The opening plenary featured, among others, World Bank President Robert Zoellick, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, who made a weird pitch for an Afghan pen manufacturer ... which is nice and all, but points out that he doesn't have much incentive to invest what little money his country has into things like carbon mitigation.

Lee Scott, for his part, announced that Wal-Mart would reach its goal of selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs by the end of the year. Nice and all, but it seems to me that Wal-Mart should pledge to only sell compact fluorescent bulbs.

On just that score, Gore made the point that market changes are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for averting the climate crisis. Governments need to be involved. Laws need to be changed. On this subject, Matt Yglesias writes that Clinton's efforts might best be spent convincing "rich guys and executives at big companies to take a more enlightened attitude toward the political process, to return to the sort of public-spirited involvement in public affairs that characterized the business class in the 1950s and 60s."

It's a fair enough point, but the CGI actually encourages both philanthropy and political involvement, even if the focus is on the former.

Of course, if Clinton convinced his wife -- possibly future president of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton -- to take an aggressive stance on this issue (maybe, say, surprise us all with a climate policy as ambitious as her late-in-coming health platform), he could very well advance the cause much, much farther than any number of Global Initiative panels ever will.