1 August 2006
Tony Blair has spoken at the launch of Clinton Climate Initiative: a new scheme dedicated to making a difference in the fight against climate change in practical and measurable ways.
President Clinton was joined by the Prime Minister, London Mayor Ken Livingstone, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to announce the first project.
Parts of this transcript may have been edited
Read all the speeches below:
Chancellor Norman Abrams:
Good Afternoon. Welcome. I am UCLA Chancellor, Norman Abrams. On behalf of the UCLA community I want to welcome the visitors to our campus and the members of our campus community here today. The focus of today’s announcement is of critical importance. Environmental sustainability is of enormous concern to all of us, and the Clinton Foundation serves as a catalyst for change.
UCLA is a very appropriate forum for this announcement today. Our Institute of the Environment, directed by Mary Nichols, a nationally recognised environmental leader, addresses critical environmental challenges through interdisciplinary research, education and service. We are for example studying the effects of climate change on California’s coastal waters. We have 20 research centres on campus that focus on environmental areas of concern. The UCLA Ronald W Burkle Centre for International Relations concentrates its cross-disciplinary teaching and research on the role of the United States in global affairs, and the environmental problems today are global in nature.
And we at UCLA, this is another dimension, have been working tirelessly on the use of our own resources in ways that help to sustain the environment through local action. For example, we have decreased our energy and water consumption here on campus through a variety of efficiency and conservation measures. We have built one of the largest university fleets of alternate fuel vehicles, and last year La Kretz Hall which houses the UCLA Institute of the Environment, became our first green building - did you paint it green? - illustrating how a research university can meet its building needs with sensitivity to environmental issues.
We serve as an intellectual resource to the creation of environmental knowledge that supports those who are dedicated to improving our quality of life, community by community. We are helping to prepare future generations to be part of the solution.
Now it is my great honour and privilege to extend a special welcome to an array of distinguished visitors. I have been on this campus a very long time, I can’t remember quite a group like this. First of all I want to extend a special welcome to the 42nd President of the United States - William Jefferson Clinton; and second, the Rt Hon Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; the Mayor of the City of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom; the Mayor of the City of London, Ken Livingstone; and the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa.
It is my pleasure to introduce the Mayor who is to speak, who is by the way a UCLA alumnus.
Mayor Villaraigosa:
Thank you Chancellor. I thank you all for being here today. This is a very significant day for all of us. On behalf of America’s second largest city, the world’s 12th largest metropolitan area, I am here today to say that we need to take responsibility for the urban contribution to global climate change. More than that, because cities have always been the centres of human enlightenment and possibility, we need to recognise that cities and their leaders have a special obligation to lead.
Let me say how honoured and humbled I am to stand with two giants of our time - Prime Minister Tony Blair, and of course our own President, William Jefferson Clinton - each of whom has led the global call to action and response to global warming.
Today we are announcing that the city of Los Angeles will join an historic agreement with the Clinton Foundation, the City of London and the largest cities on every continent around the world to co-ordinate our policies in the effort to protect our world’s climate.
The evidence is incontrovertible, the scientific consensus is deafening. According to the National Academy of Sciences, last year was the warmest in two millennia, and 2006 promises to be hotter still. We can’t think about global warming as some far away problem of melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and distant hurricanes in remote places. It is our problem, here in the city of Los Angeles. The State of California says that we can expect a significant melting of the Sierra snow-cap - our major source of drinking water - and an increase in heatwave days. In the last two weeks we have all witnessed the impact of extreme heat on vulnerable populations and on our city’s power supply. More hot days mean more smog and greater risk of wildfires. A rise in sea levels threatens low-lying areas like the groundwater basins in southern California. This is a global problem with local repercussions. The time to act is now.
Just as no family would watch his house burning down without rallying the community to fight the fire, we need to sound the alarm, join hands and face the challenge together. We can’t afford to dither, delay or declare defeat for another year. This is a crisis we can and must meet.
This is why I have joined with 200 other Mayors in the US Mayors Agreement on Climate change in which we pledge to meet, or beat, the Kyoto Protocol targets. It is going to require bold action to meet those targets and we are setting big goals here in the city of Los Angeles. I realise that our city has historically been more synonymous with sprawl and smog, but we are committed to making LA the greenest big city in America and a model for sustainable practices.
Let me briefly describe our action plan to combat global warming here in Los Angeles. The burning of fossil fuels for electricity and transportation is the major source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Here, our Department of Water and Power is our major single source for greenhouse gas emissions. That is why I have directed the city to get 20 per cent of the electricity it sells from renewable resources by the year 2010, 7 years before the rest of the state. This single action will reduce the city’s global warming emissions by 20 per cent from the year 2004 levels, it will reduce conventional air pollution and help fuel the growth of the green economy in our city.
We are also pioneering an initiative to reduce air pollution at our port and our airport. Just this June, a few short days ago, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach joined together to sign an historic clean air plan that will cut down on greenhouse gases by increasing the use of alternative fuels, electrifying more equipment and requiring greater efficiency in port operations. This is significant because 25 per cent of all the pollution in southern California comes from our port.
