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 Gavin Newsom speaks at the Sierra Summit
Lisa, you are on my finance committee next. I want to bring those white bags to San Francisco politics. I appreciate your wisdom and your decision-making, and we certainly appreciate all of you, here, in my home, San Francisco, a wacky wonderful place, a place of dreamers and doers. I think someone described San Francisco as "49 square miles surrounded by reality." I kind of like that. It's a glorious and gracious place we get to call home. You feel good out here. We also recognize, as Lisa was saying, that we are all in this together, and that we've got to take some responsibility at a local level. You know, I have been mayor for two years, and every day when I wake up, the first thing I do is open my eyes, and I look right outside. I've got a beautiful view towards the airport, and I just check to see -- is Air Force One coming in today? [laughter] I look out. I thought I heard something. I have been looking for years and years for Air Force One to come down and save the day. Sort of figure all of our problems out. Hasn't happened, [applause] I keep waiting, keep waiting. I thought I just heard… no, I didn't. It has been a dry spell, hasn't it, for the environment these last five years. Now, I've been, as much as anybody else, frustrated by this dry spell. I've been as frustrated as you are by what's going on: Rolling back environmental protection on clean air. Rolling back environmental protection on water. Rolling back our wildland protection, or at least freezing it, best case. And, of course, the frustration we all have, no one more than former vice president Al Gore, is our government's inability to recognize the obvious threat of global warming, and its inability and unreasonableness not to enter into Kyoto. [applause] And so I am with you. I'm frustrated. But then I woke up one morning and, I kid you not, I recognized, wait a second, I'm not going to see that day where the Bush administration all of a sudden changes its stripes, and everything gets better. Or when Schwarzenegger comes in with his G4 Land Rover, Global Express jet, whatever, flying in to save the day in San Francisco. We've got to act differently and think anew here in San Francisco. We have remarkable capacity, as an urban center, to set the course for environmental stewardship. And it occurred to me, in that context, that we had an opportunity, a unique opportunity this year, in celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations here in San Francisco, to bring the world's mayors to this city, as we did just a few months ago, and recognize the obvious. That for the first time in human history, more people on the planet are living in cities than outside of urban centers, and that cities consume 75 percent of the earth's natural resources. Cities. Alone. And those cities represent just a small fraction of the earth's landmass. We, as mayors, on a local level, have a remarkable opportunity and, in turn, responsibility to truly drive environmental reform and sustainability, and that is exactly what we're beginning to do, in cities across America [applause]. Think about it. I don't want to take too much of your time, but think about the opportunities that present themselves to us. We decided, and when I talk about 49 square miles surrounded by reality, we decided that we've just got to do this ourselves, so we created the first local global-climate action plan in the state of California's history. We decided we are going to roll back our greenhouse emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2010. That sounds ambitious, but we are going to do more than that. [applause] We're just going to do it. We decided there is a future that is a present. Frankly it's been a past, but we haven't captured it -- and that's photovoltaics. We decided to put together the largest municipally owned solar project in the United States of America. And, guess what? It's right here on Moscone Center; you're enjoying it. [applause] 675 kilowatts, we did it. We have 11 other projects, solar projects. We passed a $100-million solar bond. We didn't want to wait for the state. We didn't want to wait for the federal government. The people of San Francisco stepped up to the plate. We want to do the right thing. There's a 67 percent recycling diversion rate in San Francisco. That's not bad: 67 percent. We are recycling at unprecedented levels. We have the largest municipally owned alternative-fuel vehicle fleet in the United States of America. [applause] We just got smart and said enough's enough. [applause] It's easy to do. All I had to do was send a memo to my purchasing department. I said, you've got all these cars, I want to get rid of one third of them. They did that. I said, when you replace a car that is not an emergency vehicle, it must be an alternative fuel car. They said, that's pretty easy, and we did it. It's as simple as that. It's not that difficult. It really isn't that difficult [applause]. For World Environment Day, the U.N., decided to host these mayors in San Francisco last June. It's the first time in U.N. history that they decided to come to America, does that surprise anybody? [laughter] But they chose wisely, again, San Francisco. We decided that we wanted to do something that had never been done on World Environment Day, and that was to set principles, sign some accords, 21 policy principles, that we would agree to as Mayors representing 60 countries from around the world. 120 or so mayors came to San Francisco, and we signed these 21 policy principles to do everything that's simply not being done at the federal level. And as I said, this is a city alone that has close to $1 billion in purchasing power. That's why we put together a precautionary principle. This is the first city that's ever done this. Better to be safe than sorry, in terms of our purchasing. [applause] Another way we can do our job, and get things done [applause]. Look, I don't want to take any more of your time, except to say, hold us accountable. Stop listening to our rhetoric, and hold us accountable to actions. There is so much more we can do as municipal governmental representatives, and it's got to start locally, it's got to start at home. The environment is not some place in the Sierra, exclusively. The environment is when you wake up at home and make the first decision in the morning to turn on the water and you keep it running while brushing your teeth, or to turn off those lights when you leave the house, or what you do when you go to the grocery store and how you get there. We have got to educate. We have got to realign our strategies, and we have got to take this seriously, now more than ever. I'm proud of the stewardship, the leadership, the constancy of the Sierra Club, Carl, and his incredible leadership. He's just done amazing work. I'm proud to call myself a member of your outstanding organization, and I look forward to many more extraordinary years of leadership from the Sierra Club. [applause] Welcome to San Francisco. Thank you all.
Photo: Sierra Club collection; all rights reserved
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