Kevin Danaher

Transcription

[In French] I am sorry, I don't speak French, but in my my heart, I am 100% French. I have the privilege of working for, working inside the city government of San Francisco, at the Department of Environment, which is responsible for all things environmental in San Francisco. We have more than one hundred staff, working on energy, and biofuels, and transportation, and urban agriculture, a wide range of issues, but I run a non-profit NGO that is inside the Department of Environment. It's a very interesting government agency. We have two business associations inside this government department: one is large companies focused on climate change, and one is smaller local companies that are very green, that have passed a very difficult screen of criteria for being a green enterprise. So it's a government agency with two business networks and a non-profit organization inside that government agency. So it's rather unique. Now I want to switch back and forth between these two slides. This is San Francisco now and this is San Francisco in 2030. If you look in the bottom right side of the screen you will see the ocean levels. We are an ocean city. This is the bay, but it's ocean water. And in a mere twenty years we are going to have billions of dollars' worth of property underwater. We're already having serious problems with ocean level rise when storms happen. So why is San Francisco so green? When the Green Cities Competitions happen, San Francisco is always up at the top, or near the top, and it's largely because of the Department of Environment, where my office is located. The website is sfenvironment.org. Legislation is essential. This is a picture of our mayor, Ed Lee, signing legislation, moving us forward in the area of urban agriculture, which I will touch on in a moment. The government brings law, the private sector companies bring in investment and job creation, the non-profit NGO's bring in activism and education, to stimulate citizen mobilization. We have by law mandatory recycling and composting. And every business and every home is required by law to separate their garbage. Three bins: the blue bin is recycling paper, cardboard, cans, bottles; the green bin is compost, eggshells, coffee grounds, banana peels, etc., that we make soil out of; the black bin is what goes to the landfill. Our goal is zero waste by 2020. Currently we are at 80%. 80% resource recovery. Only 20% of our waste goes to the landfill. But by 2020, we want to be zero waste. Our compost is made into soil, many different types of soil. A different type for the vineyards to make wine, a different type for vegetable gardens, a different type for golf courses, because we're using up our soil. In every country, the soil is being washed away or blown away. If we don't recreate the soil we will have a massive food emergency. So getting to zero waste, we banned styrofoam. In restaurants, when you get food to take away, it has to be in a compostable container. It can't be in styrofoam. In 2007, we passed a law banning plastic bags, those little take-out bags in stores. That applied to the big stores, and then just now in 2012 we extended that to all stores. No more plastic bags. We reduced toxics, we passed a healthy children ordinance that took the lead-based plastic out of toys and things for children. That, then, caused the State of California to pass a similar law, and then the Federal Government in Washington passed a national law along the lines of what we started in San Francisco. This is a picture of our future zero waste facility. This will take us about four or five years, hopefully, and it will take all the garbage of the city, and either recycle it, compost it, or create biofuel from it, in order to get to zero waste. We have charging stations that the city is creating around town to encourage people to use electric cars. Our taxi fleet has already beat the Kyoto targets for 2020 by going electric, hybrid, natural gas with the taxi fleet. We have extensive programs for clean energy and efficiency. People can get money to insulate their homes and create energy efficiency in businesses. We are saving 60,000 tons of Co² into the atmosphere. That's the equivalent to taking 12,000 automobiles off the roads forever through these efficiency programs. We have the number one green policies of any city in the country. The UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa in 2011 gave us the number one prize for the strongest green building policies. Every new building or any major renovation of a building in San Francisco must meet the lead standards of the US Green Building Council for energy efficiency, water reclamation, etc. We just passed new laws to promote urban agriculture in San Francisco, to make it easier for people to grow food in the city, and sell it right inside the city. The best restaurants advertise that their food is local and organic. We have an Environment Now Program, which takes low income people and educates them with eco literacy and training. And then they go out into the neighborhoods to educate the businesses and the citizens, about all the different programs we have, and why they should get involved. We have a publication called Making Sustainability Profitable, which explains to the businesses that if you use less energy and less water and less heat, and less electricity, your