And we are doing more. We will be planting a million trees in the city of Los Angeles and increasing open space around our city, around the Los Angeles river. I have just been informed by Senator Boxer that the Federal government will be a partner in this effort to green the LA river. We are converting more of the city’s fleet to convert it to alternative fuels. The city’s entire fleet of refuse collection trucks will be powered by alternative fuels by the year 2010. We are expanding and promoting green buildings and green roofs to reduce energy use and save natural resources. We are looking at every measure we can take to conserve every watt of energy and every drop of water. We are expanding mass transit and promoting transit-oriented development and smart land use practices. You have heard me say that we are going to get a subway to the ocean, and we will. And the infrastructure bond that will be on the ballot, there will be $4.5 billion for public transit, a billion dollars for Los Angeles alone.
Reducing LA’s contribution to global warming will bring multiple benefits to Angelinos, it will cut smog, it will save money on energy costs, it will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels, it will make LA a more liveable city and will grow and green the economy and make LA the greenest economy anywhere in the United States of America.
Mayors in cities around the world recognise that we are all on the frontlines of global warming, we are the first responders and we can’t afford to wait. I want to thank UCLA for hosting this important event. I also want to thank Prime Minister Blair and Mayors Livingstone and Newsom for being here, as well of course as President Clinton. By harnessing the talent of the governments and people of the world we can meet this challenge and leave a healthier planet for our children, a world that is populated by vibrant and liveable cities.
I want to say a few words in Spanish, given that the Spanish press is here. (Not interpreted.)
Chancellor Abrams:
It is now my honour and distinct privilege to introduce a man who has spent his entire career in public life working to make this vision a reality. As President of the United States of America he helped negotiate the Kyoto Protocol that rallied the resolve of the entire world community to halt global climate change. He expanded protection for our forests and public land, he created new national monuments, he fought to restore national treasures like the everglades in the Bay Delta, he strengthened clean air standards, he made improving children’s health a top national priority. And in all his work, both inside and outside of office, he has always challenged us to build a bridge to a sustainable future. Please join me in welcoming the 42nd President of the United States of America, William Jefferson Clinton.
President Clinton:
Thank you very much. Mr Mayor, Chancellor, thank you for the City of Los Angeles and UCLA for hosting our announcement today, and thank you Mr Mayor for your important efforts to combat climate change. I also want to say a special word of thanks to Mayor Newsom for being here, and London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, and Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron, thank you for being here and for the leadership that London has taken in creating this Large Cities Climate Group, and for the efforts you are making for London to become a model for energy conservation and greenhouse gas reduction.
Finally I want to thank Prime Minister Blair for taking time from a very busy schedule to show up to support us today, and you will hear from him today, but I want to say how much his leadership on this issue means to me personally, because the UK has disproved the canard that led the United States Senate to vote against the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty even before I could present it to them. (party political content).
Great Britain’s target under Kyoto was more rigorous than ours, it was a 12 per cent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels. Already we know that the United Kingdom will beat their target by at least 50 per cent. And so let’s look at the argument of those who have attacked those of us who want to do something about this.
How terrible it would be for the economy. The British economy, of all the European ones, is the most like America’s, it is the most open, the most flexible. Their unemployment rate is about the same as ours. We have just finished the first five years in our history where we have had increasing productivity in the workforce and average wages have remained flat, poverty has increased. Average wages have gone up in Great Britain, poverty has declined and inequality has decreased. Now because of my politics I would like to tell you it is because his tax and social policies are more like mine than the current American administration - that may have something to do with it - but the truth is the main reason is that unlike the United States, the United Kingdom has found a source of new jobs in an open global economy in the first decade of the 21st century, and a commitment to a clean independent energy future. So thank you Prime Minster for setting an example that all Americans should be willing to follow. I am very grateful.
We all know now that climate change is occurring more rapidly than previously we had thought. We see it in the meltings occurring everywhere, in our own snow-capped mountains, in the Tibetan glacier, in the Greenland icecap which contains 8 or 10 per cent of all the fresh water on earth, and if it continues to melt at the present rate, sometime in the next 40 years or so we will lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island - America’s most expensive real estate currently. I am in Harlem in the middle of the Island, I will be all right, but it is not a hopeful sign.
More importantly, and very troubling for the United Kingdom and all of northern Europe, if we lose that much fresh water into the ocean it will almost certainly interrupt the flow of the Gulf stream which moderates temperatures in northern Europe in the winter, so we could have this perverse development of making northern Europe uninhabitably cold in the winter while the rest of the world continues to burn to a crisp, we continue to lose topsoil, we continue to lose water supplies, we continue to lose biodiversity at a breathtaking rate.
Hilary and her odd couple colleague, Senator John McCain, have gone, taking recalcitrant members of the Senate, to Point Barrow, Alaska, near the Arctic Circle, to see the manifestations in the northern most part of America of climate change, and have gone to the Norwegian islands, 600 miles north of the European continent to the northern most village on earth, to see first hand how rapidly these changes are occurring.
We have to reduce about 80 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions over the next 10 - 15 years. It sounds like a daunting task, but I don’t believe it is. I don’t believe it is for two reasons. First of all we now have a majority of the people in every major greenhouse gas emitting country on earth who believe this is a problem; and secondly, at least in the more mature economies, we have overcome the most crippling problem, which is the false idea that we couldn’t deal with this without hurting the economy; and thirdly, we have the technology available.
