News

Link to PBS show via DavidNazarNews (July 14, 2025) | How to fireproof your home. This is what you can do to protect yourself and your house from a fire in the aftermath of the deadly January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena that burned thousands of homes to the ground. Residents […]

Link to Forbes.com (June 28, 2025) | The road to hell and housing shortages is paved with good intentions. In this case, those intentions came in the form of the California Environmental Quality Act, passed into law in 1970 to protect the state’s fragile eco systems from development. …On June 30, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation […]

Link to Los Angeles Times (June 28, 2025) | Interest in building with earthen and other natural materials — such as adobe — spiked in the wake of Eaton and Palisades fires. … Ben Stapleton — an appointee on Horvath’s blue ribbon commission and executive director of U.S. Green Building Council California, a nonprofit that promotes […]

Link to Associated Press (June 24, 2025) | When Judy Sautner recently walked into Power Appliance, a store in a southeastern suburb of Cleveland, she had one goal in mind: replace her daughter’s broken dryer with something that worked and didn’t break the bank. …Jay Buchanan, the store’s owner, said many customers are like Sautner, […]

Link to Beverly Press / Park LaBrea News (June 4, 2025) | The U.S. Green Building Council California and BuildingEase on May 29 announced a groundbreaking partnership to create the Rebuild Marketplace – a centralized platform to connect communities, builders and homeowners with sustainable and fire-resilient building materials in the wake of California’s increasingly frequent and […]

Link to gb&d (June 6, 2025) | The USGBC California 24th Annual Green Building Conference came to San Francisco on May 22, 2025, drawing specifiers, green building specialists, and manufacturers from across the West Coast and as far away as the Netherlands to the Fort Mason Center on the city’s waterfront. …[T]he event served as […]

Link to Doctoring Up Design Podcast (June 2, 2025) | California’s escalating wildfire crisis is forcing a radical rethink in residential architecture. With fires growing in intensity, frequency, and unpredictability, architects, planners, and policymakers are coming together to define a new blueprint for resilient, sustainable living in the wildland-urban interface. In May, I journeyed to Design […]

Link to Forbes.com (May 13, 2025) | If you’ve shopped for appliances in the last two decades, you’ve probably seen the yellow Energy Star product stickers showing your estimated electrical costs for using it. Maybe they helped you select one clothes washer over the other or narrowed your selection to three refrigerators from six. …This […]

Link to The Hollywood Reporter (May 9, 2025) | The Environmental Media Association kicked off its ninth annual Impact Summit on Thursday, rolling out a two-day lineup of stars and activists for wide-ranging conversations about the environment. A large focus of the summit’s first day was discussing the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires that devastated the […]

Link to Go Green Radio w. Jill Buck (May 2, 2025) | In January 2025, the LA Wildfires were among the worst climate disasters of our time. The US Green Building Council-California, with support from Arup, has assembled the California Wildfire Rebuilding Guide as a resource for homeowners looking to make critical decisions on their rebuilding journey, and […]

Link to VXNews (April 8, 2025) | VX News recently sat down with Ben Stapleton, Executive Director of [USGBC California] to discuss the organization’s priorities since expanding statewide last year, including collaborative efforts to align policies on building performance, championing resilience in reconstruction efforts, and navigating key challenges in the building and construction industry exacerbated by […]

Link to Marketplace (March 28, 2025) | [Jake] Olson applied to be part of a pilot project after seeing an ad in a utility newsletter. His is one of 30 homes in Los Angeles chosen for the project. Half stay the same. The other half get free, brand new water-efficient appliances, faucets, showerheads and toilets, […]