Gavin Newsom, 41, is the youngest San Francisco mayor in over a century. Newsom, the son of William and Tessa Newsom, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Santa Clara University on a partial baseball scholarship, graduating in 1989 with a B.A. in political science.
After only 36 days as mayor, Newsom gained worldwide attention when he granted marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This bold move set the tone for Newsom’s first term. Under his energetic leadership, the economy grew and jobs were created. The city became a center for biotech and clean tech. He initiated a plan to bring universal health care to all of the city’s uninsured residents. And Newsom aggressively pursued local solutions to global climate change.
In 2007, Newsom was re-elected with over 73% of the vote. Since then he has built upon the successes of his first term, launching new environmental initiatives and a comprehensive strategy to transform one of the city’s most troubled neighborhoods into a life sciences, digital media, and clean tech center.
Meg Whitman penned an op-ed last week stating she’d suspend California’s landmark climate-change legislation, AB32, on her first day if elected governor. This is backwards thinking, and I disagree.
Experts estimate that the four largest clean-energy industries (solar, wind, biofuels, and fuel-cell) will have combined annual revenues of $255 billion by the middle of the next decade. The question isn’t whether the world will move towards cleaner living – the question is how soon this trend will take hold.
California’s challenge is competitiveness, grasping as much of the share of these markets as possible by being the industry leader in greenhouse gas abatement technology. To date, we’ve done a great job – California captured $6.6 billion in green capital between 2006-2008. And all these start-ups need workers; so green jobs have the potential to be for California what the defense industry was in 1980s.
Air travel is a major contributor to climate change. Offsets are a small part of a larger solution.
Today at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) we are launching the Climate Passport program allowing travelers to offset the impact of their air travel through an airport kiosk. This will be the world’s first airport kiosk—giving people the opportunity to calculate the environmental impact of their flights and purchase carbon offsets to address that impact while at the airport.
In the quest to create new green jobs, we have the opportunity to take existing jobs and make them green.
Every city has architects, engineers and construction divisions. In conventional circumstances the activities these employees undertake can burn considerable natural resources. But in San Francisco, we’re working to turn these traditional municipal positions into environmental champions.
In San Francisco, we have led the country in creating ambitious yet achievable programs to help residents and businesses decrease the amount of waste going into our landfill. Our modern curbside program began back in the 80s with the crazy idea that people could recycle their newspapers.
As Congress debates how to pay for national health care reform, here in California we are showing there are ways to make coverage both universal and affordable. In San Francisco, we are finding that one of the most effective reforms, and the most affordable by far, is simply using the purchasing and persuasive power of our city to promote the kind of healthy habits that keep residents away from costly medical interventions and prevent chronic diseases.
Last July, the City & County of San Francisco launched the first local solar energy incentive program in the nation, The results are in, and, the program is an unequivocal success.
In the year since our solar energy incentive program GoSolarSF launched, we have seen a 450% increase in applications for solar installations in San Francisco over the previous year, from 200 to 850. And despite the current recession, 56 applicants met our low-income standards and will receive incentive payments.
Hi, I’m Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco, and I’d like to welcome you to the electric vehicle challenge being hosted by Gas 2.0.
Our city has long been at the forefront of sustainability, and we now turn our focus to one of our biggest challenges: transportation.
I believe that the future is electric, and as Mayor I hope to make San Francisco the epicenter of electric vehicle technology. To that end, we have already established a 9-point policy plan for electric vehicle infrastructure, though our efforts to advance electric vehicles are not limited to San Francisco.
We’ve engaged the entire Bay Area, a region of 7.3 million people, to make our region the cornerstone of the coming market for EVs. Not just governments, but key companies, business associations, policy advocates, and international car and EV infrastructure companies are all working together to make the San Francisco Bay Area the EV Capital of the U.S.
Composting will prevent tons of material from going to the landfill, create healthy soil for our local farms and help us fight global warming.
Today at the Farmer’s Market in front of San Francisco’s iconic Ferry Building I am signing the nation’s first mandatory composting law. It’s the most comprehensive recycling and composting legislation in the country and the first to require residents and businesses to compost food scraps.
San Francisco created the “EcoFinder” iPhone App to help residents recycle and dispose of materials. The open data philosophy behind the app is Government 2.0 at work.
With the release today of San Francisco’s first iPhone app based on a City data feed, recycling just got much easier for our residents.
We will only reach these lofty goals together — with the help of all our residents. That’s why the City’s environment department (@SFEnvironment) has launched an iPhone version of the popular web-based EcoFinder tool.
Editor’s note: This post is a contribution by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. See his last post on electric vehicle charging infrastructure or all of his previous posts here. A companion piece was also posted on RedGreenandBlue.org earlier today.
San Francisco is a city that knows how to recycle. We work hard to give new life to our paper, bottles, cans and other waste.
New statistics released today show we are keeping 72 percent of all discards from going to the landfill – up from 70 percent the year before.
That’s a big leap for one year. The most significant gains came from the recycling of material from building sites – due in large part to our 2006 mandatory Construction and Demolition Debris Recovery Ordinance.
By requiring builders to recycle debris from construction projects, we were able to divert tens of thousands of new tons of material away from the landfill. This ordinance is unique in that it doesn’t require deposits or bonds, making it small business-friendly and limiting the amount of bureaucracy needed to implement the program.
When it comes to our recycling programs, we’re always in the development phase. In order to meet our ambitious goal of 75 percent recycling by 2010 and zero waste by 2020, we are constantly looking for additional materials to recycle, and for emerging markets to make use of our recyclables.