So the main thing we have to do is to organise ourselves to move as quickly as possible, and in the process to demonstrate to the developing countries, where there is still more doubt about whether they can become rich without continuing to put more greenhouse gas emissions into the air, we have to organise ourselves quickly enough to demonstrate that this is good for the economy, and if you are an American or a European, indeed if you are a peace loving person anywhere on earth, this is also quite good for national security because too many of the sources of greenhouse gases come from countries that are politically unstable, and the wealth transfers are staggering. A lot of the work we do in Africa for example is threatened by the impact of the rising oil prices on the African continent which basically in some countries totally wipe out the impact of increased aid being given. So this is a very, very serious problem, but also a phenomenal opportunity, and we should see it as such.
Today we are here to announce a partnership between the alliance of large global cities and my foundation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Cities are responsible for over 75 per cent of the emissions, large ones obviously are not only the largest source of greenhouse gases, but also today the most visible in their leadership, which can set a model for others to follow.
We know what needs to be done - we have to use less energy and find clearer sources. But as I said, the good news is we don’t have to have major breakthroughs, although they would help all right, but existing technologies are enough to make dramatic reductions.
Today cities waste a lot of energy. Most of our buildings waste more energy than they use because their heating, cooling and ventilation systems are inefficient, because of poor construction of walls, roofs and windows, because light bulbs use only 5 per cent of the energy needed to run them to produce the light, the rest is wasted; cars idle in traffic jams - you know nothing about that here; city vehicle fleets like buses, garbage trucks, police and fire vehicles run inefficiently on fuels that generate too much CO2; street lighting and traffic lighting use technologies that waste energy; water systems use huge amounts of energy and waste disposal systems generate large amounts of poisonous methane in the atmosphere which is even more potent in the emission of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon dioxide.
Energy wasting and inefficient power distribution systems, fed by distant coal fired power plants, are the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world, and China is bringing on a new coal-fired plant about once a week.
In the United States it is important to point out that these coal fired plants operate at only about 35 per cent efficiency, which means that two-thirds of all the greenhouse gases emitted by our coal fired power plants do not provide any beneficial electricity to us. Existing technology would enable those plants to have their efficiency increased from 35 per cent to about 57 per cent, and new plants can be built at 60 or better. Those changes alone would have a dramatic impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
As I said, this is important to me not only because of climate change, but for national security reasons, and because as the United Kingdom has shown, it is actually the only viable economic strategy for wealthy countries who want to maintain open economies, trade, help to develop poor countries around the world, and still generate new jobs with rising incomes.
So here is what we are going to do with this partnership. First, we will organise a purchasing consortium to pool the purchasing powers in large cities, to lower prices of energy saving products, and to accelerate the development of new technologies to be used in cities to reduce consumption and create cleaner energy. And we will open the benefits of this purchasing consortium to other smaller cities around the world. This is exactly what we did with the Aids drugs, we basically convinced the generic producers of Aids drugs to go from a high margin, low volume, uncertain payment strategy, to a low margin, high volume quick payment strategy, and we dramatically reduced the prices. Now we work in 25 countries with our Aids project, but we sell those medicines in nearly 60, to about 400,000 people, to about 25 per cent of the people in the whole world that are getting the medicine today in developing countries. So we know this will work and it is imperative that we take advantage of it, and the scale of buying we can do, because of the consortium of big cities and because they are well distributed on every continent of the world will be truly impressive. Secondly, we will deploy the best experts in the world to assist in developing and implementing plans that best work for them to reduce emissions. Thirdly, we want to help to create systems to measure energy uses and greenhouse gas emissions, and to chart the progress of the initiatives undertaken and then to share all the information. And this is real important, for those of you that are active in this, you know that one of the most controversial parts of the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, once you start, is setting a realistic baseline and accurately measuring reductions. So you know for example for people like me who have always believed that the carbon sinks are important, there is a lot of controversy because some people claim they have reduced greenhouse gas emissions through Notel farming, but they are counting acres that were under Notel before they began to do it.
And so there are a lot of these kind of issues. It is really important that this effort maintains its integrity, so we have to have a clearly understood baseline and clearly understood standards for measuring, and people have to buy it because I personally believe that we can’t do all that we need to do without using some (inaudible). We need to have some serious reforestation efforts, for no other reason than to restore the quality of soil and biodiversity, and maintain water supplies throughout the world, but we can’t afford to have anybody think that anyone is trying to gain the system here, none of us has an interest in cheating, the only thing we really need to do is to figure out how best to reduce these greenhouse gas emissions to avoid calamity. So this is important.
The next point I want to make is that we in the cities are not doing this alone. When my foundation was asked to work with the cities, we partnered with several other people, the way we do with our Aids work, because we knew we needed all the help we could get and there is more work to be done and all of us can do it together. So I want to acknowledge the groups that have already agreed to partner with us: the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, the US and the Global Green Building Councils, the Climate Group, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, the Urethane Network, the Alliance to Save Energy, the America Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers.
We will also have other partners as we get to work, working with the large city Mayors and large businesses based in those cities to mobilise resources and to make these things happen. And we will have to mobilise some more financial resources as we go along. I am encouraged at the broad base of Americans and people around the world, apparently from disparate sources who get this now. And let me say that I think that the political base for acting here, and the financial base, will only broaden in the years ahead if for no other reason than that an increasing number of petroleum geologists tell us we have reached peak production on oil, which means that people who never before were concerned about climate change realise we have to use less oil anyway because if we keep using it at the present rates, and the conservative geologists are right and we run out in 35 years, or 50 years, that is not enough time to convert the earth off of oil to some other fuel base.
