Skip to Content
Report an accessibility problem

Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Progress Report on San Francisco's Sustainability Efforts

April 28, 2009 | San Francisco has become one of the most innovative cities in the world in implementing new comprehensive approaches to urban sustainability. From its groundbreaking zero waste strategies such as the residential compost and green waste recycling program, to its energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, the City has been a leader in designing and implementing programs that work. The City’s project EcoMap will allow citizens to track their progress toward sustainability goals on a zip code by zip code basis.

Jared Blumenfeld, Director of San Francisco’s Environment Department, will talk about the successes and challenges the City has experienced in implementing urban sustainability programs and the many partnerships the City has developed that help it to reach its sustainability goals.

Related Events: Progress Report on San Francisco's Sustainability Efforts

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Jared Blumenfeld: I started out as a human rights attorney, and then I got involved in the UN Earth Summit in '92, looking at the relationship between human rights and the environment. So if an indigenous community's rainforest is chopped down by a multinational corporation, do they have a right to sue under human rights laws for their environment and habitat being destroyed? I then worked for a group in Washington, DC called the Natural Resources Defense Council, and did a lot of international legal, and did stuff around world trade organization and then the NAFTA side agreement on the environment. We tried to look at ways of holding governments accountable to what they were doing after their promises in Rio.

Then I worked for a group in Cape Cod called the International Fund for Animal Welfare. We protected wildlife habitat all around the world, basically taking lawsuits against companies that would try and destroy habitat. We had a big case in Baja, California, against Mitsubishi. They wanted to build the world's largest salt factory in a place called Laguna San Ignacio. So we're really looking at, we can't protect wild spaces that have existing legal protections. Is there really any point in creating new parks?

And then that brought me to San Francisco where we have a Department of Environment. When I started, I think we were about eight people. We're now about 80 people doing everything from environmental justice to energy efficiency, renewable energy, climate change, urban forest issues, school education. And I'm going to kind of go through some of the stuff that we've been doing.

But ultimately, the biggest challenge is leadership. The last eight years, we had no leadership from the federal government, I think it's fair to say. And so there was a big gap for cities and states to take action. And we had An Inconvenient Truth, which really started to change the debate, and really was a paradigm shift. I think it's kind of odd that we only allow people to make one statement, and this was Al Gore's. Now every time he wants to say something, we're like, no, no. You had your chance. It was Inconvenient Truth.

But amazing kind of tide that also coincided with Hurricane Katrina in kind of bringing the issues of climate change, whether or not there is a direct correlation or not. In people's mind, there was. And that really started to shape the debate that we're now having, which is a real debate around what we should do rather than whether it's happening or not.

Also the rise in gas prices really got people's attention. You know, now gas prices have gone down, but unfortunately, we have no money. So we're still focused on fuel efficiency, which is a great thing. People said, you know what? When gas prices, if they ever come down, people are going to forget the Prius. They're going to forget bicycle and walking and public transit, but that has proved not to be the case. It's kind of endured. So I think it was seen as a trend. The environment was seen as something that was an add-on. And when rough times came, people would kind of forget about it and move on to something more substantive. I think people's values have remained and people continue to care about the environment.

Every single magazine that you can imagine has a green cover. I mean, literally everything either is Green Car Journal, The New York Times, Outside magazine. You name it, it exists.

We live in a time where there's not a lot of hope, and I think what we're trying to do in San Francisco, at least with our citizens, is give them a sense of hope, show them what is possible, that they can contribute, that these large global forces like climate change can be dealt with if lots of people that care make a difference. And it's not just about caring. A lot of people care. Our whole thing is, we need to be able to measure it. Let's not just talk about doing something. Let's talk about how we can measure doing something.

I like these ads from Chevron, because if Chevron's focused on oil and the number of cars that will be on the streets in 2030, we probably should be. Just these facts always kind of stunned me, looking at where oil comes from and where it is. Most of these five countries aren't super friendly to the United States. We kind of forgot the oil security issue, but it remains very much alive. Our security and our energy is very much intertwined, as are the forces of pollution.

You know, when I talk with my kids about-- I have a seven and a 10-year-old-- and you kind of look up at the stars on a starry night, it is unbelievable how many stars there are and how insignificant we are. And sometimes, that insignificance makes us feel kind of like we can't do anything. But really, it is empowering to think about our planet and what we can actually achieve, both negatively and positively.

