Let's cut to the chase, shall we?

The legwork has been done. The research has been conducted. The numbers have been crunched. As far as we can tell, it is going to cost the U.S. an investment of over a quarter of a trillion dollars to upgrade our nation's...

I find myself in one of the most amazing cities in the world as I write this. And I'm here, ironically, to talk to the people of this city about, of all things, cities.

Delhi, India is undergoing one of the most stunning physical and social transformations in the history...

This week, 40,000 people will gather at Greenbuild 2012 in San Francisco to celebrate the green building movement.

And we've got a lot to cheer about.

In the depths of the recession, while the U.S. construction market was in trouble, the green building market actually grew -...

Across the land, at least according to the talking heads, morning in America has dawned, and before the sun actually came up on Wednesday, the country handed a cautious victory to Barack Obama.

And in the wee hours as we watched the election returns, it occurred to...

This week, I had the extraordinary opportunity to attend the Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, a gathering that brings together leaders from around the world and encourages them to make a commitment to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the global community.

USGBC's...

It was Samuel Johnson who said that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. He talked a lot about false patriots, those who "appeal to the rabble, circulate pointless petitions, and who allow their passions to confound the distinctions between right and wrong." He never said if he had...

One of the things that may surprise people about me is that the first place I head when I arrive home to upstate New York on the weekend is to my garden. After a long week in Washington, D.C. or the stress of long stretches of international travel, my garden...

By now, most of you know the cautionary tale of the old railroad barons, those filthy rich guys who, nearly a century ago, made the tragic mistake of thinking they were in the business of trains. Can you imagine how things might have gone differently for those complacent and ridiculously...

Two years ago this week, Haiti was hit by the catastrophic earthquake that killed more than 315,000 people. Today, the work to rebuild this poorest country in the Western Hemisphere has barely gotten started.

According to the U.S. Department of State, the U.N. has called this earthquake the...

Last week, from the White House Old Executive Building it was like a different planet -- outside the white walls, D.C. politics continued to swirl, but for one moment we found something we can all agree on. I sat there as President Obama and former President Clinton joined forces to...

No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo

You don't have time to be starstruck. Yet we are struck, not by a performance in front of the camera but by the dedication to a cause (like Petra Nemcova whose organization Happy...

I found myself sitting at the kitchen table last night, long after the President and the Packers were done.

The Packers won. What was keeping me up was the thought that the country might actually be able to pull our own victory out of what has been...

In his State of the Union address, President Obama boldly proclaimed that our nation has reached a "Sputnik moment" -- a point in time that will be characterized by our ability (or inability) to respond to an era as ripe for innovation as any that has presented itself in more...

Frank Lloyd Wright once said that, "Chicago may eventually be the last beautiful, great city in the world." What Mr. Wright didn't know at the time is that Chicago would also become the greatest green city in the world, leading a revolution in sustainable building.

This past week Chicago hosted...

Imagine a future where children wake up excited to go to school. Imagine that when they get to school, they are met with clean fresh air, classrooms with good natural light and acoustics that allowed them to hear their teachers. Imagine test scores going up, reading retention rates rising, absences...

Here is the conversation starter I'm putting on the table when I speak today at the World Economic Forum at Davos: Why are we letting supply side obstacles -- lack of capital, shortage of training, need for access to materials and technologies -- derail what stands to be the single...