So I think that this is going to happen, but when I agreed to work with the cities we said that we wanted to raise our own money to pay our own costs because we wanted the cities to spend their money helping their own citizens. And guess who our first big contributors were? This is a harbinger of the future, this is good, our first contributors were Barbra Streisand and Rupert Murdoch, and to be perfectly honest this may be the first time I have ever said that, because I didn’t want to risk either one of them having second thoughts. And I would also like to thank Anson Beard from New York, those three people got us started on this, but Barbra has been funding climate change solutions since the late 1980s, and Rupert Murdoch has committed News Corps to reducing its own emissions of greenhouse gases and to become a carbon neutral country - company I mean - maybe he thinks it is a country.
But we have a good laugh about this, but this is serious business. You just think about it. There should be no political, there should be no philosophical, there should be no difference here, there should be no national difference here. I remember when I went to China late in my second term and we did an environmental event dealing with climate change and species preservation, the Environmental Minister of China came up practically with tears in his eyes to thank me, because he said he was the only person in his government who believed then that you could reduce greenhouse gas emissions without hurting China’s longed for economic expansion. I will never forget that. And now the Chinese have tougher auto emission standards than we do. They get this.
So I say that not only because I am grateful to Barbra Streisand and Rupert Murdoch, Anson Beard, but because we all need those kind of alliances. We cannot afford any enemies on this, time is our enemy, our past habits are enemies, the entrenched thought patterns and economic interests of yesterday are our common adversaries. So we all need to join hands and we need to say that they have set a good example for us, and I am very grateful to them.
So that is what we are going to do. I believe, whether I am working on childhood obesity, or Aids, or any of the other problems we work on, I think what the world lacks so often are systems that work, they prove that there is a reward for effort. This is, for those of us in wealthy countries, a birds nest on the ground, and for the developing countries we have to show them that they can get rich quicker, and have more control over their future if they follow this path.
One final story. I was with the Prime Minister of Ethiopia the other day, and they are one of our Aids partners, but he is a highly intelligent man and he said: "You know, I think Africa should become the first oil-free continent in transportation". He said: "We can grow sugar cane as well as Brazil", he then went through all the conversion ratios of the different base fuels for biofuel. And he said: "Just think, if we ran all of our cars in the whole continent on biofuels, we would double farm income, create a great constituency for stopping soil erosion, promote people in reforestation efforts because we were going to have sustainable farming, and we would sell our oil on the international markets, deluding the influence of all those unstable countries." Here is a guy sitting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in a country with a per capita income of $2 a day, after decades of all kinds of trouble, thinking in that way. That is very hopeful for the future because we all have to do this together, and we have seen the results, not only in what the United Kingdom has done, but we know that Portland Oregon has reduced their emissions below American’s greenhouse gas Kyoto target, and their economy is booming. We know that Newport Chemical has reduced their greenhouse gas emissions and saved hundreds of millions, they may be up to a billion dollars a year now they are saving because of this. We know that this is a good thing to do and we all have to join hands.
And I would now like to introduce the person that brought us into this endeavour, who has been leading the way in organising this global coalition, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
Mayor Livingstone:
Thank you very much Mr President, and I am delighted and honoured to be here, both with the distinguished platform but clearly with an audience that is alert to the problems that our planet faces, and clearly determined to do something about it.
There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the biggest single threat that faces human civilisation is climate change. There is no longer any serious scientific opinion running against the vast consensus that has built up. There are opponents in some elements of the media, some firms and some nations have yet to accept the reality of this, but I have never been aware of such an overwhelming scientific consensus on any controversial issue of this nature before.
And what we find very much is that it is a problem that has been building slowly, slowly at first, unnoticeably at the beginning of the industrial revolution 200 years ago, and it is only 30 years ago that scientists first started to analyse the impact of carbon emissions on the earth’s temperature, and we have been unforgivably slow in reacting to that initial scientific analysis.
When President Clinton took office, the consensus at that stage was that if the continuing growth of carbon emissions continued, we would reach a tipping point beyond which climate change would become irreversible, that it would get so bad that nothing we could do would stop an accelerating warming process. And that tipping point was assumed to be towards the end of this century. The consensus now is that that tipping point is most probably 10 - 15 years away, at best, and therefore it is incredibly urgent that we move on all fronts to tackle this problem. It is not a question of waiting for a new technology to be invented, all the existing technologies at our disposal are sufficient to achieve the carbon emission reductions that we need to make.
The position I took a decade ago was very much that I wasn’t certain that business or government would really wake up to what needed to be done until we had seen catastrophic loss of life, and I am incredibly encouraged about the way in which so many governments and large corporations are now accepting the need for change and are pressing ahead, changing the way they do business, changing the way their governments actually operate.
The vast majority of the world has woken up to the scale of the threat that we face. But because it is a global problem you have to have global solutions, and there are numerous factors that have prevented the international community from acting swiftly enough, and in those circumstances it is not surprising that cities have come forward and taken up the baton. Over half of humankind now lives in cities and we are responsible for three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Mayors have powers in areas that are most important in taking the action that needs to be taken to reduce emissions, in planning, in transportation and in housing. And the Mayoral system allows those who are willing to do so to take decisive and radical action.
