(A post from Mayor Newsom. As a reminder, elected officials are encouraged to post on Calitics; we’ll do our best to promote them to the front page promptly. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Every day more San Francisco residents and businesses are signing up for two San Francisco programs that will cut monthly utility bills and help the City meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals. One is SF Energy Watch, which provides technical assistance and financial incentives that pays over half the cost of energy efficiency upgrades to commercial and multifamily properties. The other is GoSolarSF, which, when combined with federal tax credits and state incentives, can reduce the cost of installing a residential solar power system by more than 50 percent.

Edited by Brian for space. See the flip for the rest of the post.

In the past 2 years, 1,500 businesses and multifamily properties have saved over $5.7 million in energy bills through SF Energy Watch. The program has also delivered 6 megawatts (MW) of energy efficiency savings, which in turn reduces the amount of energy generation we need from polluting power plants.  

San Francisco currently has nearly 8 MW of in-City solar power, including the massive installation at Moscone Center. But the real San Francisco solar gold rush came when we rolled out GoSolarSF in July 2008. In the first seven months, 640 residents and enterprises had taken advantage of the program’s considerable incentives, applying to install nearly 2 MW of clean, renewable energy — 25 percent of the City’s overall solar portfolio.

All of this activity has been a big boost for companies that provide energy efficiency and solar services in the Bay Area. Because of the way San Francisco has structured these programs; local companies that hire locally benefit the most. SF Energy Watch has helped to sustain and/or expand companies–both service providers and suppliers–and currently supports 150 new and ongoing jobs in this emerging green field.

GoSolarSF has specific bonus incentives for employers who hire new staff through the City’s workforce development program. We have placed dozens of new employees in the local solar industry, and of the 640 projects under GoSolarSF, 83 percent are employing workforce development trainees.

On Tuesday of this week I introduced a resolution that will expand the SF Energy Watch program by nearly $4 million. The money for SF Energy Watch comes from California’s Public Goods Charge, a fund for renewable energy and energy efficiency that you pay into with a percentage of every utility bill.

These additional funds will allow the companies that provide energy efficiency services to add an additional 30 new employees on top of the 150 already employed.

SF Energy Watch and GoSolarSF help build the local economy and develop a skilled local workforce for the exploding green tech industry. But most importantly, these jobs are sustainable. They are not based on a single project, so when completed, the jobs do not disappear. Instead, these programs are open-ended, and in the case of GoSolarSF, supported by city legislation that helps feed the process. And I can see a time coming shortly when residential and commercial energy efficiency will be required by local or even statewide mandates.

On a final related note, last September I announced the Mayor’s Solar Founders’ Circle. This initiative served to inject an important new element in our solar efforts: providing free energy efficiency audits together with solar assessments for any business or non-profit in the City that wants it. This “efficiency first” approach is the smartest path to cost savings when planning to go solar.  Energy efficiency improvements to a property will decrease the size of the solar array needed to cut utility bills.

Listen to Mayor Newsom’s Green 960 radio show online or subscribe to his weekly policy discussions on iTunes.  Join Mayor Newsom on Facebook. You can also follow him on Twitter.

I do some work for No on Prop 7.

On Thursday, I headed over to Berkeley for a press conference at the Sierra Club against Props 7 & 10.  Also there were the CA League of Conservation Voters, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. All four of these groups are opposed to the two environmental measures on the ballot, Prop 7 and Prop 10.

Unfortunately, these two measures were not sufficiently vetted.  Prop 7 could discourage renewable development with poor siting mechanisms and a risk of shuttering small renewable producers. Prop 10 is a massive giveaway to natural gas interests, and Swiftboater T. Boone Pickens.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian, certainly no friend of the utilities, also reluctantly came to the decision that both of these props were losers. Join the Calitics Editorial Board in voting No on Props 7 & 10.

The E-Revolution From The Jorgensen For Congress Campaign

Building A New Energy, Economic, Environmental, Educational Future

For Our Country and Our Planet

          Democratic candidate for California’s 24th Congressional District, Marta Jorgensen has formulated a bold new campaign platform called E-Revolution.  She believes this platform, so named for its focus on the strong and productive reform of federal energy, economic, environmental, and educational policies as well as on citizen engagement, is necessary for the United States to compete and survive in the new millennium.  

