LA Weekly

Among the highlights of yesterday's signing of the Clinton Climate Initiative were Villaraigosa's second reading of his speech in Spanish, Clinton's presumably accidental reference to the Murdoch empire as a "country" instead of a "company" (and one that aims to be carbon neutral) and Blair's grateful response to his standing ovation, which he admitted doesn't happen often on Britain's college campuses these days (it was hard to look at him without being reminded of the sweater). There was also London Mayor Ken Livingstone's promise to slap SUVs in the city with a $50-a-day "gas guzzler charge."

But man oh man -- none of them bowled me over like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's whole deal: The skin (dermabrasion? facials?), the shiny chocolate hair, the delivery of his speech apparently without notes, and best of all, his declaration that reducing carbon emissions is "not that difficult." In fact, he says, it's "as simple as the stroke of the pen."

Newsom boasted of mandating B20 (a 20 percent biodiesel blend) in the city's fire engines, of instigating "the largest municipal-owned solar project in the United States," of plans in the works to install a "very large tube at the mouth of the bay, right below the Golden Gate Bridge," to harness tidal-current power the he predicts will power six percent of the city's households. He insisted energetically that there were no excuses left: "Of course we want to focus on the realities of the economy that's obviously being challenged globally," he said, "so we're now focusing on replacing blue-collar jobs with green-collar jobs."

Okay. Whatever. Go, Gavin.

(And sorry about the lousy photo. I posess a limited skill set.)

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