profits go up, to destroy that myth that, "Oh, to save the environment, it'll cost jobs, it'll cost money." No, quite the opposite. Green jobs in the United States over the past ten years have grown twice as fast as non-green jobs. And they are more resistant to depression. We do community outreach, we have teams. Our largest Section of the Department of the Environment is the outreach team, which I work with very closely. We do hundreds of public events every year, where we are out in the street. We take all this equipment and the tent on an electric bicycle with a cart in the back, so we can take all the equipment with no impact, not relying on cars, and we educate the public in their neighborhoods about all the services that are available. We host foreign delegations from China and India, from France, from Nantes, from Denmark, from other cities in the United States. This actually is one of my responsibilities, to meet and greet the foreign delegations, and explain our different programs. We use our offices as a party space, as a social networking space, because there are green people within Government, within private companies, and within the non-profit sector, and often times they're separated in silos. We work to bring them together, because it takes all three sectors to make the kind of changes that we need. This is an idea that I'm pushing, and hopefully we will make it happen: Eco-Gym, where the stationary bicycles, the rowing machines, the arm cranks will all generate electricity into the building. And we're designing a bicycle that will have a little desk that you can recharge your laptop, or your handheld devices for in the airport, because in airports there are never enough plugs right, to recharge our devices. So people can get some exercise, you're sitting on a plane for too long, you know. We emphasize education, we have five full time staff. We do nothing but go into the schools, particularly at the young ages and educate the children about environmental issues, because these children will eventually be running the world when the environmental crisis is much more serious than it is now. We have to learn to be good ancestors. We think of ancestors as people that came before us. But we are ancestors as well. If you look at the great cathedrals like Notre Dame, they took centuries to build. The masons who lay the foundation layer, they knew that they would not see the final product of their work. But they knew they had to do very precise, solid work, because of all the weight that was going to come on top of their work. Well, that's us. We are the masons who are responsible for laying the foundation layer of the future green economy that will be sustainable, that we won't have wars for oil and starving children. That will come about, it's just a question of how long is that going to take. Mother Nature's core principle is unity of diversity. That's the central principle of nature's operating system: unity of diversity. And now we are learning to replicate that law in our society. San Francisco is a very diverse city. We reach out. Our materials are in Spanish, and Chinese, and Russian, and Vietnamese, because we want to bring people together into this movement. We are lucky in that we have a prime directive, from the green architect William McDonough. How do we love all the children, of all species for all time? If that was the prime directive, we would be able to fix these problems. And I'll conclude with a little story, because the question is: Can we do this? Can we muster the courage to do this? We were in Haiti with a group of Reality Tour with Global Exchange, a group that I co-founded years ago. And we were up in the mountains in a little shack, very hot. It was the middle of the night and one of our men in the group of wealthy men from Philadelphia, he couldn't sleep. He went outside, he was sitting outside and he felt somebody looking at him. And he turned round and these two little children were peeking at him and he said, "Come here." And he didn't speak Creole and they didn't speak English. He started drawing pictures and they started gesturing, and they started to communicate, and one of the children said something to the other child, and "Oh, good idea." They took him by the hand, and they started leading him up the side of a mountain. This man was white and he thought he wasn't racist. But he started to get scared thinking: "Maybe these kids are taking me and their big brother is going to grab me and steal my wallet, or put me in a big pot and cook me, like a Tarzan movie." And he keeps getting more and more fearful, and he's scared by his own racism, and as they go higher and higher up this mountain, he's thinking: "Maybe I should just run away from these children." They finally get to the top, where he's thinking he's going to run away. They stop, they turn around, they face him east, it was an east/west valley, the sun was just coming up and the shafts of light were coming through the trees, and all the birds were coming to song. He said it was the most beautiful experience of his entire life. And he looked down and these two children were looking up at him, with these big smiles on their faces. They changed his heart forever. If those two children can do that, then we can go out and create a global values revolution, to fix what's wrong with this world. Merci beaucoup. (Applause)