Gore will be Greenbuild Keynote Speaker

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has announced that former Vice President Al Gore will be the opening keynote speaker for USGBC’s annual Greenbuild International Conference & Expo, to be held Nov. 11-13, 2009, in Phoenix, Ariz.

“Al Gore’s impressive career and bipartisan outreach have helped elevate global climate change to the main street public consciousness,” says Rick Fedrizzi, president and CEO of the USGBC. “The role buildings play in our lives, our health, the economy and the global environment – including being responsible for 39 percent of the carbon emitted in the United States – means the built environment is a tremendous opportunity for us to make real change,” he adds.

Gore’s keynote address will start off Greenbuild at an opening to take place Nov. 11 at Chase Field, home of Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. The evening event, billed as a “celebration” by the group, will feature a performance by Grammy winner Sheryl Crow and an address from Fedrizzi.

After his career in Congress, as vice president and as the losing presidential candidate in the 2000 election, Gore authored “An Inconvenient Truth,”  a book on climate change, and hosted its related Academy Award-winning documentary. In 2007, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 1992, Gore published “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.”

Previous Greenbuild keynote speakers have included former President Bill Clinton in 2007 and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 2008.

Greenbuild 2009 will feature more than 100 educational sessions, LEED and education provider workshops, off-site educational sessions, a two-day “Residential Summit,” the World Green Building Council International Congress, and tours of local green building sites, according to the show’s organizers.

More information on the event can be found at www.greenbuildexpo.org.