After mooning a group of rowdy students to get their attention, Antanas Mockus resigned from the top job at the National University of Colombia. His next job was in a classroom with six million students: the city of Bogotá, which elected him Mayor for two terms. Inspired by the relationship between formal and informal rules, Mayor Mockus deployed 420 mimes to make fun of traffic violators. Traffic fatalities dropped 50 per cent. During a water shortage, he showered with his wife on TV to promote water conservation. Water usage dropped 40 per cent. Noticing that people feel safer with more women on the street, he launched a “Night for Women” series asking the men to stay at home and care for the children: 700,000 women came out on the first night of the series, and backed up by 7000 community security groups, homicide rates fell 70 per cent. At the time of writing, Mockus is on a short list of two to be President of Columbia, a nation of 44 million people, as—no joke—the Green Party candidate.

Meanwhile, on a global level, the most powerful and entrenched forces of our society have woken up to the seismic shifts that are redefining the relationship between the environment and the economy from zero-sum to win-win. The church, the mafia and big-shot lobbyists are all chasing the shiny green buck. The Archbishop of Canterbury is one of the biggest investors in Al Gore’s eco-friendly Generation Investment Management; guess who has cornered the Sicilian wind market; and from Washington’s K street to Rahim Jaffer, beltway banditry now includes shilling for green businesses.

The green revolution even extends to ExxonMobil, who is positioned to inherit the low-carbon future, possessing more low-carbon patents than any other company in the world (see Chatham House report: Who owns our low-carbon future?). And the inside scoop on why China stymied a deal at Copenhagen: not because they are afraid of the low-carbon future, but because they want to own it by stalling things a few years while they rapidly close in on global green R&D leadership. As China’s lead climate change negotiator, Su Wei, told me in a stuffy tent this past December: “We have a saying in China. A feast is worth waiting for.”

But just because the big boys are getting on board the green economy express doesn’t mean we’re in the clear.