Thursday, November 08, 2007

Big Bill helps the ACUPCC tackle existing buildings

We had an exciting day for the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment yesterday with Bill Clinton publicly announcing a partnership we've been developing between the ACUPCC and the CCI (Clinton Climate Initiative).

Check out the full report from Inside Higher Ed - http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/08/clinton

The announcement was made at GreenBuild - the conference of the US Green Building Council - in Chicago, which was a great event with about 20,000 attendees, reflecting the tremendous development of the greenbuilding industry.

Watch his speech here: http://www.greenbuild365.org/Videos/video_gb01.html

As part of his talk, Clinton made an excellent point that as this space develops and the economics are better understood, things will only accelerate and in about 18 months the focus will be on zero-carbon and energy-positive buildings. This is the sort of development that dramatically changes energy forecasts, driving down the need for large, centralized coal and nuclear plants and driving smaller distributed clean renewables. In conjunction with the demand-side management this sort of path has dramatically lower costs to society.

This is a powerful example of how backcasting - in this case from climate neutral campuses - can drive the innovation and create the synergies needed to move towards sustainability.

Exciting stuff... stay going.

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