MR. GAVIN NEWSOM: Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco. Thanks for -- thanks for being up this early in the morning. I was with some of you last night so I know. I know what you were up to.

I'm mayor of a city that probably was best described as 47 and a half square miles surrounded by reality, which is a nice way of saying we've always been a city of dreamers, a city of doers, a city of entrepreneurs, a city of innovators, a city that's always been on the leading and cutting edge of new ideas, a city that I am very proud to call home; and a city that is proud to be part of the innovation that we, I hope, collectively want to seek as it relates to the issues of the environment and environmental stewardship. And I have been given the great honor and privilege of introducing a friend of mine and someone who is a real champion and a friend of the environment, Van Jones.

I told Van, I said it's always dangerous to have politicians introduce you because they end up giving speeches rather than giving introductions, but I -- but he said he's willing to allow me to break a little bit of precedent and kind of do a halfway version of the speech introduction. And I -- I wanted to do that because it does weave in to how I met Van and why I was honored to be asked to introduce him.

I had the opportunity a number of years ago having just been elected into office in 2004 to announce that San Francisco was to become the first city in the history of the United Nations world environment efforts to host in America its national conference.

2005 was an important time for San Francisco, because at the same time we were also honoring and recognizing the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in our city and so we had the opportunity to host over a 120 or so mayors from around the word that came in to discuss the environment.

It was also an important time because not only were we celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, but we were also marking the first time in human history more people on the planet were living in urban centers than in rural and suburban communities. Meaning over half of the world's population had marked during that last few years, around 2005, a unique status of now living in urban cores.

We reflected on the fact that a million to a million and a half people every single week were moving into cities. And already in 2005, these numbers need to be updated, we were consuming two-thirds, some had suggested three-quarters of the earth's natural resources in these same cities and polluting roughly equivalent of the amount of the planet. And so it was an opportunity to focus on the responsibility and opportunity of cities to be fundamentally part of the solution to the issues of climate change.

It was there that I met Van Jones. It was there at this conference where I had finally met a guy that was well-known to all of us out in the bay area because of his leadership and stewardship at Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and I finally got a chance to meet him, which is an extraordinary organization.

But I finally got to meet a different Van Jones because he was moving away from social justice issues as it relates to crime and violence and beginning to focus on social justice issues related to the environment.

It was also a time of real change in consciousness, because it was a time -- and I referenced it in the context of San Francisco, where we recognized we had to stop dreaming and we had to start producing real results. We had to actually move away from talking about the problem and pointing fingers to trying to solve it. And it was then in San Francisco that we decided rather than just state the obvious that it was sad and unfortunate the United States had advocated real leadership as it relates to Kyoto Accords that we would like other cities put together our own local climate action plans. Ours calls for reducing our CO2 emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. It actually goes twice as far as the Kyoto Accords. And we're proud that I had that planned. But it seems everyone's got a plan. How do you measure it and how do you deliver it? And I want to, in the context of introducing Van, introduce you to some of the things briefly that we're doing.

We, in just 10 days, will be announcing where we are as it relates to that plan. We actually had our CO2 footprint and our inventory brought to a third party, because I don't trust politicians when they come to conferences like this. They always tend to overstate what they've done. And there is really no way of measuring what you've done unless you have a third party really analyze as opposed to politicians analyzing what they've done. So we're about to come out and give you a midterm report on our plan and I won't share that necessarily with you. But the reason I'm bragging about it is to suggest we're well on our way to reducing our footprint. We've done that by doing real things.

We have the most aggressive solar plan in the United States of America with the highest rebates of any city in the country. We provide up to $6,000 for individual rebates for people that want to get solar installations. You match that with what California is doing and our current tax breaks no one else in the country comes further.

We have always initiated some of the most aggressive green building standards in America, not just for municipal buildings but for all private sector buildings. You want to build a residential or commercial structure in San Francisco you've got to meet LEED certification going up to LEED gold standards just in a few years, the most aggressive in the United States.

We converted our vehicle fleet 100 percent of it to B20, to biodiesel-20, and we've gotten it through a grease cycle program not through the ethanol programs but a grease cycle program that comes from our restaurants where we recycle all that grease and we begin to convert it back in to our engines. And now we've got Google and Stanford University also participating in that grease cycle program.

Interestingly, we have ambulances running on biodiesel and fire engines, which is interesting, because it's been a public safety that's always been a little bit concerned about this environmental movement getting in the way of getting those ambulances and fire engines showing up on time but proving the concept that we can do things differently.

Already two-thirds of our vehicle fleet -- and that is our public transportation is on alternative fuels. We were the first city to advance our efforts on taxi cabs. You probably didn't know that because you know that Mayor Bloomberg did that in New York. He announced it on the Today Show, I announced it on local cable Channel 26. But we did it a year prior to New York City and we're very proud of that and we're well on our way of converting that entire fleet into alternative energy sources.