So this is the famous chart of where we are and where we can get to. The magic threshold of 500 parts per million is a number that scientists tell us leads to irreversible climate change. So there's kind of two elements of climate change. One is mitigation. Mitigation talks to the issue of what we can do to stop getting that number going up. And the other is adaptation, what we need to do to deal with climate change impacts that are going to come if we don't act, or even if we do.

This is a second chart, which is kind of peak oil. Half the room, in most cases, care about climate change. And people that don't care about climate change worry that we're running out of oil. And so the dates here kind of vary a little bit, why they're running out, in 16 years or 26 years. But once you get to peak-- and every single person in the oil industry will agree. I was meeting with yesterday in San Francisco, the Ugandan Oil Minister was in San Francisco. They were talking about how great it was that they found oil in Uganda. And I was like, yeah. But globally, we're running out. We're absolutely running out. And so the good news is we have just enough oil to cause catastrophic climate change. The bad news is that we soon won't be able to fill up our cars.

Another thing that's really driving the debate is insurance losses. So the insurance industry holds a lot of the keys to the climate change debate. It used to be that when you wanted to insure your home on the eastern seaboard they would look at historical data relating to all the storms that happened in the last 50, 100 years. And that's how your premium would be set. Now they're looking at climate change models coming out of the International Panel on Climate Change and saying, wow. Why would we be crazy enough to ensure these houses? There's going to be hurricanes all up and down the eastern seaboard. We're not going to ensure your house. If you don't insure your house, you can't get a mortgage. Difficult enough to get a mortgage as it is, but if they strip your insurance, you cannot get a mortgage in the United States. So you ended up with more stranded, toxic assets that no one will insure.

Cities, ultimately, have a lot in common. We all have waste and recycling. We all have water issues. We all have transportation issues. We all have urban forests. We all have energy. And mayors used to be thought of as kind of people that filled up potholes. I think now the shift has come that mayors are seen as people that are on the front line in the battle of climate change.

And shockingly, 80% of the world's CO2 comes from cities. So my background in international law would say, you know what? The people that really deal with the international crisis of climate change are going to be the state departments, because they have to come up with treaties. But these treaties, we have about 400 international environmental treaties on everything from trans-boundary movements of hazardous waste to convention on the trade of endangered species. And most of them are completely ineffectual. They don't do anything. No one implements them. They're paid lip service to. And so if we want anything done, my position is we need to include cities. They produce 80% of the world's CO2, and they're not at a table, and so we need to bring them to the table.

This is a picture of kids swimming in a beautiful river in Jakarta in Indonesia. And this is kind of-- we could have cities like this. This city exists now. This scene exists today. We have a choice about what the cities of the future will look like.

We brought together for UN World Environment Day in 2005 70 mayors from the largest cities, basically to start talking for the first time about the environment as an urban issue that they have responsibility to deal with. And we signed an accord of 21 action items that each city could take called the UN Urban Environmental Accords, and really just tried to move the agenda forward. It led to something called C40, which is 40 cities dealing with climate change. And I'm actually going to Seoul in May for that meeting. The first meeting was in London, the next meeting was in New York with Mayor Bloomberg, and now we're going to Seoul. So the kind of momentum behind urban environmental issues is heating up.

Lest we forget our role in climate change, the United States is this one. This is the world average of CO2 output per person, which is just under four tons. The US is now 23 tons per person. So our contribution-- Uganda yesterday, when I was talking to them, is under one ton. So for every one ton that one person produces in Uganda, we produce 23. So looking at global equity issues, when you hear about this imbalance, well, why are all these people so angry at the United States? We're doing our best. The issue is that there's a huge imbalance per capita of how much CO2 we're all producing.

You can see the difference. It's pretty hard to see, but the UK where I'm originally from is at 11. Japan is just over nine. South Africa is about seven. You know, China here is about four and a half. So a huge disparity. The reason that India and China have so many CO2 emissions is primarily because they have so many people. It's not an issue of individual output. So equity is going to play a big role in determining how we solve these problems.

So this is our climate action plan. We adopted the goal in 2001 to reduce our CO2 20% below where we were in 1990. So if you can imagine 1990, less economic output, less people at that time. But it's the international baseline for measuring CO2. So 1990 is the year by which you measure how you're reducing your CO2. And we're going to get a 20% reduction by 2012. So the Kyoto Protocol is 6% below 1990 by 2012.

