Many business leaders and policymakers believe that any meaningful attempt to address the climate crisis will result in global poverty.

We believe the exact opposite is true.

A properly financed, public-private global transition to high-efficiency and renewable energy technologies holds the potential for an unprecedented worldwide economic boom.

A global public works program to rewire the planet would create millions of new jobs all over the world.

It would begin to reverse the widening gap between the North and the South.

It would raise living standards in developing nations without compromising the economic achievements of industrial nations.

And in a very few years, the renewable energy industry would eclipse high technology as the central driving engine of growth of the global economy.

What is missing is neither the technology nor the know-how. What is missing is the vision.

In search of that vision, an ad hoc group met during the summer of 1998 at the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical School in Boston to hammer out a set of interactive and mutually-reinforcing strategies which we believe will accelerate the international climate negotiations and vastly expand the amount of equity, stability and wealth in the global economy.

The group -- which includes energy company presidents, economists, energy policy specialists, scientists and commentators -- was united by its impatience with the Kyoto process, the inadequacy of the mechanism of emissions-trading embedded in the Kyoto Protocol relative to the scope of the problem and the overall economic defensiveness with which the climate crisis is viewed by policy-makers and business leaders.

The set of strategies that emerged from the group is spelled out in: