It’s Earth Day every day here at hugh​stimson​.org, but nonethe­less I will take this oppor­tu­nity to announce an offi­cial endorse­ment for Gavin Newsom in the upcoming California Gubernatorial race.

You can read Mayor Newsom’s announce­ment of his can­di­dacy on twitter, and listen to a Long Now Seminar in which he nerds out for a solid breath­less hour on the topic of envi­ron­ment, envi­ron­ment and envi­ron­ment. You may or may not agree with all the details of his com­pre­hen­sive and sprawling plans for eco-​​infrastructure building in San Fransico (and now pre­sum­ably the entire State), but oh boy has he thought it through. That is fan-​​tastic stuff. It’s espe­cially sat­is­fying to hear him state flatly the sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems with some of his own propo­si­tions. Honest, open-​​eyed exper­i­men­ta­tion on a sig­nif­i­cant scale looks to be a pre­cursor for our move­ment into a more local­ized adaptation-​​ready era, and this fella seems to be willing to roll the dice in the right direction.

Canadian res­i­dents: every time he talks about only including green energy in San Francisco’s (or now pre­sum­ably California’s) port­folio of sources, trans­late that to “not BC’s run-​​of-​​the-​​river hydro projects, and not for God’s sake Alberta’s bloody tar sands”.

A side note: the above speech includes some back-​​story on the ban­ning of plastic bags in San Francisco, which he claims was a retal­i­a­tion against a pre­vious move by the national gro­cery store asso­ci­a­tion to ban their mem­bers from intro­ducing bag fees. I was lis­tening on the head­phones while shop­ping at the Thrifty gro­cery store near my house, which hugh​stimson​.org hereby endorses for best gro­cery store in south-​​western BC (I’ve been meaning to do that for a while). When I started packing my back­pack with my pur­chases the clerk men­tioned she would reim­burse me the plastic bag fee, which I only then real­ized they had been charging rou­tinely. Then when I walked past the news­paper racks the head­line on the Times-​​Colonist was Thrifty’s announce­ment that they will be aban­doning plastic bags com­pletely come July.

Go Gavin Newsom. Go Thrifty’s. Go Earth.