President Bill Clinton recently announced that the owners of the Empire State Building in Manhattan will be doing a $20 million dollar green face lift of the building. Clinton's foundation is assisting in the environmental upgrades which will include the replacement of 6,500 windows with insulated glass. The $20 million project is expected to save the building's owners $4.4 million annually in energy costs, and will reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 105,000 metric tons during the next 15 years, equal to the annual emissions of 17,500 cars according to MSNBC. Clinton said the only way to get property owners worldwide to make over their buildings is by setting an attention-getting example. "We have to prove it's good economics, and we have to prove we know how to do it," he said. "Every person on Earth who cares about this knows about the Empire State Building."

Work already has begun, with the upgrades to the building systems expected to be completed by the end of 2010 — longer than it took to build the skyscraper, which opened in 1931 after a year and 45 days of work.

All of the building's green projects are expected to be finished by the end of 2013.