In the late 1990s, the small town of Kuzumaki in Northern Japan started transforming itself into a living laboratory for alternative energy sources.

Last week, the California Building Standards Commission unanimously approved the nation’s first statewide green building code. The new rules will mandate that all new construction reduce energy use by 15%, water use by 20% and water for landscaping by 50%.

Some people, motivated by high fuel prices, are climbing into more fuel-efficient golf carts instead of cars. Police and other public agencies may follow suit. But will these non-standard vehicles be a hazard when they mix with traffic?

Pennsylvania's ridges make wind energy a rising presence in the state's energy profile. And demand for wind turbines is creating new jobs, often housed in the old steel complexes.

A simple tool helped the Princeton Public Library trim its energy use and expenses. Now they're making that tool available to the public, loaned out like a book, so individuals can understand how they're really using energy in their households.

Grist's David Roberts tours biomass installations in rural Austria, looking at the elegance of combined heat and power from locally controlled sources.

A number of communities in Maine are committing to combating global warming through various programs and initiatives. Some are signatories of the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement; others are taking other paths.

If you expect conventional energy sources to keep getting more expensive, investing in a renewable source that's currently more expensive - like solar - makes more sense. San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit is doing just that, committing to pay nearly double its usual rates per megawatt for power from new solar installations.

Buildings, their construction and maintenance, account for nearly half of U.S. energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. That means city councils and other code-setting entities are in the perfect position to make great strides in cutting energy use, and Architecture 2030 has tools to help.

In many ways, Amsterdam and other Dutch cities have fostered urban environments that provide a wide range of transportation choices for residents and visitors. The result is vibrant cities and greatly reduced automotive use - not a cure-all for carbon woes, but a great step forward for climate viability and urban livability.

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy senior fellow Armando Carbonell writes about the importance of land use and transportation decisions to a coherent energy and climate policy.

Citizen groups have led efforts to address the issue of peak oil in Santa Fe, where a citizen's energy board is forming, and in Greensboro, N.C., where city government is starting to listen. Both articles quote Daniel Lerch and Post Carbon Cities.

As the inevitable shadow of high-priced and carbon-emitting fossil fuels looms, Nova Scotia's municipality of Clare is sowing its own seeds of self-sufficiency, based on its kinship with a comparable community in Austria.

The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority held a symposium to identify issues as it prepares to write its Regional Transportation Plan for the next 25 years. Post Carbon's Daniel Lerch spoke at this even about how peak oil is forcing planners and policymakers to change their assumptions about future transportation and land use patterns.

Mick Winter of Drydipstick.com reviews Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty. "Post Carbon Cities focuses on the basics: what the energy problem is, why it is, and what can be done about it. It brings home the effects that oil and gas depletion—and climate change—are apt to have (and indeed already have) on local governments."

San Francisco is looking to become the United States' "Berlin of solar power" in terms of installed solar capacity - and is backing up that goal with a solar rebate program that's the nation's highest local solar subsidy.

This week, Architecture 2030 released an unprecedented guide for every city, county and state in the nation to swiftly meet their greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets through existing building codes, asserting that meeting reduction targets through existing codes is the critical ‘missing piece’ to getting major reductions underway immediately.

It may be June, but Vermont's Governor and legislature are planning for the potential emergency when high fuel prices and low temperatures coincide this coming winter. The Governor has created the Vermont Fuel and Food Partnership and established a Cabinet-level task force. The state legislature has called an emergency home heating meeting of the Joint Fiscal Committee, all in recognition that plans need to be made for the state's needs sooner rather than later.

Some Idaho Falls city officials are proposing construction of a fuel storage facility that in case of emergency could sustain services, like police and fire, for a month. They estimate that they would require 50,000 gallons of fuel.

Vancouver, B.C.'s EcoDensity policies have been the subject of much debate, but they've become a fixture of the city's political and planning landscape, even after the term of the mayor who promoted them.