So significantly beyond Kyoto, we spent about a quarter of a million dollars to work out what our inventory was in 1990. And so you can see, about half of it is transportation and the other is building energy and waste. So really kind of divided. And this varies greatly. The more coal you have in your electricity mix, the more building energy goes up. California has relatively clean energy until transportation becomes a much bigger part of the pie.

So California has a lot of history on the issue of the environment. It has 34 million people. It should be able to solve some of these issues, and it's struggled to work out what the solution is. Recently, the governor signed AB 32, the Climate Solutions Act, which took a lot of pushing and effort. And actually, he made his first statement on it in San Francisco at UN World Environment Day.

This is what happens to the three big cities when you look at different scenarios about what could happen relating to extreme heat. And we found this very useful. The more real data you can give people about what different scenarios are kind of in the offing if they don't take action. And it really shows. There's a lower warming range that we could get to if we take enough mitigation action, and there's a higher warming range, which is possible.

Wildfire frequency. This is a NASA image from last year. You can drive up and down-- I did drive up and down the state of California. There's virtually nowhere you could go that wasn't burning. It was really like Dante's Inferno. It was incredible.

This is actually a picture we took on our family vacation up to Mount Shasta. I mean, literally, you drive along roads and you suddenly see fire popping out. You could not see the car in front of you five feet, the smoke was so thick. My parents from England thought it was a great family vacation.

[LAUGHTER]

They're like, are we ever going to get out of the smoke? Yeah. Snowpack, we get all our water. This morning, we're looking at the Decision Theater about where you get your water from. 100% of our water comes from snowpack in the Sierras. And you can kind of see the diminishing amount of snowpack based on different climates scenarios. I mean, 20% of what we had in the warmest scenario is pretty dire.

And other issues, obviously the melting further north and south. One meter sea level rise makes a big difference in the San Francisco Bay. It leads to $48 billion of damage. And this is our airport here. So the good news is that you can still get duty-free at the terminal right in the middle.

[LAUGHTER]

Unfortunately, you won't be able to fly out of the airport. So a lot of low lying areas in San Francisco, a lot of fill into the Bay. And if we don't take action-- even if we do take action, this is a likely scenario. A one in 100-year storm becomes a one in 10-year storm. This was last summer as well. So we not only had fires, but we had flooding.

So the total goal is 2.6 million tons, which is about the same amount as the goal for the entire country of Ireland under Kyoto. So it's a significant amount of reduction we're trying to achieve. And we're actually on track to meet it.

We're about 6% below 1990 now, and hopefully we'll be at 20% by 2012.

So this is what everyone wants to know. How can we win the war on global warming? There's a huge amount of confusion out there. This is just literally a tenth of the number of different eco labels that exist. So the public is very confused. Businesses are very confused. So our role in city government is to help reduce confusion and promote clearheaded action that people can follow.

So we've set up a green business program that walked businesses through every element of not only climate change, but toxic reduction, transportation, recycling, water, everything with really high standards. And that's something that anyone can steal. It's on our website. We want people to steal it. In the kind of global competition around the environment, we want people to steal every idea that exists out there. And that's partly why I'm here today to work with John and others.

Energy efficiency has been a big program. We've spent about $32 million to reduce people's energy bills, mainly small businesses. And we save small businesses now upwards of $20 million a year on their utility bills.

This is the solar map, which was kind of an idea that we want to promote solar power in San Francisco. We have Steph Stoppenhagen here with CH2M HILL who is a partner on this project. And we said, how can we use digital technology to promote solar?

And really, the first question is, well, what does my roof look like? I mean, people don't spend a lot of time on their roof. And even if they did, they wouldn't know the solar potential of the roof. So here you enter your address right above Get My Info. Every single parcel, every single one in San Francisco has been digitized. And we looked at both the shading and the square feet to determine the roof size, then the estimated solar potential, the electricity that can be produced, the savings, and then the carbon savings.

So for any-- this is on Harrison Street-- any business can phone up or they can look themselves. It also allows solar installers to start mining this data to find the best roofs in the city for them to put solar panels up. Then it shows you all the incentives. State incentives, San Francisco-created incentive, and federal tax credits.

And then the Facebook aspect is that everyone wants their picture next to their solar panel, so people put their own pictures up and then tell you the installer that they use. So it's become like a phenomena. People want to get solar. They want to be in competition with their neighbors. They want to show their grandparents back east, or whatever the story may be. People get excited by it. And then you can kind of see the goal.

The Department of Energy gave $5 million based on what we did in San Francisco to make other cities adopt this for little or no money. So this is something that Phoenix or any of the cities that you come from can do really easily. And if you want to, talk to Steph afterwards.

