In the summer of 1999, I received a call from Laura Bush. She and then-governor George Bush wanted a design for a house that would blend into the landscape of an extraordinary piece of land they had just purchased in Crawford, Texas. We talked at length about environmental systems, and Laura was clear at the outset that they wanted to do everything possible to protect the land. It is exceptionally beautiful, with deep bluffs, streams and stands of native live oak.

The house is designed to use a quarter to a third of the energy of a normal house its size. With some modification, it could run entirely off the grid. There are dozens of features that contribute,

In Salt Lake City, we've been able to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in our municipal operations by 31 percent in four years. We've eliminated 143 cars from the city's light vehicle fleet, and replaced 41 SUVs with smaller, more efficient cars. By retrofitting all city and county buildings with compact fluorescent bulbs, we save the city $33,000 a year. We then invest one third of that in wind power, making Salt Lake City the state's largest purchaser of wind power. We also changed all the city's traffic lights from incandescent bulbs to LED lights, which saves about $50,000 a year in electricity while also reducing annual carbon emissions by 500 tons. Those are just a few small, easy changes that net

A chance to fix a neighborhood
There is a huge hole in our economic fabric where clean tech should be. And residents of this community can be trained to fill these "green collar" jobs. Instead of all these economic-growth agencies pushing for stadiums or big-box stores where the average wage is $7 an hour, the city could invest in cleaner transportation systems such as barges and rail lines to connect us to the rest of the city. We could take all the waste grease from the food industry that now gets trucked here for disposal and process it instead into biodiesel fuel. Workers will install "green roofs" on commercial buildings, which will provide cooling and generate