In many countries, including my own, the greatest emissions of carbon, and the biggest waste of energy occur, as President Clinton just said, in the process of generating and distributing electricity through a centralised grid system. Oil prices in the 1970s prompted some cities, such as Stockholm, to pioneer the use of decentralised energy, replacing the wasteful centralised power generation with highly efficient combined heat and power systems. Decentralised energy systems are ideal for cities, they save energy, cut carbon emissions, provide consumers with lower energy bills and protect us from future rises in the price of gas and oil.
In London we are adopting this decentralised model and have established a new municipal company - the London Climate Change Agency - to achieve it. Decentralised energy is undoubtedly the way forward for the cities around the globe.
President Clinton also touched on his experience in China, and what is quite interesting about going to China is to see a people waking up to the impact of this. For those of us in the west, in Britain and America, our process of industrialisation spanned well beyond a century, no one human lifetime could see the impact of our economic activities on our environment. Yet in China it has been seen in a generation, this rapid process of industrialisation has demonstrated to the Chinese government the need for urgent action, and their recent decision to go for the mass production of (inaudible) cells is one that will help to bring down the price of these globally, perhaps by two-thirds over the next 2 or 3 years.
I visited Shanghai recently and I was shown their plans for the construction of a whole new city which will be a carbon and zero carbon city, ie producing no carbon emissions. (inaudible) on the edge of Shanghai, the citizens will receive all of their energy supplies from renewable sources, using combined heat and power to maximise efficiency, and the cars will also be zero carbon.
But most cities don’t have the option of starting from scratch. Toronto has worked incredibly successfully with the private sector to go back and retrofit commercial buildings so they consume less energy. The combination of a better bottom line and lower emissions is something that other cities will want to learn from and copy.
How to manage waste is a significant issue for every major city. Here in Los Angeles they have demonstrated how to make a virtue out of necessity by extracting gases from landfill waste, converting them into clean and renewable energy. This is a 21st century alchemy and it provides a key component to how we can meet future energy demand, particularly if visions of a hydrogen economy are to be realised.
California’s main source of carbon emissions however is transportation. In London we have been able to use the pricing mechanism to deter unnecessary car travel through the congestion charge, and quite remarkably, and contrary to many of my detractors, I managed to get re-elected after doing it, so it shows the level of public support. We started out with a fairly crude mechanism, just charging £5 a day, 38 per cent of people chose not to drive into the city and switched to other methods, and it is a small area, only about 8 square miles. We are about to double that, but we are also looking at a much more sophisticated next step, which will take a couple of years to introduce, in which the charge will vary according to the carbon emissions of your car. And so far the situation is that the shift of people
from the car into other forms of transport means that in London we have 10 per cent less car journeys now than 6 years ago, and a corresponding increase in public transport usage and cycling has almost doubled, and people are walking a bit more as well.
Now we intend to effectively transform this into a pollution charge, and for the most polluting vehicles, and not all sports utility vehicles because some are quite efficient, but for the real gas guzzlers the charge will become $50 a day, and this I believe will create quite a market for lower polluting vehicles.
We are also about to introduce a low emissions zone which will cover the whole city, 620 square miles, and it can’t be done all at once overnight, we will start with the most polluting vehicles, the heavy goods vehicles, buses, taxis and so on, and move down the scale as we are able to extend the scheme. And that low emissions zone, the charge for a heavily polluting lorry will be $2,000 a day to drive into the city. So we expect this to be a real deterrent and I think we will build a consensus around that as people see the need for it.
There are incredible numbers of alternatives of less polluting vehicles, we simply seek to intervene with the pricing mechanism to make sure that people choose the one that benefits the rest of the people living in the city, and indeed the rest of the planet.
The partnership that President Clinton is announcing today will enable those cities that want to move decisively forward towards a more sustainable future to do so, and to do so more quickly, by taking the best from other cities and adapting it to their own needs. The purchasing power of what we will be able to do, as President Clinton spelt out, I think will rapidly advance the process of tackling climate change. This initiative started last October in London when we invited 20 of the world’s largest cities to come to discuss a joint response to climate change, the communiqué we signed that day, and which my Deputy, Nicky Gavron, whose idea this originally was, then took to the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal last November, sets out a broad programme of collaborative activity. The initiative involves many of the world’s major metropolitan areas - Berlin, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Caracas, Chicago, Delhi, Dakar, Johannesburg, Istanbul, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Madrid, Mexico City, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, Sao Paulo, Toronto, Seoul and Warsaw, which you will promptly see is now up to 22, and literally 10 minutes before we came into this room we heard the Mayor of Houston has also decided to join the group and we are therefore delighted about that.
I am delighted that President Clinton and his Foundation have chosen to put their considerable clout behind our cities, (party political). The Clinton Foundation has been incredibly successful in working with governments and the pharmaceutical industry, as he spelt out, to dramatically cut the price of Aids drugs in Africa, and we now hope to benefit from that same drive and experience in bringing together the best private sector expertise with the world’s cities to tackle an even bigger threat.
This is an initiative of the world’s largest cities, but we also want to work with other cities that have demonstrated real exemplary leadership. In particular I want to pay tribute to the 275 United States Mayors, including Mayor Villaraigosa, and Mayor Newsom, who have shown real leadership in signing up on that climate change initiative here at the US Mayors’ Climate Protection initiative. That action, committing their cities to the emissions reductions required by the Kyoto Treaty, gives the rest of the world hope that we can tackle climate change.