So money is a big goal of most people. They like money. I like money, especially $100 bills. That's why I put this one up there. And so you can put mandates out there, you can kind of guilt people into doing stuff. None of that really works. People are tired of being told what to do.

But if you say, you know what, we're going to give you six grand to put solar on your roof, people are like, oh, now I'm starting to get interested. So we tied our social values into the money. We said if you get $6,000, you have to hire someone from a local job creation program, and it has to be a local San Francisco-based company. We don't want people coming from out of state to get this rebate. If you get this rebate, you need to be focused in San Francisco and hire at-risk youth through a job training program. And this is that program. We've done a lot of solar.

This is another project. San Francisco is in the green on the bottom of the picture. Marin's at the top. The red is the power going through the Golden Gate. That's where the Golden Gate Bridge goes on top of. And this is what tidal power underneath the Golden Gate Bridge could look like. So we're really exploring what we can do to harness that and also the waves. We have a permit application into the federal government to do a five-megawatt-- basically enough to power 5,000 homes-- project off Ocean Beach.

As a result, we get to close power plants. There's nothing more gratifying. I can actually see this in the distance from my window. Nothing more gratifying than closing a power plant. Now it's completely gone. Completely gone.

Not even a trace of it. They spent two years demolishing it, and it's really an incredible sense of satisfaction, especially for the community that lived right next to it that had incredibly elevated levels of cancer and asthma.

This is a remaining power plant in San Francisco that we're working to get rid of. So this motivates me. It was actually taken from my wife-- as a painter. And the studio, this is what the window looks out to.

So trash is another component of climate change. Every city has trash, and we've spent a lot of time getting to our goals. I like this Shell ad. "Don't throw anything away. There is no away." Which is true. Doesn't really go anywhere.

So today, actually, you're the first people to hear this. The mayor hasn't announced it yet. But actually today, our rate is 72% recycling rate for all the waste. Total amount of waste, which is close to two million tons, 72% of it is recycled or reused. And then our goal is to get to 75% by 2010, and to zero waste, no waste going into landfill or incineration by 2020.

This is what we collect. So we spend a lot of time looking at what we do collect. So we have single-stream recycling. So all bottles and cans and paper and glass can go in the blue. Food scraps, which now 400 tons a day from our homes and restaurants, get collected curbside and get turned into organic compost. And then the black card is for everything that's left over. So this is our compost facility. We actually sell that 400 tons a day to organic vineyards and golf courses and farms, and then the food comes back to San Francisco, and we're actually closing the loop.

Vehicles, 49% of our emissions. This is the first project we did with Cisco to create a connected bus that had Wi-Fi and made people want to get on the bus. We have lots of ways. Critical Mass is a very cool bicycle anarchist program, that basically the last Friday of the month, just goes on to the streets and closes traffic down. But people have a lot of fun doing it. I'd recommend it if you're ever in San Francisco.

And these old forms of transportation, we never got rid of. San Diego, Chicago, a lot of cities got rid of their old trolley cars. We actually ended up--

[SOUND FROM AUDIENCE]

Sorry. I didn't hear.

Audience: Phoenix too.

You got rid of yours, too? Yeah. You're getting yours back. Light rail back, at least. So we ended up buying everyone else's, which is a really smart move. So we kind of cornered the market in antique electric vehicles.

I like this ad, because I bike every day.

[LAUGHTER]

I hate cars that go in the bike lane. We have a goal of getting 100% zero emission fleet by 2020. So our fleet is now pretty much on the way there. All our diesel vehicles are biodiesel and the rest are all electric. We have a fleet of plug-in electric hybrids. They go about 100-- this one goes about 110 miles to the gallon.

So green building is a huge component of energy across the US. 65% of electricity, 30% of raw materials, 30% of solid waste. And this hopefully is the answer, which is our newest museum, the California Academy of Sciences. It's a LEED Platinum with a four-acre green roof. It just opened in Golden Gate Park, and it's truly amazing. Hopefully you'll all get the opportunity to go there when you're visiting San Francisco. The nice story is that this was the old one. 100% of the old building was used in the new one.

So legislation, we love mandates. I know in Arizona you have a little bit of fear around mandates. Anything that we can mandate, we do. I've never seen a really useful voluntary program that we couldn't make mandatory. So--

[LAUGHTER]

--with that spirit, we pushed to get all new buildings to be LEED Gold by 2012. And that's from literally a garage to a skyscraper has to be LEED Gold by 2012. And that legislation has passed, and now we're looking at existing buildings.

