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Climate Change

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Green Cities - Part 2
May 1, 2009

Newly announced California gubernatorial candidate Mayor Gavin Newsom's opening address to the Asia Society's "Scaling Up, from Green Buildings to Green Cities in the US and China" conference in San Francisco. Return to Part 1

Partial Excerpt:
"We were one of the first cities in the United States ... to initiate green building requirements for all municipal buildings. We did this a decade plus ago, so for example you're a city, you're a taxpayer, your money's going to be used not to build an old energy consuming structure. If you want a new library, you want a new park with a recreation facility, if you want a new public health plan, your taxpayer dollars we'll be using, we need green building certification. We use LEED as our certification - LEED silver now for all municiple buildings, we did that a decade ago...

...Of course now that's the norm. And as soon as things are the norm, in San Francisco we realize that we're slowly falling behind, we always gotta be on the leading and cutting edge,
so we established a framework a year and a half ago, and now we have the most agressive green building standards for everybody else, in the United States of America. If you do any new construction in San Francisco in excess of 25,000 ft, you have to meet LEED silver certification, that goes up to LEED gold in a year or so, and we're hoping ultimately to get to LEED platinum though that has yet to be advertised...

It not only includes new construction of commercial and residential buildings,
but also remodels, so if you do any significant remodel in your home or business, you also now have that LEED silver baseline certification requirement.

The next phase for us is going to be an energy efficiency requirement for everybody else, meaning all those legacy buildings, all the buildings that have already been built using the old ways, that haven't been retrofitted like PGE and the LEED Gold certification, which incidentally is remarkable, that you were able to meet gold certification on a building built around the turn of the century, suggesting that this can be done. But we're now with what we call now a green building task force 2.0. When in doubt go 2.0 anything. And they are going to come in with these new standards very shortly, which we think will also raise the bar for cities not only around the country but we hope will be a model for cities aroeund the world.

This is a big deal. We focus so much on tailpipe emissions and cars, we focus so much on exhaust issues as it relates to the production of energy and coal. We do not focus enough on how we design, construct, demolish our buildings, and operate our buildings."