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Interview with Jared Blumenfeld, Director, San Francisco Department of the Environment
“Mobilizing San Francisco to be a More Sustainable City”
80% of the world’s CO2 comes from cities. So strong action by cities is required to reduce the carbon emissions that they produce.
In this interview, Jaren Blumenfeld, Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, explains some of the innovative legislation and actions that San Francisco is initiating as one of the world’s greenest cities.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Why the biggest sustainability challenge is sustaining people’s attention
- How the SF Department of the Environment is encouraging more sustainable business
- San Francisco’s cutting edge “Eco Map” project
- How San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom contributes to the green agenda
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amy Vaccaro with Green Business Innovators. I am speaking today with Jared Blumenfeld, who is the Director for the San Francisco Department of the Environment. Hi Jared.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Hi.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So my first question today, I’m interested about your background, how you got here, and kind of the snippets of bios I could find about you…Talk about your work in animal welfare campaigns and then moving into this job. It seems like a huge transition. I’m curious how it came about.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, I started doing international environmental law and I went to law school and it was the time of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. So we, with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, did this big report on the connection between human rights and the environment. If your rain forest is chopped down do you have a legal right against the company who did it, because your livelihood depended on those trees? So that was kind of how I started. Then I worked for Cambridge University doing international environmental law. Then I went to work for NRDC, the Natural Resource Defense Council and we did all these campaigns and reports on what countries had done to follow-up on the Rio Earth Summit.
One of the campaigns we launched was to stop Mitsubishi from building a salt factory in Laguna, St. Ignacio and Baja, which was the last pristine breeding and birthing for the California Gray Whale. And so then we migrated that campaign. I got a job with a group in Cape Cod called the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which did global habitat protection. So, legally protecting existing national parks and then buying and donating lands much like the Nature Conservancy and others, but all around the world. So, I think we protected about 4 million acres of land while I was there, and also brought lawsuits against everyone from Mitsubishi to Airbus for violating the sanctity of national and international parks. So, during that campaign against Mitsubishi we had this campaign called “Mitsubishi: Don’t buy it.” Don’t buy their products, and don’t buy their arguments that they are actually protecting wildlife.
We got 42 cities and counties in California to pass resolution saying they wouldn’t buy or invest in Mitsubishi products while they were considering building this huge factory in a national park. So, during that process I spent a lot of time in San Francisco and California, and when this job came open Randy Hayes, who was the President of the Environment Commission for the city recruited me and said, Jared you should come and do this. And I interviewed, at the time it was with Willie Brown, and he offered me the job on the spot. He was like Jared - this is the job for you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Wow.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So when I started, the department was very small. It had a great director before me, called Francesca Vietor that really helped bring it from nothing to an institution. Now we have about 70 people.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s terrific.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Yeah.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So, what is your vision for San Francisco environmentally? And how have you seen things change over your six years here?
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, the vision is, globally we live on a planet faced by many different threats from climate change to human health issues to the demise of the oceans and a lot of them stem from what we do in cities. So, cities produce 75% of the world’s CO2 and greenhouse gases. Cities are the ones that are buying lots of products that are shipped and end up in our oceans from plastic bags to Styrofoam. So, if you can change what we do in cities.
And cities are very similar - every city needs water, every city needs energy, transportation, roads, buildings. So, unlike countries you can really do a lot in one city and then replicate it in another. So that’s the goal. If San Francisco can’t deal with these issues and come up with solutions - we have an incredibly affluent city. We have a very environmentally aware city. We have a very progressive set of politicians, so we don’t have the obstacles that most cities have. Our citizenry really wants us to do this. We have innovation all around us from Silicon Valley to Berkley and Stanford. We have more Nobel Laureates in the Bay Area than anywhere else on the planet.
So, if we can’t do it in San Francisco, it doesn’t leave a lot of hope for the rest of the planet. So, our vision is to help make San Francisco a place that the citizens want to live, tourists want to visit, future people in this field want to come to and really create a buzz around the environment with green collar jobs, clean tech jobs, a desire to let people know that we are going to use the $600 million that the city has to buy goods and services and make them environmentally focused. So, really put ourselves out there as an entity that is promoting this new direction for the planet.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And how do you compare San Francisco to other cities? I mean, I see it as like this leader, but I’m curious if you agree and how we are doing better than other cities? Or where we are lacking?
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, San Francisco started earlier than other cities and so we have advantages that some other cities may not. We’ve got some pretty amazing urban growth boundaries on three sides, which is the bay, the ocean and clearly defined on the south, so we are not dealing with sprawl. We were founded before the automobile. So, a lot of cities like San Diego and others were invented in a time when cars were already on the streets. And so, because we had done it earlier and we have some advantages I think we just have some mistakes and successes that others can learn from, and that we want to share. And I think because we’re more focused on this as something that we really care about, we’ve been able to achieve stuff.