This is where our water comes from, Hetch Hetchy. It was the valley next to Yosemite. It remains the valley next to Yosemite, except it's full of water. John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, kind of cried when it was filled. I actually think it's really beautiful with water in it, but maybe it would be more beautiful empty.

So water is a big issue. We've attacked lots of different issues related to water, but my favorite one is we were the first city to ban the use by city government of single-serve plastic water bottles. A billion water bottles end up in landfill in California every single year, not recycled. A billion. That's not counting the recycled ones. So a billion of them end up in landfill a year just in the state of California. It makes absolutely no sense.

Nor does this. This is kind of seen as better, but it isn't. It's still the water that's taken around, driven in these trucks causes huge emissions. And I'm not sure why anyone would want to get the Bisphenol A from the tanks leeching into your water. So there's a much better solution, which is this. So now throughout city government, we've saved half a million dollars a year by going from that to this. Just that one change.

So really, the environment is secondary. We're in the middle of the worst recession that we've had in our lifetime. So even if you didn't care at all about the environment, you should still do energy efficiency, green building, and getting rid of this to put in these. Because why not? If it saves half a million dollars a year, it's worth it.

An issue that kind of gets swept under the carpet relates to toxicity, pesticides. It's just incredible that when you look at the list of pesticide and synthetic chemicals created since World War II, there's been 80,000 synthetic chemicals that have been manufactured. New chemicals that didn't exist before. And in the US, we've tested eight for their impacts on the brain. So got a few to still test.

And we don't seem to really think about this that much. San Francisco's spent a lot of time looking at electronic waste. They're now banned from the landfill. We throw them all into our sky, and hopefully they just get caught in the wires. A lot of electronic waste was ending up in China, and we were exporting our e-waste problem somewhere else, causing cancer and other problems in other parts of the world. So we banded together with other cities in California to push the legislature to create an advanced disposal fee. So with every computer or cell phone or TV screen sold, you have to pay now $10 for the disposal when you buy it.

We do a lot of public information in three languages, English, Chinese, and Spanish, explaining to people what to do with stuff. It's not enough just to have great programs. You need to constantly remind people what they are and how to use them.

We eliminated the most toxic pesticides from all our parks and reduced the rest of them by 80%. So we categorized all those pesticides. And that's all on our website. Any city can just take those and say, we're going to use these. We have an approved list that says these are approved, these are not. It's very, very simple. Everything in city government has to be relatively simple, we find.

Food. There's a big movement towards eating organically and locally. Luckily, we've got a great climate and a lot of food is grown very close to San Francisco. So our point is if we can't eat locally, it's very difficult for any other region on the planet to do so. So we're really looking at how we can source food from either organic or local and organic sources. The biggest issue is the people that we feed. Prisoners-- and no one really cares if they're eating organic or not. They don't really care if they're eating anything. You know, we're in a difficult budget time. We're like, should we spend more money to serve organic food to prisoners? So it's been a little bit of a hard sell.

We work with business. So we believe that you can't achieve any of the sustainability goals without getting business on board. So everyone from Google to REI to Clif Bars, CH2M HILL, brought in to create a collaborative called the Business Council on Climate Change with the United Nations to sit down and say, what should we be doing? And the first thing that people don't understand is how to measure their carbon emissions. They don't know there's a lot of opportunities, B2B opportunities to work out how to reduce them. So that's the purpose of that.

And then we did a whole marketing campaign to look at, well, what is the core message? And for us, the core message in all our programs is do the little things and make a big difference. People are overwhelmed by thinking they need to do everything. And so if you can make it bite-sized and really show people that they are making a big difference, it goes a long way.

So the EcoMap came out of a partnership with Cisco, the computer manufacturer, and it talked about-- the intro, I'm just going to talk through. You can read it. The goal was to be able to use ZIP codes to determine CO2 footprints in San Francisco. So the idea was, individuals want to make a difference, but they don't really know what that difference would be. If you fill out a carbon calculator or do a pledge on the internet, it doesn't really lead to any aggregated number. And so the point here was to be able to replicate what we do so that you can one day compare a Phoenix ZIP code with a San Francisco ZIP code with a Beijing ZIP code.

