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IT’S not easy being gray.

For the first time ever, getting out of a car is no picnic. My back is hunched. And I’m holding on to handrails as I lurch upstairs.

I’m 45. But I feel decades older because I’m wearing an Age Gain Now Empathy System, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Agnes, they call it

READ FULL ARTICLE – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06aging.html

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The doors swish shut and with the press of a touchscreen button, the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) car is off, gliding through the tunnels beneath Abu Dhabi’s new Masdar City. The sleek four-passenger vehicle — which looks like something out of the movie TRON: Legacy — runs on an electric motor, making it clean and carbon-free. There are no tracks — the car is autonomous, driven by a computer that charts direction with the help of tiny magnets embedded in the road. When my PRT car senses another vehicle waiting in our parking space, it stops and waits for the area to clear, avoiding a collision. PRT is meant to be the future of mass transit within cities, with the environmental benefits of buses and trains but the freedom of a private vehicle. But as my car pulls into an open docking bay, I can’t help thinking there’s something slightly silly about all this. For all the technology — which isn’t cheap — the PRT has taken me to its one and only stop, maybe half a mile (800 m) from the starting point. For a lot less — and not much more time — I could have used a much older form of transport: my legs.

In a nutshell, that is what’s good and bad about Masdar. Back in 2007, the government of Abu Dhabi — a Middle Eastern emirate that controls 8% of the world’s oil reserves — announced that it would build “the world’s first zero-carbon city,” a custom-designed settlement called Masdar. (The word means source in Arabic.) It would rely entirely on renewable energy — mostly solar — and would produce zero waste. It would be home to a university dedicated to the study of sustainability, as well as attract the best companies in clean tech. There would be no traditional cars inside the city — all transportation was to be via PRT vehicle — and it would use half the energy of a settlement of the same size. The urban layout — by the green-minded British architect Norman Foster — would combine classic Arab design with 21st century technology. Masdar would be a living lab for a greener, cleaner future and a bridge for Abu Dhabi as it prepared for a day when the oil ran out. “We will position Abu Dhabi as the hub of future energy,” Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Masdar’s CEO, told me in January 2008.

READ FULL ARTICLE – http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2043934,00.html#ixzz1OpVkGGj9

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One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called “green.”

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

READ FULL POST – http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662807/the-future-of-design-blue-is-the-new-green

Having traveled to both China and India in the last few weeks, here’s a scary thought I have: What if — for all the hype about China, India and globalization — they’re actually underhyped? What if these sleeping giants are just finishing a 20-year process of getting the basic technological and educational infrastructure in place to become innovation hubs and that we haven’t seen anything yet?

READ FULL ARTICLE – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/opinion/03friedman.html