"It makes sense to take on the climate crisis and the crisis of extreme poverty and disease simultaneously," said former U.S. Vice President Al Gore at a roundtable discussion in New York June 3. He was speaking at the closing session of the inaugural Cornell Global Forum on Sustainable Enterprise that began June 1.

He and other panelists, including Ratan Tata '59, chairman of the Tata Group, agreed that the "tyranny" of gleaning short-term gains in economics and politics too often undermines long-term progress.

Held at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, the conference was telecast to the Cornell campus at Sage Hall. The roundtable discussion was introduced by Cornell President David Skorton and moderated by TV anchor Charlie Rose.

The conference brought together 100 green-technology pioneers and entrepreneurs, in the words of forum founder Stuart Hart, the Samuel C. Johnson Chair in Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell's Johnson School, to work on action plans to accelerate a "convergence" of clean technology and business development at the "base of the economic pyramid."

He described the purpose of the plans as making available to the world's poorest people such small "household-scale" technologies as solar cells, wind power, smokeless cooking stoves and eco-efficient water treatment devices that "purify only the water you drink." Hart described these green technologies as creating paradigm shifts by bypassing current unsustainable systems without the need for complicated public policy shifts.

Take cell phones. Because they are small and do not require any infrastructure changes, several panelists agreed, they can be quickly adopted in poor countries and have a profound potential to prompt large changes.

And when such technologies are applied to the "base of the pyramid, you are looking at enormous market sizes," said Tata. India will soon have 500 million cell phones, he said, recalling that when he was a child in India, "you waited seven years for a telephone connection" to be installed. Tata's company recently began making the Nano car in India, which gets 65 miles to the gallon, sells for around $2,500 and will be on sale in the United States in two years.

Gore discussed how small smokeless stoves may help address a pending water crisis in India and southern China, where seven major rivers are fed by glacier snow melt from the Himalayas. Wood-burning stoves produce black carbon or soot that not only contributes to the greenhouse effect but also settles on white glaciers, making them less reflective, so they absorb the sun's heat and melt faster. Scientists project that 75 percent of the glaciers under 15 square kilometers that supply 70 percent of the water in the Ganges River could disappear in 10 years, Gore said.

H. Fisk Johnson, chairman and CEO of S. C. Johnson and Son, said his company has been developing natural insecticides in Rwanda, powering factories with biofuels in Indonesia and Vietnam and absorbing financial losses when products prove environmentally unfriendly.

Tata blamed the "tyranny" of the financial markets for forcing companies to maximize returns on a short-term quarterly basis. That, panelists agreed, inhibits sustainable innovation that may require immediate losses but longer-term gains.

This "tyranny of short-term horizons is not limited to investing but also to politics," said Gore. But the Obama administration has an opportunity to lead the world, he said, especially at the forthcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen. And if the cap-and-trade bill to tax carbon passes in Congress this year, it would help create a "global framework" to bring China into a global agreement on regulating carbon, he said.

The conference was organized by the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell's Johnson School.