Fraser place may someday loom large in the annals of environmental history. Completed in Shenzhen in 2005, the crescent-shaped service apartment is China's first green commercial building. The windows are designed to capture breezes, reducing the need for air conditioning. Rainwater runs off the roof and into an irrigation system for the surrounding gardens. With a combination of advanced design concepts, new technologies and safe materials, the building is healthy for its occupants, efficient for its owners and light on Mother Earth. The best measure of its success comes on the bottom line: it delivered $177,857 in energy savings during its first year in operation, compared with a similar-size conventional structure. That puts Fraser Place and the handful of similar buildings in Asia at the center of today's climate debate. Asia's growing demand for energy is the main driver of $100-per-barrel oil, and makes it the hottest market for biofuels that threaten food supplies. Thanks to its metastasizing power grids, which rely mainly on coal-fired plants using technology from the 1950s, it is also the fastest-growing contributor to the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming. Clearly, China and India need cleaner power plants, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the fastest, cheapest way to reduce emissions is to build more energy-efficient cities, using proven green technologies. "Success in confronting climate change depends very heavily on how we house Asia," says Daniel Esty, Yale University environmental-law professor and coauthor of "Green to Gold." "This is a huge challenge but also a huge opportunity." Why Asia? Because breakneck economic growth and the region's still-huge rural population make it the epicenter of urbanization in the 21st century. The challenge (as is so often the case in the region) lies in not repeating the West's developmental missteps. Rural-urban migration now lands millions of Asians a year in apartments replete with TVs, refrigerators and air conditioning. Every day more of them obtain the ultimate urban accessory: the automobile. If current patterns persist, by 2020 China alone will import half the world's coal, a fifth of its oil and will have 158 million cars on its roadways compared with just 30 million today. The alternative: apply existing green building techniques