But Portland is definitely a leader, Seattle, Vancouver, Santa Monica, Austin. There are a lot of cities: Stockholm, Corichiba in Brazil. So the cities have been doing a lot of stuff for a long time. But I think we’re in the top ten of cities on the planet that have thought about how to become more sustainable and started actually doing it.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So, are we benchmarking ourselves against other cities?
JARED BLUMENFELD: I don’t think we are benchmarking ourselves against other cities, but against ourselves. So, we set goals to get to zero waste, no material going to landfill by 2020, to reduce our CO2 emissions significantly below where we were in 1990, to get rid of all the toxic chemicals from our parks. So, we set our own goals. We just put a green building ordinance in place that says that all new buildings in the city have to be built to a very high standard, which is called Lead Gold by 2012.
And we hosted an event in 2005 with the mayors from the seventy largest cities on the planet, called World Environment Day, which is a U.N. event. And we wrote a document with all the mayors called the Urban Environmental Accords, and they have twenty-one actions that each city is committing to take. So, we benchmarked ourselves on that level against other cities, but at the moment, it’s really less about competition and more about sharing.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And so, what kind of projects do you have in the works, and what projects are you currently working on?
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, the department does everything from environmental justice, toxics reduction, green building, energy efficiency, renewable energy, recycling, and school education.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Is there one that you want to highlight, that you’re excited about?
JARED BLUMENFELD: We’re doing a very cool project with Cisco, the computer company and they chose three cities, Amsterdam, Seoul and San Francisco, to work out how computer technology can help save the planet, particularly related to climate change. So, we are doing this Eco-Might map project where we will get real time information from utility company recycling, transportation on what your energy and other climate footprints are for your zip code. So, how many Priuses do you have in 94102 (which is right here)? How many Hummers? How is that compared to Bay View? So, you’ll be able to start comparing the numbers and ranking communities and then getting people to pledge and seeing if those pledges actually impact numbers.
Because at the moment people say, oh we’re going to do something, but in fact you don’t know if they have done it. Since we have the numbers on energy use for a zip code, we will be able to see if the energy use goes up or down. And then we will export it to other cities around the world. So you’ll be able to compare San Francisco zip code with a Seoul zip code with a Madrid zip code.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Interesting, it’s like kind of getting people’s competitive edge involved.
JARED BLUMENFELD: But also being able to look at how at the moment the whole focus is on individual action, but no one ever aggregates their individual action to show you if sixty people in your neighborhood did it, what would the impact be? And so, we want to show real time how. Because climate change is here for a long time. It isn’t a two-month campaign. So, you want to show people that by putting material in the green cart you’ll actually be able to reduce your CO2 by this much and if you e-mail 10 of your friends to do it, it will reduce it even more. And then we will be able to see, at the end of the month, did that actually impact the amount of material in your zip code that went into the green cart. So, it’s a way of also looking at messaging. Which messages actually work to get people to change their behavior as opposed to them saying they were changing their behavior?
We’re in the middle of writing a piece of legislation on mandatory recycling to require everyone to have recycling and to use it properly. We’re looking at a green MLS rating for real estate so that every building sold would have an eco rating, and you would be able to look and see how green your new house was. We just launched the $6,000 rebate from the city for people putting solar panels up. We just launched an urban wind task force to look at how we can have urban wind turbines and peoples roofs and in other places like Twin Peaks. We just launched a program with the library, across the street and all twenty-eight libraries, The Green Libraries Initiative. So you can go into your library and get information on everything from bicycle repair to how to get a car share program to how to make your garden greener. Those are the ones that come to mind.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s great. Yeah, that’s a lot. A lot going on.
JARED BLUMENFELD: We have Slow Food Nation, right here. So, we are going to launch an ordinance next week that requires all the purchases that the city makes of foods, to source to the location that that food came from. So the farm, the factories, so that we find out where all our food is coming from, and then goals as to push for local purchasing of food.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Terrific. What do you see as your kind of biggest success since you’ve been in this position?
JARED BLUMENFELD: I think the biggest success is really getting the urban environmental agenda to be more mainstream and into the mainstreams so that people are talking. I think seven years ago when I started the job when people talked about the environment they thought of Yosemite, they thought of Muir Woods, and now I think people are starting to think of San Francisco as the environment that they need to protect. We’ve done some pretty symbolic and powerful things like banning plastic bags and Styrofoam. I think the real success though, is ultimately getting people engaged and moving. The numbers rather than just having rhetoric. So, when we started, the recycling rate was at 46% today it’s at 70%. And so, showing people that you can set a goal and achieve it, and that their life is not diminished in terms of quality, but enhanced is what we’re trying to do.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And what has been the biggest challenge that you’ve encountered in this role?