The first pillar of E-Revolution is energy reform.  As our older energy sources continue to pollute our environment, make us dependent on foreign governments, and slowly get used up, we must adopt clean, independent, and renewable forms of alternative energy like solar power, wind power, tidal power, geothermal power, and biofuels.  

Countries like Denmark, which already gets 25% of its energy from wind power, and Germany, which expects to get 45% of its power from renewable energy sources by 2030, have already recognized the dangers of an addiction to oil and coal.  But Marta Jorgensen believes that the United States can meet this challenge head on; we can take back the mantle of energy pioneer we once held by supporting these new technologies with tax breaks and federal mandates.

The second pillar of this platform, economic reform, seeks to return the American economy to the robust strength it once had and to create new Green and higher paying jobs for American workers.  This can be done by steering our economy toward alternative energy sources, by making our economy more efficient, by working to overcome global warming, and by creating more favorable trade agreements.

While the American oil and coal industries are losing jobs, renewable alternative energies can create and support millions of new jobs.  According to studies, wind power can account for nearly 350,000 jobs, solar power for over 260,000 jobs and $45 billion in economic investment, tidal power for thousands of jobs per plant, geothermal energy for over 20,000 jobs; and biofuel for over 200,000 jobs.  California is the natural home for many of these industries, and with them our state’s economy, already one of the largest in the world, will surely grow even larger.  

We can also make our economy more efficient.  For example, one study found that an increase in fuel efficiency standards starting in 2001 could have saved drivers in upstate New York more than $2.4 billion in gas by 2012; the savings for California, with its much bigger economy and many more residents, could have been astronomical.  Calling for stricter fuel efficiency standards and supporting the creation of new cars with alternative forms of power like electricity, hydrogen, or fuel cells can make our economy more efficient and each of us better off.

Switching to alternative energies and making our economy more efficient as well as working to reduce pollution and instituting a carbon tax will have the additional and very important effect of helping to ward off the effects of climate change.  The costs of untreated global warming is an increase in wildfires, water conservation, public health, agriculture, and flooding could be incalculable; if we take steps now to mitigate those effects, we will be able to sustain and grow our economy far into the future.

In addition, we can take steps to keep our thriving international trade alive and growing while fixing bad trade agreements so that our only exports are American products, not American jobs.  We can also address the issue of our crumbling dollar by reducing the federal deficit and paying down the federal debt.  These policies form an important part of Marta Jorgensen’s platform.

       Such sweeping economic reform may sound difficult, but it is nowhere near as hard as keeping our economy beholden to the old energy sources, old technologies, and bad trade agreements that have made our economy so weak.  But America is no weakling, and Marta Jorgensen believes that we are strong enough and motivated enough to do what we must to secure success for our economy.

The third pillar of change in E-Revolution, environmental reform, is closely related to Jorgensen’s call for both energy and economic reform.  We face serious peril from the effects of global warming, including a catastrophic rise in sea level, widespread drought, and myriad extinctions in plant and animal species all over the planet, effects that will change our world for the worse.  But Marta Jorgensen thinks we can change the world for the better; Marta Jorgensen has a plan.  

First, she calls for freezing carbon emissions and instituting a carbon tax, which will go a long way to reduce any further impact we might have on the atmosphere.  But we also need to further reduce our creation of greenhouse gases by instituting a moratorium on coal plants not outfitted with carbon capture features, calling for the replacement of inefficient incandescent light bulbs, and building a more efficient electrical grid.  In concert, these changes will drastically reduce our negative impact on the environment.

Of course, while we in the United States bear well more than our fair share of responsibility for global warming, we cannot address this problem alone.  That is why Marta Jorgensen will call for a new and stronger global treaty, more effective than the Kyoto Protocol and with a closer compliance date, and she will do all she can to make sure that this time, we sign on and we stay on.

The final pillar of E-Revolution, educational reform, centers on the need to teach our children how to succeed in an E-Revolution world.  We need programs to teach them how to work on a wind farm, how to design a better solar panel, and how to build a more efficient energy grid.  We need to make sure that they know how important our environment is what they can do as individuals to make sure we maintain it.  In short, we need comprehensive environmental education, and we need to do it on the national level.

