From Grist

When he took the stage for the closing session of this year's Greenbuild, amid flashing lights and a thumping rock anthem, USGBC CEO Rick Fedrizzi got right to the point: "When people say green building is over, tell them there were 29,752 people at Greenbuild. That doesn't sound like we're at the end of the road." It's a message that green building advocates are chanting every chance they get -- and personally, I hope they're right. Green building makes sense on all sorts of e-word levels: energy, environment, economy, employment. But there was some sense that this crowd -- as massive as it was -- was still fairly ... insular, at least if keynote speaker soundbites are to be trusted (e.g., "what would we do without NPR?" and "finally [since the election] we feel like we have our whole lives ahead of us, and anything is possible"). For a reality check, I talked to some of the staff and volunteers at the event.

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From Slate

According to Timothy Beatley, an urban-planning professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Green Urbanism, the per-capita carbon dioxide emissions of American cities are almost twice as high as those of their European counterparts. Hardly surprising, since European cities are denser and more compact, homes are smaller, and people rely to a far greater extent on mass transit. So if Americans are to significantly reduce their carbon footprint, we will have to do a lot more than switch to reusable shopping bags and recycle our soda cans. But as a recent conference on "urban design after the age of oil" at the University of Pennsylvania (where I teach) demonstrated, there is something of a disconnect between the global-warming problem and the available solutions.

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