Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group that owns 25 per cent of Virgin America and licenses the Virgin brand, will jet into town. Virgin America Chief Executive Officer Fred Reid, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and possibly Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger will be in attendance. Newsom and Schwarzenegger lobbied Branson to have Virgin America set up its headquarters in the Bay Area. The state also put up nearly $13 million in job-training funds as inducements for the carrier to open its corporate headquarters in Frisco.

Virgin America first set up office operations in 2004, promising to create excitement, offer jobs and create an economic ripple in the Bay Area. It took three years, but funding has fallen into place, and the Transportation Department has overcome its fright of foreign ownership and given a green signal to Virgin America’s flight plans. The airline has hired about 500 of the estimated 3,000 to 5,000 employees it expects to eventually have on its rolls. About 100 are pilots and another 100 are flight attendants. Most staffers will be based in the Bay Area.

Not all of Virgin America’s employees are in the Bay Area. The carrier uses reservations agents who work from their homes around the US. Virgin America also outsources many of its IT needs to CSS Corp, a San Jose company that further farms out the work to its outfit in Chennai, India. Justifying these practices, CSS chief marketing officer Ajmal Noorani says: “Virgin America is offering a very high-quality service at a cut-throat price, and it needs to keep its IT lean and mean.

A 10-year-old company, CSS employs just 45 people in San Jose, and 5,000 worldwide in its offices in New York, Washington, Singapore and India. It is also setting up operations in Poland and Ireland. In 2004, Virgin America received nearly $13 million in job development funding from the Employment Training Panel, associated with the California Employment Development Department, to create Bay Area jobs. Officials expect the company will use the money to retrain some of the thousands of Bay Area aviation industry workers laid off in the post-9 / 11 US airline meltdown.

I would like to congratulate Prime Minister Tony Blair for taking this historic step to do in Great Britain at the national level what California is doing at the state level. The Prime Minister has been an inspiration to California as we have taken our own historic steps to fight greenhouse gases with the Global Warming Solutions Act. His leadership has shown us that we can protect the environment without harming the economy. Great Britain has already successfully reduced its greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels while at the same time growing their economy by 38 percent.

California’s economy stands to greatly benefit from the wave of new businesses and jobs created by the emerging technologies and different approaches to fighting climate change. By harnessing market forces, we will reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. And by 2050, we will reduce emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels.

California is proudly partnering with Great Britain to fight climate change and I look forward to advancing our efforts and linking our regional trading schemes so we can create a global carbon market.

Last July, Prime Minister Blair and I took the unprecedented step of signing an agreement between California and the United Kingdom to create an international partnership to fight against global warming. Our agreement includes efforts to evaluate and implement market-based mechanisms to spur innovation, deepen our understanding of the economics of climate change, collaborate on technology research and enhance linkages between our scientific communities.