In a newly released working paper by John Quigley, Piet Eichholtz, and Nils Kok titled "Doing Well by Doing Good? Green Office Buildings", the authors discuss the economic value of green building certification in the commercial sector. They matched publicly available information on 694 certified green buildings (Energy Star and LEED) with 7489 other office buildings located within a quarter mile of the certified green buildings. The research revealed systematic evidence that rents for green buildings are about 2% higher than rents for comparable buildings located nearby.

Hollywood star Brad Pitt will work as a design consultant with Los Angeles architecture firm GRAFT to design a five star 800 room hotel in Dubai for developer Zabeel Properties. Zabeel is aiming to make the proposed hotel conform to a minimum of LEED Gold standards.

The UK Green Building Council has rejected accusations that the UK construction sector is failing to take environmental sustainability seriously enough and is engaged in widespread " greenwashing". The accusations were leveled by the government's watchdog on town planning and design, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), which claimed that the vast majority of flagship building projects are failing to prioritize environmental sustainability. John Alker of the Green Building Council downplayed the suggestion that the sector was engaged in "greenwashing" activities and said that by the end of 2008 legislation would likely to be introduced that would require all new-build homes to be zero carbon by 2016 and all buildings to be zero carbon by 2019, effectively forcing building firms to embrace sustainable design.

According to InMan news, current building codes are not formulated to accommodate the reuse of salvaged materials, leaving well-intentioned green builders caught in a classic Catch-22.   "As a matter of public policy, many progressive cities encourage the recycling of building materials, yet as a matter of administrative practice they make [the use of recycled materials] either economically impractical or else outright illegal".  A common example is building codes that require safety glazing in all glass doors and in many windows. Yet the overwhelming majority of glass doors gleaned from architectural salvage, along with most of the windows, have plain glass, which cannot comply with these requirements.

RockPort Capital Partners closed a venture capital fund with commitments of over $450 million, making it one of the largest venture funds focused on clean technology investments. According to an article by Clean Edge, RockPort's "Fund III" will invest in the development of technology and products in emerging clean tech companies. Founded in 2000, RockPort Capital Partners with offices in Boston, Massachusetts and Menlo Park, California, has invested in nearly 40 clean tech companies.

The White House criticized legislation in the U.S. Senate that is aimed at controlling climate change, arguing it would cut economic growth and lead to soaring gasoline prices. The legislation the Senate will debate, which is not expected to become law in 2008 amid a presidential election, could cut total U.S. global warming emissions by 66 percent by 2050, according to a summary of the measure.