Highlights from the interview with Take Two:



Q: Senate President pro Tem Kevin de Leon, who will be joining you in Paris, has said one of the goals at the summit is to bring back investment capital to California to fund green tech projects. What are your goals for the visit?



I'm looking to get others to join California in what it's doing on renewable energy, on building standards, on auto emissions, zero-emission vehicles and all that...about half of the venture capital investment in America comes to California because of Silicon Valley and the [biotechnology] in San Diego and Orange County, so we're very well placed to receive and earn these investments and that will push our whole program forward of reducing our carbon footprint.



Q: This year one of the key parts of the climate bill you backed, known as SB 350, would have set the goal of cutting oil consumption by 50 percent over the next 15 years. But that part was dropped after heavy lobbying from the oil industry. How big a defeat was that and how can California make the cuts necessary without tough measures like this?



Well, I would have loved to have had the law embodied in our statutory framework, but I still have set the goal by executive order: 50 percent less oil and diesel in California vehicles, that's our goal. And we're going to meet it by working with the California utilities and the automobile companies to promote zero-emission vehicles. We want to make the combustion engine obsolete – and certainly in the short term, a smaller and smaller share of the market.



Q: We've talked about climate-related concerns in the state, whether its sea-level rise or more extreme drought. What do you see as a top priority in the state in terms of getting ready for climate change?



The threat I see is fire and more negative effects from the historic drought. What I think we have to do [is] we have to get more electric vehicles, we need more efficient buildings, we need better land-use so people live close to where they work, and we have to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels, on oil and gas. And we have to make all our industrial processes – from cement to everything else – more efficient and, therefore, more compatible with a benign weather climate.



Q: One of the important pieces of the state's climate plan is the cap and trade program, but it's been controversial. And not just from the energy sector. This year, Pope Francis criticized the strategy of buying and selling 'carbon credits,' saying it leads to a new form of speculation that won't reduce pollution. Is California relying too much on this strategy?  



No. In fact, cap and trade is about 17 percent of our goal – in fact, probably even less than that. We have regulatory efforts, what the critics call 'command and control.' We say, you must have 50 percent renewable energy in 15 years, that's a rule. We say the level of emissions coming out of your automobile, the standards of your buildings, homes and commercial buildings have to meet. That's an order. Thou shalt do it. Now in addition to that, we have this flexible, what they call market-based system, where if you can't do it in your own building, you can go pay someone else who has done even more than is required. And through cap and trade, you find you can bring down emissions in a very efficient way. I think the Pope was talking about some kind of system that relied totally on a market and not on specifically mandatory goals, which California has.