JARED BLUMENFELD: I think the biggest challenge is to sustain people’s attention. We are bombarded by so many pieces of information everyday and told so many different country things that say to someone you know this is a long journey. We need to get you to participate in all these different programs. It’s difficult because we’re competing for people’s attention. So, keeping it relevant and interesting and cool and impactful is the constant challenge.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Are there any projects that you’ve had in mind that feel like they’re impossible? Like that you’d really like to make happen, but…
JARED BLUMENFELD: Well, lots of things are legally impossible. We’ve done a lot on children’s health and toys and toxic components in toys, and you know we’ve been sued by the plastic manufacturers because they say we don’t have the legal right to ban toys. That only the state or the federal government can do that. The same with pesticides, you know we’d like to ban the use of pesticides in San Francisco that are toxic to the environment, but we can only ban them on city property. So, that’s kind of a big obstacle of things that we’d like to do that we can’t do.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Will you talk a little bit about the Solar Mapping Project, like with the, I understand you have a goal of getting one thousand roofs solar…
JARED BLUMENFELD: Ten thousand.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Ten thousand, oh even better.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Yeah. So, the Solar Map actually is the foundation of the Eco Map that I was talking about, that’s the first layer. The next layer we are working with NASA to do is a heat infrared. So, this actually shows you the amount of energy that’s coming off roof tops at night, and the next layer of detail, you can see where there is energy leaking out. So, someone who hasn’t done proper insulation of their roof. We are going to do a wind map, but the solar map was basically this first connection between computers and the environment, to make it more convenient and easy and simple for people to install solar on their roof.
So, if you’re a homeowner, you don’t spend a lot of time on your roof. You don’t know if it’s shady. You don’t know how big it is. And so, the idea was: Let’s let people know that they have this resource above them. How large it is? And so, you go on to sf.solarmap.org and it tells you all these things. You type in your address. We digitized every roof in San Francisco and looked at the sloping, the shading and the solar capacity and it comes out with a number of how many kilowatts you could put on your roof, and then that shows you how much CO2 you would save based on the amount of sunlight in San Francisco. It shows you how much energy you would save in terms of your PG&E bill and then it shows you all the other solar installers or solar panels that have been installed in the city.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And what about the Wind Task Force you were mentioning? Will you make little details behind that?
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, some places don’t have a lot of sun, but they have a lot of wind. So, I live in one, Twin Peaks. So, it’s not super sunny, but it’s super windy. So, in Bernal Heights and in the Mission, about four or five people have started. We just got the permitting set up so that you can put small urban wind turbines right on your roof and people love them. And some people can use them better than solar because they don’t have a lot of sun, and other people just want every renewable gadget on their roof. So, we’re looking at how to promote it from a permitting perspective. How to look at the incentives… Should our $6,000 incentive go to wind as well? So, we’re just trying to work out what the future of urban wind is in San Francisco.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And how much energy can you really produce from one wind turbine on your house?
JARED BLUMENFELD: You can produce up to one kilowatt. Some of them are one-kilowatt systems.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So, what is San Francisco doing to encourage greener businesses? I know there is the Green Business Certification Program and it’s definitely very popular right now. People are kind of waiting in line to get certified. Talk a little bit about that.
JARED BLUMENFELD: The business communities are a really critical cutting edge part of how we solve environmental problems. So, we certainly don’t think the government is here to solve all these problems or even can. So, the role of business is very important. So, there’s the Green Business Program was set up with very stringent criteria to look at across different business types. It doesn’t deal with every business type, but it deals with restaurants and large office buildings and some different types of retail. But it takes a lot of time and effort to work out what the standards should be for a nail salon. So, we haven’t done that yet, but we have done pharmacies and other kinds of retail.
So, once you have the standard then we really encourage businesses in that group to apply, and they get audited. They get a free audit and we come in and work out how they can meet the letter of the Green Business Ordinate. So then once they become a green business we try and promote them and get more traffic to them. So, the goals is really, hopefully there is a market niche so that you are a green business, selling the same thing as a non-green business, people in San Francisco will come to you and you’ll make more money. So that is the business model for why it makes sense and also because people are always looking for green certifications. They want to know that the product or the company is green.
And this city is trusted as someone that inspects restaurants and all kinds of other things. This is now another inspection, and hopefully it’s a trusted one as opposed to a business just saying, “we are green.” Now a customer can say “well, are you actually certified by the city?” And if they say no, then you may have a different feeling about their greenness. So, two things; one: I think we are going to move towards (because we’ve become a victim of our own success) we are going to move towards a place where we charge for part of the service because some of the businesses that we do, a large hotel, can take hundreds of hours. So, smaller businesses we can get into program and they will probably still be free, but the larger businesses will have to pay for the service.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So, another question I had was how do you and Gavin [Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco] work together? And I know Gavin sort of takes a lot of credit for all of these advances in the environmental movement in San Francisco and I wonder how do you guys get along and work together on these processes?
