It’s Earth Day every day here at hughstimson.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 hughstimson.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.