San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom stopped by Netroots Nation on Sunday to introduce Van Jones, and he also talked to the crowd about some of the green accomplishments his city has been able to make so far.
Newsom has proposed the toughest building standards in the country, and in November 2008 he was planning to submit a carbon tax to voters for their approval (he’s now pushed that back to 2009). In March he signed into law a requirement that the city’s taxi fleet be converted to low-emission vehicles by 2011, directed city departments to purchase 100 percent recycled paper and reduce overall paper use by 20 percent by 2010, and backed a tidal-energy project in the San Francisco Bay. He’s also working on projects to boost the city’s use of small wind turbines, and they’ve banned plastic bags and toys that contain bisphenol A and phthalates.
We grabbed a few minutes with Newsom to talk about what the city’s accomplished and what they’re planning to tackle next:
(You may note that the person operating the camera isn’t doing a very good job. In fact, they don’t appear to even understand how to turn the camera off at the end. That would be me. Ahem. I apologize. I was using one of these do-hickeys for the first time.)
