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On day two at the Clinton Global initiative the big draw for the Eco-minded was Al Gore, presiding over a panel on Innovation (capital i intentional).

The panelists — former Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunis, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala the Managing Director of The World Bank Group, and a surprisingly charismatic (if a little over energized for the Al Gore vibe) Jack Ma, Chairman and CEO of the Alibaba Group — introduced a concept that I have heard before, but found interesting when embraced on this scale: that the process of Greening is simply not going to cut it when it comes to battling the environmental crisis. We need to “disruptively innovate”, leapfrogging over the current technology and changing the ways that we do business. Now.

This really isn’t a new concept — Nordhaus and Shellenberger said the same thing in Break Through — but hearing it embraced at the highest level of the movement was eye-opening. If thinkers are really moving past the idea of conservation and regulation as the spearheads of the environmental movement, then I think we are finally moving the public discourse in the right direction.

Lets be clear: no one on the stage was saying don’t worry about recycling, or changing your light bulbs. But innovation at CGI is made of sterner stuff. The scale we are working on here is something Gore called “sustainable capitalism”.

In short, that means that Gore is putting a very shiny happy face on Cap and Trade legislation. Sustainable Capitalism is much like our system now, but with the correct* externalities built into the system. Getting an accurate dollar value on what Carbon should cost us is one part of the equation, but so are positive externalities like the societal benefit derived from education. We need — according to this prestigious panel — to make capitalism responsive to the things that actually matter in life.

A one or two sentence synopsis of how:

• Al Gore: Call Your Senator. The U.S. Senate, and the current Cap and Trade legislation is going to go a long way toward making the market responsible to the right things. Plus, that whole “If you pay someone to maximize their earnings every quarter, that’s what they will do” problem with Capitalism.
• Muhammad Yunis: Teach, and then fund, Social Businesses: businesses that aren’t dedicated to making money for themselves, but rather for supporting a community.
• Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: We need to look at how we can build private partnerships more. Then, we need to make sure that we don’t just give aid, but that those partnerships are leveraged into real change. (translation: CGI, with it’s huge private organizations and their huge philanthropic promises, is doing alright.)
• Jack Ma: Don't complain about what business doesn’t do, take some sort of real action. If you bury the social responsibility deep in the business model, and just run a good business, everything else falls into place.

I know that I am ignoring Judith Rodin, from the Rockefeller foundation. Her contributions to this panel were fascinating, just not on topic for my own little focus.

The moral of this panel, though, is very much in line with the big picture ideas of CGI in general. At one point, Okonjo-Iweala mentioned the difficulty of Africa supporting a population that would need double the food by 2050… and is currently experiencing soil qualities in different parts of the continent that resemble the American dust bowl.

Within 30 seconds, Gore had made the connection back to getting carbon back into the soil, turning it back into the rich dark fertile soil of yore. 30 seconds later, someone mentioned over Twitter that Zainab Slabi, the CEO of Women for Women International who was in the plenary earlier in the morning made the point that it is impossible to address the food crisis without working with the people doing the farming and that 80% of the world's farmers are women. This sort of lighting connection thing is going on all around me, and it’s really exciting. Now, if only we can keep identifying solutions and not the interconnected web of crisis…

*as seen by folks who worry about pollution

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[Editor's note: This is the first post from Alan Smith, a New York-based political junkie and media consultant. Alan will filing reports from this week's Clinton Global Initiative that coincides with the opening of the UN General Assembly. When not fighting the good fight, Alan writes at Living the American Green. Alan is also live-tweeting from CGI as @Americangreen. -TH]

Let it never be said that Bill Clinton doesn’t tackle the big ideas head on. The ideas here at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative are all so big that they are straining against the (admittedly luxurious) confines of the Sheraton Hotel.

Basically, this entire event feels like a giant version of Match.com for people with money to meet people with ideas. It’s exciting, and all week we are going to be hearing about the promises that everyone is making for the upcoming year. But the press coverage of the event is a little wonky: focused on the names, but not so much on the ideas.

At least on day one, this is Clinton’s show: he’s his usual truth telling self, digging at congress for being unable to figure out healthcare even though Chile can figure it out, and pointing out that Wal-Mart’s recent success proves you can reduce emissions and still make Money.

Clinton mentioned at one point that Australia is the place hit worst by the actual realized effects of Global Warming to date, something that I hadn’t heard before. This, in part, is why I feel like the real environmental take away from the opening ceremonies (which can be forgiven for being light on content) was made by the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. In talking about Australia’s work to combat Global Warming, he said that there are two lines of attack that people take around the globe:

1) That the science is wrong.

2) That focus on reducing C02 emissions it will destroy the economy.

Both of these complaints – regardless of where they crop up, seem fundamentally wrong. Wal-Mart’s CEO was here to tell us that profits have been going great guns as they moved toward ever more C02 conscious plans. Bill Clinton pointed out that 100,000 electric cars are due to be on the roads in Israel before the same number get launched here in the U.S. “Maybe someone can convince me that is going to be a crushing blow to their economy,” Clinton said “but I don’t think so…”

Which leaves point two: science. To quote the man of the hour, WJC: “If we do it right, we will still have created a new economy, made growth more democratic, created new jobs, and pulled us out of a financial tail spin. And that’s even IF THE SCIENCE IS WRONG! (which isn’t a rabbit hole to go down right now)

But the room (and the extra 500 journalists) has basically been buzzing in anticipation of President Obama’s arrival, to give the keynote speech. It’s been a busy day for Obama, from stopping by the U.N. to talk about confronting the Global Environmental Crisis, to calling for a peace accord in the middle east, to hitting up the opening Plenary Session here at the Clinton Global Initiative to inspire a four day period of big crazy ideas. So, I guess he can be forgiven for mailing the speech in a little: It was all about hope, change, and platitudes on civil service, which was jarring coming off the hard talk about commitments to real concrete changes.

Coming back at you all week with new commitments, new ideas, and new hard and fast projects that will save the world…

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