Finally I am sure that there will be many people who say this challenge is so vast, can we really win? I have no doubt that we can. Every now and then a generation is called upon to make enormous efforts to defeat something appalling. For my parents’ generation that was a war to defeat fascism, a war that consumed 60 million lives and consumed the best years of their lives, and it required a vast effort, bringing together America and the former Soviet Union, and Great Britain, in an alliance in which other differences were put aside because of the scale of the evil they faced that had to be defeated. Climate change is not an evil, it is not a conscious force, it is not someone’s plan, but it threatens life on this planet every bit as much as the threat of fascism threatened our parents’ generation, and we have to do what they did to try to advance on every front, to use all our energy to mobilise the resources that are necessary to create a sustainable world economy in which not just our prosperity can be secured, but the emerging nations can join in that prosperity as well.
And if Barbra Streisand and Rupert Murdoch can put their differences aside to join in this great common enterprise, I think anybody can. 2,500 years ago the first experiment in democracy was in Athens, and the first Mayor was Pericles, and they had an oath for those that governed and led the city, and I am sure my translation isn’t perfect, but it goes as follows: "We leave this city not less but greater, better and more beautiful than it was left to us." If we are honestly to be able to look our children and our grandchildren in the eye and say we stood up to the test that the ancient Athenians set, climate change must be defeated, and it must defeated now by governments and municipalities and the most progressive of firms in a common effort to save all humankind.
Can I now invite a Mayor of one of the most amazing cities on earth, and you have got two of them represented here. I know there has sometimes been competition between these two great Californian cities, but they are both led by great Mayors, both committed to this agenda, and I was well aware of that when I visited Mayor Newsom last year. Will you please welcome him now to the podium.
Mayor Newsom:
Thank you very much. Well since he brought up Pericles, let me begin by quoting Pericles in another context. Pericles once stated as well that we are models, speaking of Athens, we do not imitate for we, he said, are a model to others. I would like to think in the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol that we can say that about the United States of America, but we haven’t unfortunately been a model to others in terms of our global stewardship and our global leadership on the environment, and I think that is a shame and I think that is unfortunate. And that is the spirit to which I am very pleased to be here today and the spirit to which I am very satisfied with the progress that is not only being made as it relates to the incredible work that Mayor Livingstone has done representing the largest cities in the United States and the largest cities around the world in terms of global stewardship on the environment, but also so appreciative that the Clinton Foundation has stepped up to magnify that effort in a meaningful way.
Now the key is to no longer be dreamers, but to be doers, to actually manifest these ideals and manifest the change. And that is why I am so proud to state that this is not that complicated. I am so proud to state that there is remarkable evidence that suggests it is quite basic and simplistic to move forward in an environmentally friendly, in an environmentally stable way.
I happen to be Mayor of a city that has done a remarkable amount on the environment without much effort whatsoever. I am the Mayor of a city, the largest municipal vehicle fleet of any city in the nation, and it was as simple as the stroke of a pen in an executive order that says that once you get rid of that old car, you have to buy a new car, but it has to be an alternative fuelled vehicle. Of course there is an exception for fire engines, and then we realised well what has caused that loophole, and let’s require that there be biodiesel, B20, in those fire engines as we convert them over to biodiesel fuel and alternative fuels the same.
We extended that same principle when we decided look it is time to lead by example in relation to (inaudible) and created the largest municipally owned solar project in the United State of America, only to then do the second largest in the United States of America on our waste water facility in our south east sector of San Francisco because we believe the environment needs to deal with environmental justice issues in the issues of income inequality and poverty and the like, and I think that is a core construct that drives a lot of the stewardship that is being represented here today.
We are about to do something that I hope gets the attention that it is deserving, and that is put a very large tube at the mouth of the bay, right below the Golden Gate Bridge. It will be the first tidal current effort that this state has ever seen and one of the few in the United States of America, certainly the largest in scope in the history of this country, and we predict, we project that just that one tidal current energy producing renewable 100 per cent zero emission green technology will power over 6 per cent of all the households, just that one source in San Francisco. And we are going to be doing not just that one source, no emission, not that complicated, we are enthusiastic as well to be doing the most comprehensive wave power initiative in California’s history as well, about a mile up the coastline on Ocean Beach, that is a little bit more complicated because of state and federal regulations, but we are going to get there as well.
And we are a city that as Mayor Villaraigosa mentioned, has been doing a lot of things, not dissimilar to what you are doing in Los Angeles as relates to green building designs. You want to build something in San Francisco, we are going to incentivise you, we are going to fast track your permit if you do it to lead standards, lead silver, lead platinum, lead gold standards. We have done the same with our bonds, and we are going to say look if the taxpayers are going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars to revitalise our neighbourhood parks and recreation facilities, our playgrounds and the like, then we are going to rebuild them to lead standards as well, without exception. In fact one of the most exciting projects in our city’s history is rebuilding a long term (inaudible) facility, it will be the first in the state of California’s history to be at lead standard, and it was again as simple as a stroke of a pen, not that complicated, rather straightforward.