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, I report directly to the mayor. He has a passion and a great interest in environmental issues and you know every trip he goes on, he comes back with thousands of new ideas. And we sit down and kind of sort through them and try and prioritize them and see what makes sense. I mean, our context: he’s incredibly supportive and without him, programs wouldn’t happen. So, you can have a great department of seventy people, but unless you have a political champion, stuff doesn’t move as quickly or as fast.
So, we really work collaboratively and he knows that. He knows what he doesn’t know when it comes to the environment and he actually knows a lot. So, he comes to the department we have round tables in this office with environmental leaders and we push as much stuff as we have the capacity to do. So, yeah he should take credit because many mayors sit and say: You know what I’m going to do, is make some great speeches about the environment. Whereas Gavin really says: You know what? I actually want to just get stuff done, so tell me how we can do it as opposed to talking about doing it.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s terrific. Another question I had was I know for me, personally, I’m very much a environmentalist, but when I look at my life I’m not always making the greenest decision and I’m curious about even your personal life and how green are you?
JARED BLUMENFELD: Yeah. In San Francisco it’s relatively easy to be green. I live in the city, so I can bike to work everyday. So, the thing is I couldn’t drive because there would be nowhere to park. It would take me a lot longer. I use to take Muni. I still get my Fast Pass every month, but I really don’t like taking it because I have to wait for it. Whereas if you have a bike, you can just jump on it and when I’m finished with work, I can go home, and by the time I get home, I feel much better. So, I don’t do it because of the environment. I’ve always biked to work because I just like biking and it’s fun.
So, anyone who’s listening, reading from San Francisco, should do it too. And then at home, really, even if you didn’t care about the environment at all, there’s a lot of green things. So, on the most basic level, like no VOC paint. It doesn’t smell. I have kids who hate the smell. We always have used no VOC paint, but it costs a little bit more, but you can paint a little… You don’t need to do the whole room because it doesn’t smell. You don’t need to leave the room. We just got a new fridge that cut our energy bill our electricity from about $45 a month to about $19.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Wow.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Because your refrigerator is on. It’s the only thing in your house that is on every single hour of every single day of every single week. So, refrigerators are always on. The technology has caught up. So, people used to not like compact fluorescent light bulbs, and used to have the excuse that you can’t dim them. All of our lights are on a dimmer and we all have compact fluorescent. So, every time one of the old lights goes out, I get a compact fluorescent one because it’s the same light. And it’s just going to save you money.
So, you know when things break in your house it just makes sense to get something that’s got Energy Star on it. So, when we moved into our house, everything was pretty broken and so we got to buy lots of Energy Star dishwashers and clothes washing machines and hot water boiler and forced air. So, our forced air heating system is 96% efficient.
The one that was in there before was like 38% efficient.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Wow.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, just technology has caught up. When, we had some windows that were all rotten out, we put in Green Seal new Anderson windows. It’s relatively easy to be green. And it saves you a lot of money. So, even if you didn’t care about the environment, financially it’s the thing to do.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And my last question for you is about your direction in life. What do you see as next for you, career wise?
JARED BLUMENFELD: I like doing what I’m doing now. So, I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of work in the non-profit sector and I kind of feel like it’s a great place to be, but really the movement has now kind of, in some ways, eclipsed a lot of non-profit groups because government’s taking it out. I was just in Denver for the convention and here’s T-Bone Pickens’ plan. This guy is running the swift boat campaigns against John Kerry four years ago. This year he’s running a campaign here, you know how to save the planet through wind turbines. So, the movement is progressing at a really fast clip, and I don’t know. I want to go to a place where there’s impact. So, the more real change you can see on the ground the better, and at the moment I think it’s still in San Francisco doing this. It probably won’t be forever. If I’m doing this job in fifteen years, the planet will be in trouble because it means that the rest of the movement hasn’t moved.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Terrific. Well, thank you so much for speaking with us.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Thanks, Amy.
October 19th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
[...] October 19, 2008 Interview with Jared Blumenfeld: Mobilizing San Francisco’s Sustainability Movement Posted by ecofrenzy under Interview piece, San Francisco | Tags: gavin newsom, green, interview, Jared Blumenfeld, s, San Francisco, sustainable | Listen to my interview with Jared Blumenfeld, Director of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment. You can listed to the podcast, read the transcript or just read the highlights on Green Business Innovators: http://www.greenbusinessinnovators.com/interview-jared-blumenfeld-san-francisco-department-of-enviro... [...]