(Audience applauding)

MR. NEWSOM: We also have the highest recycling rates. I am very proud of this. People don't know this. 70 percent recycling rates in the city and county of San Francisco. Highest in America. And few people believe this. We did this without a mandate. We just did it through incentives and now we're going to be well on our way we hope by 2010 at 75 percent. We want to get to 0 waste by 2020 and we absolutely are convinced we can do it. No one thought we'd hit 50 percent. Few cities in the world -- few cities in the world have hit 50 percent. San Francisco is at 20 percent -- or 70 percent.

You know that we did something about plastic bags in our city, which we are quite proud of symbolically but also substantively. And if you work for Coca Cola and Pepsi, you know what we're doing on water bottles and you're not very happy with us, but it's time we address the water bottle issue in the context of the environment as well. Styrofoam containers on take-out, San Francisco's been there, done that, leading the cutting edge, restricting the use of those things.

The point, I guess, I'm saying long-windedly is we're taking responsibility not to talk about the problem but try to solve it, and that's what Van Jones is all about. He's about doing. He's about taking action. He's about measuring efficacy of programs. He's moving away from just the big fancy plans to how we actually make things happen. And I'm very proud that in San Francisco we've had the pressure of folks like Van Jones to say, You've got to do more than talk, Mr. Mayor. You've got to do more than talk about energy efficiency and solar rebates and all these things. You've got to demonstrate a capacity to deliver; that's why we're going -- doing a big title project at the mouth of the Golden Gate Bridge. We're actually putting a wind turbine underwater at the mouth of the bay right when you come in under the Golden Gate Bridge to harness the energy of mother nature. I'm putting a buoy in two weeks off of Ocean Beach in San Francisco, the first wave energy demonstration project in California's history, we're doing in San Francisco.

(Audience applauding)

MR. NEWSOM: And some of you have already blogged about this, but we've got urban wind farms in the city. In a city we're doing wind generation in our Bernal Heights community, in Castro and others. And I think this is a great opportunity. We've got this great new work group on wind generation.

So while Al Gore talks about these things and we're proud of it, let's not forget that right now wind and solar is just 1 percent. One. We've got to get to 100 percent, right, in 10 years. If we want to achieve that goal, we've got a lot of work to do. And so we've got to manifest this ideal and we've got to take action and take risks and try different things. And we've got to disenthrall ourselves of the notion that cities should not lead on this. Cities must lead in terms of moving this environmental agenda forward.

But there's an area beyond wind and solar, beyond green buildings, beyond the emissions coming out of tailpipes, beyond what we are doing even on geothermal -- and I hope that someone asks me more some other time about what San Francisco is doing on geothermal -- that is so fundamental to the speaker that is coming up and that is the issue of environmental justice.

So often you go to conferences like this and you see environmentalists give speeches and they all kind of look like me, and you start looking around the environmental movement and it's kind of a certain type of person that talks about the environment. And it was Van Jones who started showing up at all these events I was having saying, "Mr. Mayor, you're missing something, you're missing something." I said, "Well, wait a second, recycling, biodiesel, all these" -- he said, "You're missing something." I said, "Well, what is it?" He goes, "Well, you remember at the UN World Environment Day we talked about social equity, we talked about the opportunities to create real jobs for real people that had been locked out of the industrial economy and make sure they are locked into this new green economy."

(Audience applauding)

MR. NEWSOM: And I'll never forget, I was sitting there at some fancy desk with all these fancy environmentalists and we're all pontificating, patting ourselves on the back, every one is feeling good and all of a sudden Van walks up to me quietly and gives me a piece of paper. And on there he writes -- I still have that piece of paper -- and on there he just was scribbling and he wrote the most eloquent speech. And he said, "I'm sick and tired of telling you this, I've written it down for you." And it has become -- I just re-read that. It has become the framework for a book that he has finally written that will be out this October about green color jobs and about the
to make real his commitment and his vision about environmental justice.

And to reconcile the fact that four out of five toxic waste dumps in the United States of America are in predominately African-American communities where your prostate cancer rates, your breast cancer rates, your cervical cancer rates are two to four times the federal average. Where your asthma rates are exponentially greater. Van not only gets this but he has a plan and it is real.

An Apollo type plan, a Manhattan Project type plan, but a real plan nonetheless that twins our vision and passion and purpose, but also the collective wisdom of all of you and so many others on the work force training side, on the job development side, these are the jobs you can't outsource, these are the jobs that will change not only the environment but create wealth and opportunity for those again that haven't been part of our economic prosperity to date.

No one is more eloquent on this topic than Van Jones. No one is more pointed and critical on this topic than Van Jones. And no one, I think, is going to bring more people together on this topic than the person that is about to speak. You guys know Van. We certainly know him out in the bay area in California. And I know he told me, he said don't give me one of those speeches where you overstate what kind of guy I am. I said tough luck.

This guy is a superstar in a world where there's an increasing number of superstars out there. And he's not one of those guys that's just going to make you feel good, he's going to be one of those guys that challenges you and that's what makes him a superstar, to think differently but to more importantly act differently. His book will be the catalyst for that change, but he's here today to preview it, and I couldn't be more proud of who he is and what he has become and what he is going to challenge all of us to do.

If you guys could put your hands together, a big round of applause for Van Jones.

(Audience applauding)