DAVID HEYMANN
Professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin

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,

ROCKY ANDERSON
Mayor of Salt Lake City

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

JEROME RINGO
President, The Apollo Alliance

Today the environment is at the forefront of everyone's thoughts, not only in this country but also worldwide. I haven't seen an issue with such a magnetic capacity to bring people together since the Civil Rights movement.

Excessive temperatures have a greater impact on the poor who have less access to air conditioning and proper heating. Poor people have less access to health care to deal with climate-related medical problems. Water is a major problem worldwide, either because there's too much of it-the poor tend to live in flood zones-or not enough that's safe to drink.

The most powerful mechanism of change is our right to vote. We have the ability to elect officials who are going to focus on and

ANDY RUBEN
Vice President for Sustainability, Wal-Mart

New stores will use less energy
Hurricane Katrina was a big turning point for us. It showed us that we've got a role we can play that might be greater than we realized. Two years later, we have prototype stores-the first is in Kansas City, Mo. It uses LED lighting in the freezers, and a heating and cooling system without a fan. That store uses 20 percent less energy than a store we'd have opened in 2005. One product we're promoting heavily are compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs. They account for only 5 percent of light-bulb sales, but at Wal-Mart we've been redoing our aisles to make CFLs more visible. Today 20 or 30 percent of the light-bulb aisles will be CFLs, mostly at eye

K. R. SRIDHAR
Founder and CEO, Bloom Energy

Look at the crisis as an opportunity
I think the debate about the climate crisis in this country has been framed the wrong way. We've been talking about it from the perspective of the cost to society, rather than the point of view of the opportunity for profit. People are missing that this is a $4 trillion market for energy, and that's before we factor in the supply-demand imbalances that will occur as China and India ramp up their energy use. There is both a climate crisis and an impending energy crisis, and as Stanford economist Paul Romer has said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Energy is just the capacity to do work, and work is what creates economic output. I'm not against

ARTHUR H. ROSENFELD, PH.D.
Commissioner, California Energy Commission

Energy efficiency is the ultimate answer
If we're going to survive global warming, there are two things we must do. We have to move in the direction of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, and we have to improve energy efficiency. You can measure it in different ways-passenger miles per gallon of gas, lumens per watt-but we need to think in terms of doubling efficiency. Not "conservation," which implies sacrifice. Efficiency doesn't involve sacrifice. If you compare a modern refrigerator with one from 1973, which was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, it's bigger, it's gotten rid of CFC refrigerants, its inflation-adjusted price is two thirds less-and it uses 75

Inventors: Dish is 'user-friendly, user-friendly, so anybody can build it'

updated 10:56 a.m. PT, Fri., June. 20, 2008

A new type of solar energy collector concentrates the sun into a beam that could melt steel. Researchers say the device could revolutionize global energy production.

The prototype is a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam.

"This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence," said Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish's design - the rights to which he has signed over to a team of students at MIT.

To test the prototype this

Rainwater harvesting with multiple barrels (http://www.kidsfromkanata.org/~kfk/files/rainbarrels.html)

I'm dependent on water and I'm hooked on barrels. With one installed, I just had to have more. I added another, and another. Now I have seven connected barrels. This system of barrels, pipes and fittings has a water holding capacity of 350 gallons. The potential capacity is limited only by space available. The system supplies all of our outdoor watering needs in the summer, spring and fall, and also feeds a solar shower which is regularly used once the weather warms up. This is a good system for anyone who wants to optimize save and use rainwater, but doesn't have the resources or inclination to install a cistern and pump.

The first barrel