A banker for global banking giant Nomura Group put it bluntly to a gathering of environmentally conscious entrepreneurs and investors two years ago: “We’re geographically agnostic.”

What she meant on that March 2008 day in Vancouver was that her institution’s money would follow the best green business ideas anywhere in the world. That sentiment is as true today as it was then, before the collapse of capital markets and the birth of the Great Recession.

Whether it's Wal-Mart reducing waste in its supply chain or venture capitalists looking for the next big thing or entrepreneurs like Eric Hansen's Competitive Lawn Services Inc. in Downers Grove, Illinois—just about everyone is competing in the global economy.

Hansen, whose business in the Chicago suburbs is shifting from running on gasoline to cleaner-burning propane, clearly recognizes that. He’s looking internationally for the fuel tanks on his trimmers.

“We need a solution. How about a backpack that can carry propane and operate the trimmers? Can they make them in Norway?” he wonders in a blog post for Portfolio.com’s special report The Great Global Business Adventure.

Shai Agassi, who heads the venture-funded startup Better Place, established the model for his business around the idea that he can do just as the name of his company implies by building the infrastructure that will be necessary for the world to run on electric cars.

Better Place is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. But its business has stretched around the world, with deals to put its electric-car infrastructure—stations for recharging electric cars and swapping batteries—in place in Israel, Denmark, Ontario, Hawaii, and Northern California. Some stations are already up and running in Denmark and Israel.

Bigger Every Day (Especially in China)

Political and diplomatic issues, the flow of money, potential customers, and vendors are global in the green business world. And they’re growing more so, seemingly by the day.

In just the past two years, for instance, China has become the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic solar panels. Few would have seen that coming not too long ago, when China was being criticized for building hundreds of coal-fired power plants. Now, China seems to have embraced green and is likely to emerge as both a competitor and a customer of North American companies.

Giant American utilities like Duke Energy have reached out to forge clean-energy partnerships in China. Along with the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf, China’s BYD Auto—in which Warren Buffett has invested—is among companies worldwide with plans to roll out electric cars this year.

Duke is far from the only power company looking to China for deals. A Southern California startup, eSolar, has landed a deal to build two gigawatts' worth of solar thermal plants, enough to power some 2 million Chinese homes. It’s a first-of-its-kind deal in China, by far the largest announcement of its kind, worth $5 billion, and two-year-old eSolar will partner with Penglai Electric, a privately owned Chinese electrical power-equipment manufacturer.

The global deal should bring eSolar the profits for which all companies are on the hunt. That, of course, assumes the deal plays out as expected over the next several years.

And it could be an example of the kind of relationships American companies can forge with China as they reach out to the world, as Barbara Finamore, the founder and director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s China program, told Portfolio.com in October.

“The U.S. has the capability for innovation that’s much deeper than China. But China has the advantage in low-cost manufacturing,” she said. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it will drive the price of green technology down. “It’s the China price that’s going to bring down the cost for everybody,” she said.

And, she points out, the U.S. is still spending more public and private dollars on creating a green economy.