[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Sharon Kyle and Dick Price

Speaking before supporters in Altadena this week, Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi tiptoed lightly around talk of running for governor of California next time around. “We’ll have an announcement about that in January,” he said, though the reception was titled “Garamendi—2010” and nobody present stuck their fifty bucks in the envelope to support his run for anything short of California’s top spot.

Instead, Garamendi spoke about four issues that have consumed his first year as lieutenant governor: the environment, transportation, education, and health care.

“Europe took Kyoto seriously. They made major changes,” he said, regarding the Kyoto Climate Change Conference he worked on as Deputy Secretary of the Interior Department during the Clinton Administration in the mid 1990s. “Germany now gets 25% of its energy from renewable sources, up from almost nothing 10 years ago.” In the meantime, the United States—which has not adopted the Kyoto Accords—has fallen behind even China in average gas mileage.