And of course, yes, we want to focus on the realities of an economy that is obviously being challenged globally and dealing with the exodus of manufacturing jobs, and now focusing on replacing those blue collar jobs with green collar jobs, to President Clinton’s point. The reality is the President said something 15 years ago that few elected officials in either party said, and that was he made the distinction he was making earlier today, he made the distinction of the tyranny of (inaudible) versus the genius event, the notion that you can grow the economy and have an environmental construct, was not something that was top of mind in the United States of America. People didn’t necessarily believe that, all of a sudden the President started stating, well I would argue the obvious, and it had a remarkable impact and effect. And I can say as a mayor of a city that just created an incentive for green collar jobs, that actually created a tax incentive to get these companies in the (inaudible) manufacturing business, to get these companies into our city, that we are experiencing the same thing. This is not that complex, the difference is we actually have to manifest these changes, we have to move forward aggressively.
Let me end, because the Prime Minister has been with me for three days and he has been hearing plenty from me, and I know you want to hear from him, that we also recognise on the waste management side we can do more and do better. San Francisco just hit a roughly 70 per cent recycling rate, among the highest in the United States of America, among the highest in the world, and again they said you can’t do 50 per cent 5 years ago, they said there is no way you will do 60 per cent, and we did 64 per cent two years ago, and now they are saying it is impossible to hit 75 per cent, which we are going to do in the next 24 months, but then we set that bar a little low, we want to bring it even higher, and we will, rest assured, watch, we will do this, we will become that first city in America with zero waste by 2012. And by the way that is aligned with our local global action plan which rolls back CO2 emissions 20 per cent below 1990 levels by that same date in 2012. It is not that difficult.
So here is my long winded introduction to I think the call of today, that is about action, it is about leadership, it is about results orientation, it is about no longer identifying problems, abdicating responsibility and walking away from them, it is about doing something about it. We have remarkable capacity, and I will close with this, as Mayor Livingstone said, now living on a planet where more people are living in urban centres than at any other time in human history, half the planet’s population, as was noted. We consume in these cities 75 per cent of the earth’s natural resources, and a roughly equivalent amount in CO2 and greenhouse emissions. It is incumbent upon us that we at the local level set the tone and tenor for change as it relates to environmental stewardship and a global consciousness around the environment, and it is incumbent upon those Mayors that haven’t signed these accords, not those present but those that are not here, to do the same, and for all of us to say enough is enough, to hold our elected officials accountable to real results and no longer the stale rhetoric that got us in this place in the first place.
Thank you all very, very much, and congratulations President Clinton.
Chancellor Abrams:
Now I would like to invite Mayor Livingstone and President Clinton to sign the agreement.
President Clinton:
Let me thank again Mayor Villaraigosa for his leadership, Mayor Newsom thank you for the amazing example San Franciso are setting, and Ken thank you for your remarks and your commitment and your passionate embrace of this cause in bringing all these other cities together. I would also like to thank (inaudible) who did all this work putting this together for our foundation and has so much to do with our (inaudible)
And one thing that Gavin said, he talked about building buildings that meet the lead standards, the international standards. My library was the first Presidential library that did it, and we only reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 34 per cent, below what it was projected to do, and we are going back, we are going to try to get it down another 20 or 30. But I have been to the shopping centre conventions and I have been all over everywhere talking to people saying nobody should ever build any buildings anywhere in America again that don’t meet lead standards. I think that we need to do that, so I thank you.
It is fitting that we close with Prime Minister Blair, who has patiently sat through all this. I wanted to thank him for many things. He and his wife and children have been great friends to Hilary, and Chelsea and me, a great source of inspiration. We were comrades in arms on so many issues. Yesterday he did an astonishing thing in signing an unprecedented agreement with the state of California to work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and I told Tony Blair there is an old law in the books going back to the 19th century called the Logan Act in America, which makes it a crime for a private citizen to engage in his own foreign policy, and every time I go overseas and say anything I am tippy-toeing wondering if I am about to step on the Logan Act. So I told him that if Governor Schwarzenegger is charged with a violation of the Logan Act for having an international commitment, I will defend him for nothing, I will represent him. And I am so proud of Prime Minster Blair on so many issues, and grateful for his friendship and grateful particularly though for his leadership here. Don’t forget, any time somebody tells you it can’t be done, you ask him how the United Kingdom beat their Kyoto targets by 50 per cent and grew incomes more than we did, reduced poverty more than we did, reduced income inequality more than we did, and there is no answer except that it is the right thing to do.
Prime Minister:
(inaudible) come along here, obviously to congratulate Ken, as you can tell Ken is on the bold end of politics. But one of the great things about him that I have learnt over the years is that some of the issues that he raises, and he did this actually in the 1980s with issues to do with equality, to do with the gender and sexuality, is that some of the things that we on the kind of more cautious wing of the party used to think well that is a little too bold, actually funnily enough 15 - 20 years later have become conventional wisdom for everyone …
To Mayor Villaraigosa and to Mayor Newsom, I think Gavin what you have set out as to what you are doing in San Francisco is just fantastic and really, really imaginative; and Antonio, you have got a really tough programme ahead of you but that is a tremendous galvanising vision I think for people in Los Angeles and congratulations on it, it is really, really wonderful. And if this is the future of Mayors and politics in your country, you can be very proud actually, they are great people, really great people.
