Clinton campaigns for greener buildings

Speaking at this week's Greenbuild conference in Chicago, former US president Bill Clinton told delegates that fighting climate change requires making homes, offices, and schools healthier and more energy efficient. Sweeping efforts to reduce the carbon footprints of buildings, which emit three-quarters of most cities' greenhouse gases, can measurably benefit the environment, he said.

"The sale's been made," Clinton said. "Otherwise Al Gore wouldn't have gotten the Nobel Prize. Now what we have to do is...to prove that this is not a big bottle of castor oil that we're being asked to drink."

To that end, the Clinton Climate Initiative has been engaging businesses and leaders of 40 US cities to plot ways to reduce carbon emissions. The project launched in August 2006 as part of the William J. Clinton Foundation. "This is the biggest economic opportunity that our country has had to mobilise and democratise economic opportunity since World War II," he said.

Clinton insisted that the United States and emerging superpowers should embrace a successor to the Kyoto Protocol by 2010, and blamed the failure of Kyoto in the United States on both Congress and the Bush administration. "If the coming giants India and China and those coming behind them -- Vietnam, Ukraine, all these emerging countries -- if they insist on the old industrial society's patterns of energy use, it is true that the most calamitous consequences of climate change will occur," he said.

"We have no idea what we can do in terms of reducing greenhouse gases because we just got started."

PHOTO: Gregory Wenzel

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