There have been so many programs started and so many issues tackled this week at the Clinton Global Initiative that listing them all here would be useless. I urge you to troll through the site (every session has video available) and check out what amounts to the annual rebirth of corporate philanthropy: Clinton getting companies not to just give money, but to overhaul something dramatic about how they deal with the world.

I want to highlight two of these projects, to give you a sense of the scope of what has been going on here. First up: lets go as big picture as we can.

I spoke with Paul Dickinson, the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of the Carbon Disclosure Project. It’s an independent not-for-profit organization that has corralled a group of 475 big givers (representing nearly $55 trillion in assets) and used their clout to ask companies to reveal their Carbon Footprint.

CDP on it’s own has grown to “Over 2,000 organizations in 66 countries around the world” that measure and disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate change strategies through CDP. And that’s before the Clinton Global Initiative.

Now, they’ve signed on with Microsoft, SAP, and Accentor – the movers and shakers when it comes to global information.

This gives CDP the capacity to become a truly global civil service, one that could be independently minded enough to provide us with the global information we need to set up a international Carbon Market.

Here’s the theory. As we learned before, accounting for externalities in the system is going to be what it takes to get capitalism to correct the environmental problem on a large enough scale. As Paul pointed out to me, global business holds the power (all of the power) to make the changes we need to make, but they just have no reason to do it right now. They don’t make any money at it, and they don’t make their shareholders happy.

Now, here I am, just having heard about “responsible businesses” and “sustainable capitalism”. I don’t want to go back to that dark place with a single terrible bottom line. But Paul made some compelling points: taxation and regulation will compel society to do something about the problem of global warming, and the only way we are going to get enough countries to buy into an agreement like the one we all hope comes out of Copenhagen is if we know how much Carbon is out there. Then, we can put a price on it. Then, the nice folks at General Electric, who really really WANT to reduce their carbon, but can’t find a way to make it work in the budget, will have an offer that they can’t refuse.

“You know what I think” Paul said, near the end of our chat “I think that Global Warming is going to be solved by a couple of Texas billionaires”. Once it becomes worth their while to save the world.

It’s a nice idea, to keep trusting in the system we’ve got, and CDP seems to be pushing people in the right direction by grabbing the dragons by their tails and holding on for dear life.

If you want to know how much your friendly neighborhood mega-conglomerate produces in C02, you should check out the CDP website. It’s all free, easily available, and extremely transparent with it’s methodology. Plus, it’s endorsed by the secretary general of the U.N.

Image via Jurvetson under a CC License

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