Dumping iron

If you take the threat of global warming seriously, all potential solutions—nuclear power, so-called clean coal, even geoengineering—need to be on the table. That's why today's Sustainability column at fortune.com looks at the intriguing, albeit controversial, idea of ocean iron fertilization.

The question: Should we try to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by sprinkling massive amounts of iron dust on the ocean? Dan Whaley is the founder and CEO of a startup company called Climos that wants to do just that. Here's how the column begins:

“Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.”

So said a scientist named John Martin, after he discovered that sprinkling iron dust in the ocean could set off plankton blooms, suck carbon dioxide out of the air and cool a warming planet.

This was 20 years ago, and oceanographers have debated what’s called “ocean iron fertilization” ever since. Never mind that Martin, who died in 1993, later said he was only half-serious. The debate rages on, as a startup company called Climos prepares to build a business by fertilizing the ocean with iron.

Dan will speak next week at FORTUNE's Brainstorm: Green. We have more than 400 people coming to the first-ever Fortune conference devoted to business and the environment. We've got the most important leaders of the environmental movement in America, big-time CEOs, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, a brand-new electric car for people to test drive, the west coast’s hottest organic chefs, Shawn Colvin to sing and Chuck Leavell to play the piano and talk about American forests. It's going to be great!

Carbon finance comes of age

Carbon finance may be the most interesting business that I've ever written about, and it is surely the most important. It is also incredibly complicated and hard to turn into a compelling story. I've spent the last few months trying to understand the business, and my first major story about carbon finance appears in the current issue of FORTUNE (cover date: April 28, cover boy: Warren Buffett), which includes a special section on "The Business of Green." The story was posted on fortune.com today and you can read it here.

There were many challenges in putting this story together, not the least of which was trying to explain the industry to those who know very little about it—most of the U.S. audience of FORTUNE, I'd guess—without dumbing-down the issues for more sophisticated readers. As usual, I would have liked more space but this is an industry that's still relatively small and Eurocentric. It will probably be reinvented when climate-change legislation passes Congress, most likely in 2009. There will, in other words, be many more opportunities to revisit the world of carbon finance.

In the months ahead, the challenge for corporate America will be to work with Congress and NGOs to make sure that we get climate-change legislation "right"—that means coming up with an effective way to create the economic incentives, by putting a price of greenhouse gas emissions, that are needed to move to the U.S. away from fossil fuels and towards a clean-energy economy.

Here's how the story begins:

If all goes according to plan, the business of buying and selling rights to pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases - carbon trading, as it is known - will curb global warming and save the world. That is its only purpose. Along the way, a lot of people will get rich.

Last year traders bought and sold about $60 billion worth of emissions allowances, mostly in Europe and Japan, where governments regulate greenhouse gases. If, as expected, regulation comes to the U.S., this country’s carbon-trading market is expected to be worth $1 trillion annually by 2020. That’s why investment banks, utilities, industrials, and hedge funds - among them GE (GE, Fortune 500), Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), J.P. Morgan Chase (JPNV.L), and AES (AES) - are rushing into the business of carbon finance. To succeed they will have to master what is surely the most bizarre, complicated, and controversial new industry of the 21st century. We’ll try to break it down, beginning with a couple of things any Fortune reader can understand: a pile of pig manure and a private jet.

You can read the rest here.

Loose Lips []

Anthony Minghella's rep has announced that the writer/director died from a brain hemorrhage after undergoing a "routine operation" on his neck. So sad. • Mariah Carey comes across as shockingly down to earth in an interview with Allure. She says she knows people think she's a "ditzy moron" and, of her tumultuous love life, Mariah explains, "Not to quote Swingers, but 'we all have stories.' I got a freakin' miniseries in me." • Heather Mills has hired celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred to be her "advocate" in the United States. [TMZ, Us, DListed]