And of course I can’t ever share a platform with President Clinton without thanking him for everything that he has done, for being such a fantastic friend and leader, and there is nothing I can tell you that you don’t know already about his qualities as a human being and as a leader, but he is an extraordinary person, he is intelligent, creative and also immensely caring. And the amazing thing about him is that after having stopped being President, whether it is on Aids, or on Africa, or on this issue of climate change, he is still providing the leadership that I think all of us should be grateful for.
Now on the subject, I just wanted to say two things. The first is that we have got to work now for a new international agreement. We will do our Kyoto targets, we in Britain, we will more than do them, as President Clinton was just saying to you, but actually we are going to need, when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, we have got to get a new international agreement, it has got to have a binding framework with binding targets in it, it has got to have a stabilisation goal for greenhouse gas emissions that should be an aim for us to have, and it has got to be an agreement that has every major country in the world in it. It has got to have America, it has got to have China, it has got to have India, it has got to have Europe and Japan, we have all got to come together and make that agreement. And if we think about what can hold us back, it isn’t people being bad people about it, it is that people when something as big as this happens, it requires an enormous sense of vision to overcome all the obstacles that people will put in its way.
And if I am blunt about it, when we first entered into our Kyoto targets and when we first started taking the measures necessary to achieve it in putting obligations to use the renewables, in things like the climate change levy on some of the major industrial users, you know we were somewhat fearful as to whether we would be able to combine economic growth and sustainable growth in an environmentally beneficial way. And as we continued along the path of people saying you mustn’t do that, and doing it, we actually realised, as Gavin was saying a moment or two ago, it isn’t that complex if the will is there.
And here is the absolutely fascinating thing, which is the second thing I wanted to say, is that once you start embarking on this, suddenly you realise it can be done, but also there are fantastic opportunities in it being done. For business and for industry there is nothing better than for our types of countries to be leaders in environmental technology. We could be the people in Europe and the United States actually leading the way in this technology and science, in making sure that some of the things that at the moment are fantastic and creative ideas are brought to market, and we can create, as indeed we are creating now, a whole new industry and economy based on sustainable environmental policy. So although we may start with fear and caution, actually very, very soon we can be courageous and hopeful.
And whether you take the individual initiatives that are being taken in all these three cities represented here today, or whether you take some of the things that the best and most progressive of business are doing today, the ideas are there, that is the fascinating thing. Some of the things that Ken was talking about, and Antonio and Gavin just now, these are things that they are doing, they are actually doing, and their cities are getting as a result. And so at every single stage of this it can be done if the will is there to do it.
Just yesterday at the meeting with Governor Schwarzenegger, we had some of the leading business people, both from the UK and from the United States of America sitting around the table, they were just literally offering up things that could be done. People from the aviation industry telling us literally in just four reasonably simple things, OK it may take some doing but they can be done, how they could cut emissions in their own industry by anywhere between 10 - 15 per cent, literally just round the table people giving that type of information and that type of creativity, and the fact is it can be done.
So what we need to do is to come together as an international community, agree a binding framework because everyone needs to know that this is the direction we are going in, business has got to be given the certainty that it can plan ahead on that basis, that it can start looking upon this as a market opportunity and not a market pressure, and we have then got, and this is the huge significance of the initiative today, to show in all sorts of different ways how it can be done. The great thing about the Clinton Foundation being involved with the cities is that you are going to manage to combine the collective experience of all those cities and people can feed off each other, people would say well you are doing this in your city, actually when we think about it, with maybe a little bit of amendment, we could do that in our city too. And this is the way it should work. And so at the same time as you have got the international pressure from the top, imposing the framework, you have if you like the organic pressure from below giving the examples, giving confidence to people in the process of change.
So I think today is a very significant event. And I just wanted to conclude by going back to something that all the speakers have mentioned. The most difficult thing in politics is often not taking the decision, but actually spotting when the decision has to be made, has to be taken. And we are at such a moment now. There may be some people somewhere who still argue about the science of climate change, but the evidence is overwhelming. There can’t be any serious doubt about the changes that already are happening to our planet. And incidentally, unchecked the poorest and most vulnerable worldwide are going to be those that suffer most and are least able to adapt, so there is a vast moral cause here that we have to grasp. And I could not be in the position of looking back on this time when I had some power to affect this issue, and not do something about it. And the more that I looked at it, and the more that I experienced the pressures of government, but also could see the changes necessary to tackle this issue, the more convinced I became that if we do not regard this issue with the gravity it demands, if we do not motivate ourselves to take the decisions commensurate with the gravity of the threat that we face, we will betray in the most irresponsible way the generations to come. That is not something I want on my conscience as a political leader. What we have shown today is that this challenge, however immense, can be overcome, and what you see today are people who are prepared to overcome it. But it is not just us, it is you as well, each individual citizen that is building up the pressure for this inside wider civic society can make a difference.
And actually when we look at some of the ideas that are thrown out now, even individual people can make their own contribution. In parts of Germany for example they are looking at micro generation where the citizen is able to sell back the excess electricity that they don’t use into the grid, so that they are actually receiving a benefit from it. Individuals have got a role to play, business has got a role to play, cities have got a role to play, governments and the international community have got a role to play, and if we combine that effort and that commitment we will defeat it, and if we do defeat it, what a signal to a world that is often divided that it can come together in a common cause and make things work.
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