And this is-- wait one second. So this is what you see. And the website's launching in a few days. So you see San Francisco. You get a sense of all the ZIP codes. On the top, it tells you your ZIP code because you can now automatically-- your IP address on your computer can be tabulated with your ZIP code. So rather than you having to type anything in, the computer tells you your ZIP code. And then it shows you the ZIP codes based on greenness.

So the lighter the green, the better actual green you are.

So the first thing it shows you here, which is kind of maybe hard to read from where you're sitting, but it shows you the three indicators, which are transportation, energy, and waste. And then it ranks the top 10 ZIP codes in San Francisco, and it shows you the percentage for each category. So in the first one, 50% is from transportation, 46% is from energy, and only 4% is from waste.

So on energy, it shows you the amount of electricity used and the amount of gas. So we went to our utility and said, we want, by ZIP code, the residential data for both gas and electricity, and then we looked at the amount of carbon in gas and the gas-electricity ratio, and came up with a ZIP code ranking. And you can see the little green or red arrows next to the number. So each month, there's kind of the potential to go up or down. So in your community, if you get 30 or 40 people to do small actions, you can get your whole ZIP code to go from number two, let's say, to number one.

The other thing that it shows you on the bottom, that green bar, is the city average and the city goal. So we have these goals, but they're very hard to translate so that people understand what they are. So the purpose here is to be able to show people, you know what? You're not quite where the city goal is. If you took these actions, you could get there.

So waste. It shows you the weight of the black [? cart, ?] the weight of the green [? cart, ?] so this is average per household weight-- and the blue [? cart. ?] And you can see huge disparities between the top ZIP code with 295 pounds, and the worst in this one is 925. So three times more is being thrown away in one ZIP code than another. And it turns out that the ZIP code that's doing really well is called South Beach. It's a new development. It's young people that live in small apartments. They're producing three times less trash than single-family homes in the Richmond. But really, I mean, it's startling starting to look at that data, and who's throwing away more green material, and who's throwing away more refuse.

Transportation. We managed to get the state data and regional data so that you can start looking at the number of hybrids, the number of SUVs, and then the miles per year driven to commute in each ZIP code, which gives you your carbon footprint. So really starting to get pretty high-level granularity of data to look at this issue. You can do it by ZIP code, you can start comparing two ZIP codes, and eventually, you'll be able to take two ZIP codes from different places on the planet and compare SUV versus hybrid ownership, for instance.

So the next thing we did is look at these three key indicators, which are effort, cost, and impact. So that's what we learned from our market research was that those are the three drivers. People want to look at the effort they need to take to do something, the cost it's going to be to do that thing, and then, what is the impact? So there's some things that are very high impact, but they're also very high effort, like going car-free. If you said, I'm going to give up my car and just walk, bike, and take public transit, it's a huge impact, but it's also quite a lot of effort. Putting solar panels is not a huge effort, really, but it's a huge cost. And so some people may not be willing to do that, or able to do that.

And so we tailored, rather than just coming up with generic things that you could do, based on what your personal profile is by effort, cost, and impact, we then generate a list for you of what you can do. So it comes up with a list, and then you get to decide out of those which actual actions you want to take in the three different categories. And as you take them, it fills out your tree. And as it fills out your tree, you can then add it to Facebook. We really wanted to add the social networking dimension, and we used the mayor here, so you get to see the mayor's Facebook page. And his tree goes on there. And then it goes back and looks at the people that live around the mayor that are also using the site through Facebook and finds out what they're doing.

So he decides he wants a plan a bicycle route. So it doesn't just give you a high level of data. It starts to mine down deeper. So it says he's going to go from City Hall to see the Giants, and then it shows the route. And one of the cool things that we did with the route planner is that it also shows you the gradient, you can see on the bottom right. San Francisco, we have a lot of hills. People want to know, if there's an easy route, how long does it take? And then at the bottom, it links you to a bike buddy through Facebook. So if you don't want to bicycle alone, you're just starting to bike, it helps you do that.

And then it links you to other people. This person can teach you how to learn how to compost. The next person is going to be part of a green business, and they happen to have a video on Cole Hardware, which is a small hardware store that can tell you more about what you want to know about green businesses. So you can really start linking this to real-life experiences in the city rather than making it some abstract tool that is of little use.

So this will launch in Seoul. We started in San Francisco. Amsterdam and Seoul are the next two cities that are going to do it. And then the goal is to replicate the model by greening each ZIP code. And ZIP codes really are a scale that you can start measuring things. I mean, if you get enough ZIP codes to do it, you can really see what the impact on the planet is going to be. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]