14 states, another $1 billion on so-called smart grid technology and smaller amounts on rooftop solar, biomass and landfill gas. The company is also aggressively promoting energy efficiency to homeowners and businesses.

Interestingly, Rogers confounds critics at both extremes of the energy and climate debate. Some other utility-company CEOs think he has been too quick to embrace carbon regulation, while environmentalists fault him not only for wanting to build new coal plants but for his blunt talk about costs and skepticism about the claim that carbon regulation will create “green jobs.”

“I think it’s a mistake for us to talk about the green jobs that will be created from renewables,”  he says.  “We run the risk of misleading the America people.”

Rogers can’t afford to promise more than Duke can deliver, if only because he needs to prepare his regulators and customers for the shocks ahead. Indeed it’s striking the degree to which Duke’s business depends on elected officials and regulators in Washington and the state capitals who make energy and climate policy, set utility rates and determine his rate of return.

“I say to people that I’m in the power business,” Rogers observes.

“Electricity is only a byproduct.”

Not everyone loves Jim Rogers and Duke

In the latest sign that China takes the threat of global warming seriously, Chinese business executives with close ties to the government have launched a voluntary market in Beijing to buy and sell carbon credits.

Just don’t call it cap-and-trade, which is the regulatory approach embodied in the climate legislation pending in the U.S. Congress. The “cap” part of cap-and-trade remains anathema in China. As a developing country where billions of people earn less than $3,000 a year, China simply won’t accept mandatory limits on its emissions of greenhouse gases.

David Yarnold, Environmental Defense Fund

But the Chinese have enlisted western partners to build a market that will, as they put it, “limit and incentivize.” The theory is that a voluntary market in carbon credits will limit emissions by providing financial incentives to Chinese companies to develop renewable energy, promote energy efficiency and, above all, find environmentally-friendly ways to burn coal. Some of that money would come from outside China and would would come from within.

This could lay the groundwork for a mandatory market in the not-too-distant future.

That, at least, was my takeaway from a Low Carbon Conference held today in New York that brought together leaders of the world’s big stock exchanges, energy industry executives, environmentalists and experts in carbon finance. [Disclosure: I hosted the event for BlueNext, a French company that recently announced a partnership with the China Beijing Environmental Exchange to develop carbon trading in China.] Not surprisingly, the Chinese are looking for money from the west, specifically from companies and governments looking to offset their emissions. They argue that they can reduce emissions faster and cheaper than the U.S. or the EU. But they also expect to raise money from businesses and individuals in China that care about climate change.

One company represented at the event, the Tianping Insurance Company, has said it will become China’s first carbon neutral business, in part by buying credits. It bought its first credits last month.

David Yarnold, the executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, which has worked with the Chinese to develop a carbon market, put things in perspective nicely:

This new partnership between Wall Street and the Great Wall flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

Today, you will witness tired conventional wisdom drawing its last breath. You will learn that China is no laggard in the race to develop clean energy and reduce global warming pollution. In fact, it is moving ahead.

Just five years ago, who would have thought that the New York Stock Exchange would be hosting a meeting on carbon trading? Who would have thought that China would have an environmental exchange?

Of course, it’s no surprise that Yarnold and business-friendly EDF, which pioneered emissions trading in the U.S. during the first Bush administration, would endorse a market-based solution to climate change. As he put it:

Many believe markets are the source of environmental problems.  They think that the relentless search for profit that leads to the sacrifice of the environment and that money is the root of all environmental evil.  In contrast, here we are, convening to assess how markets can be put to the service of environmental protection, how markets can be the engine of innovation that will support the growth of the new low carbon economy.

What was striking was to hear Chinese executives like Xiong Yan, chairman of the China Beijing Environmental Exchange, who has impeccable Communist Party credentials, wholeheartedly agree that banks like Merrill Lynch and Citi and utilities like Duke Energy need to help solve the climate crisis. Merrill, Citi and Duke were all invited to speak by the Chinese, who shaped the agenda for the event.

While there was lots of talk about wind, solar and efficiency, the conversation – like so many conversations about climate – inevitably kept coming back to the question of coal. China gets about 80% of its electricity from coal. The U.S. gets about 50%.

Jim Rogers, Duke Energy

“Coal binds the U.S. and China together,” said Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, a major coal-burning utility as well as a supporter of a mandatory U.S. carbon cap. “Our challenge is to find a way to use coal in a low carbon world.”

Duke is betting on the technology of carbon capture and sequestration. By contrast, a Chinese coal executive touted the virtues of using algae to absorb CO2 emissions. Whatever technology proves to be most effective–assuming clean coal is more than a distant chimera–ought to be shared quickly and widely, U.S. and Chinese execs said.

For more on China’s role this week in New York, where President Hu Jintao addressed the United Nations, see Is China Turning Into the Climate Good Guy? by Time’s Bryan Walsh and Are Chinese Emissions Pledges a Game Changer for Senate Action? at Joe Romm’s Climate Progress.

Helping to create Brainstorm Green was a highlight of my 12 years at FORTUNE, and I’m pleased that I’ll be back this year, co-chairing the event with my colleague Brian Dumaine, FORTUNE’s global editor. The program for this year’s Brainstorm Green is still a work in progress, but a group of us got a draft agenda down on paper last week and I’m confident that it will again be a lively, exciting, information-packed event. The theme, once again, will be: How can business help solve the world’s biggest environmental problems?

We’ll discuss and debate climate change regulation, “clean coal,” nuclear power, electric cars, the smart grid, investing in green, renewable energy, sustainable consumption (if there is such a thing), carbon finance and too many other topics to list here.

What makes Brainstorm Green special is the diversity of the crowd. This year, we’ll again hear from many of America’s most important environmental leaders, including Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense, Glenn Prickett of Conservation International, Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy (who was there last year on behalf of Goldman Sachs), David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Mindy Lubber of Ceres and Mike Brune of Rainforest Action Network. At least two dozen CEOs of big and medium-sized companies have agreed to speak, including Shai Agassi of Better Place (the electric car company), Ray Anderson of Interface, Carl Bass of Autodesk, David Crane of NRG Energy, Jeff Hollender of Seventh Generation, Fisk Johnson of S.C. Johnson, Donald Knauss of Clorox, Mike Morris of American Electric Power, Ralph Peterson of CH2M Hill, Jim Rogers of Duke Energy and Tom Werner of SunPower.

Other companies sending speakers include Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, Mars, Intel, Boeing, McKinsey, the private-equity firm KKR and architectural firm HOK. That list is sure to grow.

We’ll also be joined by speakers whose ideas are shaping the sustainability debate. I’m looking forward to spending time with Paul Hawken, whose books have shaped much of my own thinking about business and the environment. The dynamic Van Jones, who is profiled in the current issue of The New York by Betsy Kolbert,  will talk about green jobs. The always-inspiring Janine Benyus, who spoke last year, will be back to show us how biomimicry works in practice. My friend Joel Makower, the guru of green business and author of Strategies for the Green Economy, will return as well.

Venture capitalists from some of America’s top firms and entrepreneurs touting exciting startups will round out the group. We’re hoping to attract senior officials from the new Obama administration as well.

You can find a full list of speakers on the Brainstorm Green website. That’s also the best place to propose new speakers or to sign up for the event. (FORTUNE screens all participants.) We’ll meet in a beautiful setting—the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel, CA, and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you blogreaders there.