Move into Kimberton Village Green, and your heating and cooling costs are paid for -- for the lifetime of the house. Post Carbon Cities talks with Dan Orzech of Earth Rising Homes about the town of Kimberton, the future of building, distributed energy, and building the Prius of homes.

Leading Your Community and Saving Money, Energy, and the Environment targets local government leaders, finance directors and building officials who are trying to figure out how to fit energy efficiency measures into tight budgets.

Louisville, KY and Albuquerque, NM have used the EPA's ENERGY STAR Challenge program to promote improved energy efficiency in public and privately owned buildings and achieve city-wide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This live webcast session will explain how they launched the program and got people involved.

The Brisbane (Australia) City Council's Climate Change and Energy Taskforce report, released on 12 March 2007, included 31 recommendations across eight strategy areas having to do with how this large, coastal, sub-tropical city can face the challenges of climate change and peak oil.

A new report by Warren Karlenzig, author of How Green Is Your City?: The SustainLane City Rankings, ranks the largest 50 US cities by their readiness for $4+ a gallon gas and $100+ barrel oil prices. This unique study considers a variety of factors, including city resident public transit use, city carpooling rates, metro public transit ridership, metro area sprawl, telecommuting, biking and walking-to-work rates, and use of heating oil.

As transportation costs and wasted resources become more dear, greater attention to appropriate scales may well offer better solutions and prevent harmful ones. Post Carbon Cities staff Laurel Hoyt considers the problem of scale in producing two of our most basic needs: energy and food.

The City of Santa Barbara's Energy Ordinance, passed in November 2007, seeks to make the city 40 percent more energy efficient than any other locale in the United States. It makes Santa Barbara the first city in the nation to adopt the Architecture 2030 Challenge, aiming to tighten energy standards by 10 percent every five years and make buildings 20 percent more energy efficient than California state standards.

The Building Codes Assistance Project is a joint initiative of the Alliance to Save Energy, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, and the Natural Resources Defense Council that provides information about and advocacy for energy codes. Their online resources explain how codes work and track what kinds of codes are in effect where.

The US's first suburb, Levittown, is launching a program to encourage energy efficiency upgrades in its homes. Volunteers are going door-to-door to publicize house upgrades that could improve the community's carbon footprint by 20%. But "having a green neighborhood and a green home are two different things" --although greening the houses is a step forward, the suburban form creates much greater impacts by requiring car use.

Local governments around the globe are coming up with some of the most innovative ways to cut energy use. There are lessons here for places of all sizes, mixing new and old technologies and strategies.