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WE CAN'T IGNORE CLIMATE CHANGE
At a Clean Energy Economy Forum at the White House on October 7, 2009, J. Wayne Leonard, the chairman and CEO of Entergy Corporation, a Fortune 500 energy company based in New Orleans, spoke about the urgency of addressing climate change. —Editor — Published 2009.1021
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MAKING BUILDINGS GOOD
The days of making the business case for sustainable design, or even explaining what LEED means and why it is important, have passed. Today's green building challenges have moved to more complicated areas of policy — permitting and politics — and the motivating sense of competition to be "the greenest." — Published 2009.0722
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BUILDINGS AND THE CLIMATE BILL
It's important to "get things right" when a new building is constructed. More so than perhaps anything else we create, new buildings will be with us for a very long time.
The greenhouse gas cap-and-trade section of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill gets most of the attention, as it should, but the bill has many other provisions, some of which are directly important to the building industry. — Published 2009.0624
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PELLI'S PLATINUM VISIONAIRE
At first glance, the glossy new 35-story condominium tower slicing into the lower Manhattan skyline doesn't stand out as a beacon of sustainable design. Its sleek form — an extruded curving wedge accented with red terra cotta bands — looks more Ferrari than Prius. And the structure's granite base and travertine lobby walls are elements not usually associated with green building. — Published 2009.0610
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SOLID GREEN PRACTICE
Given the urgency of our response to climate change and other environmental needs, is it really okay to keep building new non-green buildings?
Here are nine U.S. firms that took sustainability to heart and made green design a centerpiece of their work, and have now taken the next logical step: they have committed to create only green buildings, from here on out. — Published 2009.0506
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GREEN STIMULUS MULTIPLICATION
What if there were a way for states, cities, and counties to leverage each dollar of federal stimulus money they spend to generate $14 of private spending, create 14 times the number of jobs, reimburse the federal government $3, and get a dollar back to boot?
And what if that economic solution could also help us tackle climate change by constructively attacking building-related carbon emissions? — Published 2009.0506
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GREEN OR GREENWASHED?
What would you call a green building standard that, on balance, tends to interfere with environmental reform more than help?
In March 2009, ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition television show featured the first house in the country to win certification under the new green building standard from the National Association of Home Builders. — Published 2009.0422
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HELLO LEED V3!
The U.S. Green Building Council is rolling out the long-awaited LEED Version 3 on April 27, 2009. It's been ten years since the first LEED version was released in 1999, and this release is intended to initiate a pattern of biennial updates.
The green building industry has been asking for changes to LEED for some time. One of the criticisms of the current LEED Version 2 has been the inequity of the one-point-per-strategy system. — Published 2009.0415
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GREENBUILD IN BOSTON
Attendees of the 2008 Greenbuild International Conference and Expo had good reason to be excited. Since the conference's debut in 2002 in Austin, Texas, when just over 4,000 people gathered to discuss the importance of sustainable design, Greenbuild has expanded dramatically. — Published 2009.0204
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CLIMATE CHANGE: STRONGER, FASTER, SOONER
Recent scientific research — published since the deadline for the latest assessment report from the IPCC — reveals that global warming is accelerating far beyond the 2007 IPCC forecasts. This brief collects some of the key findings, including particular impacts of climate change in Europe. — Published 2008.1112
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Global Warming and Climate Change page: 