      The four pillars of E-Revolution are closely related; if one of them fails, the success of the whole project would be cast into doubt.  Without energy reform to create new jobs in alternative energies and to make the economy more efficient, true economic reform is impossible, and without a switch to cleaner energy sources, true environmental reform is impossible.  Without economic reform to create and maintain alternative energies, true energy reform is impossible, and without a more sustainable economy, true environmental reform is impossible.  Without environmental reform to wean us off our addiction to fossil fuels, true energy reform is impossible, and without an environmental policy that seeks to overcome the problems of global warming, true economic reform is impossible.   And unless we have educational reform to teach our children how to thrive in this new world, all the gains of the rest of the project will be for naught.

We need to make E-Revolution a reality; we need to elect Marta Jorgensen.

Please support Marta Jorgensen’s campaign to unseat Republican Elton Gallegly in California’s 24th Congressional District.

             For more information, visit her website at: www.jorgensenforcongress.com.

805-742-0163

[email protected]

Our governor was on This Week this morning and as Arnold has a largely undeserved reputation for being an environmentalist George Stephanopoulos decided to ask him some questions on that topic. The answers were quite revealing, and should give Obama a major opening to attack McCain should he be interested in doing so.

ABC doesn’t yet have a transcript up, so I’m borrowing from John Campanelli’s transcription. First up, he destroys McCain on oil drilling:

Arnold: I have no interest in off-shore drilling off California. People can do it wherever they want…[McCain] can give us the rights to drill offshore but we will say “No thanks, we will not drill because we want to protect our coasts.

Stephanopoulos: That’s more important than bringing down the price of gas, bringing down the price of oil?

Arnold: First of all, let me tell you, anyone who tells you drilling, nuclear power, alternative fuel, fuel cells will bring down the price right now is pulling wool over your eyes because we know that will all take at least 10 years.

Which is of course the point I made when this drilling nonsense first emerged. Offshore drilling will line oil company pockets and contribute absolutely nothing to the easing of gas prices. The “wool over your eyes” comment is priceless – let’s hope the Obama campaign replays that quote often in the days and weeks to come.

Arnold took the opportunity to go further in explaining the need for a sustainable energy policy, praising Jimmy Carter’s approach:

Arnold: But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do those things. The problem in America is not that we don’t have ideas. It’s that we aren’t consistent. Jimmy Carter in the late ’70s came in with a great energy policy. He talked about (couldn’t make this out), tax credits for people investing in windmills, and all those things. And then President Reagan came in and scrapped the whole thing because oil prices came down and said it didn’t make sense financially. Well, many countries all over the world  stayed with the program even though oil prices came down. In Germany, with solar, they’ve been working on it for 30 years and they are number one in solar. I think that is what we need to do. We need to stay the course. We got to go and stay, “Here’s the plan: here’s how we get energy independent. We need renewables, we need nuclear power, we need alternative fuels. All of those kind of things. Let’s do research. Let’s never go off course, no matter who the administration is or no matter what the oil prices. Let’s stay on course. That’s the big problem in America.

It’s a great set of points he makes – Carter’s energy policy was smart, but Reagan came to power and promised America a painless return to the cheap oil days of the 1950s and led a conservative attack on sustainable energy and transportation alternatives. America certainly would have been better off had we continued with the late 1970s energy policy instead of abandoning it for cheap political gain.

Stephanopoulos went on to ask Arnold if he’d serve in an Obama cabinet, Arnold said he won’t rule it out. That may be the main media takeaway from the interview, but the more important statements were those quoted above. Arnold does recognize the need for a more sensible energy policy and also admits that McCain isn’t on board with it – instead McCain prefers to continue the failed policies of Reagan and Bush, policies that have caused gas prices to soar and thrown our economy into recession.

Of course we need to not go too far here. Arnold’s own record on energy and the environment is not good. His water bond proposal would ruin the Delta and spend $9 billion on wasteful and damaging dams. He greenwashed himself with AB 32, but continues to target public transportation for crippling cuts. He has endorsed Proposition 1 on high speed rail but hasn’t taken a leading role in campaigning for it. He could help implement a wind and solar strategy in California, along the lines of what Proposition 7 proposes, but prefers to remain silent on the matter.

So ultimately his appearance on This Week is more of the usual environmental grandstanding we’ve come to know and love from our governor. But this time it has political value for Democrats and Obama in particular, who would be smart to exploit these comments for all they’re worth. It would be a good way for Obama in particular to start flipping the script and generating his own news for a change.