A Green New Deal? LA Now Has One

Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles on Monday unveiled an ambitious, wide-ranging “Green New Deal” for the nation’s second-largest city.

He framed LA’s ability to achieve the sweeping goals as standing in contrast with Washington’s difficulties moving forward on a broad climate plan.

“Who cares about potholes if Venice is under water?” he said. “Politicians don’t need to look across the aisle to find the answers — they need to look across the country.”

Garcetti’s plan calls for making every skyscraper and house “emissions-free” by 2050. It calls for building a zero-emissions transportation network that would get Angelenos out of their cars and onto trains, buses, bikes and scooters. (Though, as Curbed Los Angeles reported, that will be difficult.)

The huge port of Los Angeles would be carbon-free, too.

It calls for an end to the era of plastic straws and single-use takeout containers by 2028. By 2050, Garcetti said, “we won’t send a single piece of waste to landfills.”

Wastewater, according to the plan, will all be recycled. And doing all of this, Garcetti said, will create hundreds of thousands of green jobs.

One area in which Garcetti has already laid out major climate goals — he estimated that the plan released Monday was about half new and half a mix of past targets — was energy production. The new plan still said the city would be powered by all renewable energy by 2045.

Earlier this month, I wrote about a report by residential solar energy company Sunrun, which proposed a kind of “virtual power grid” for LA, where solar panels on homes replace fossil fuels. Experts told me that although it may sound far out if you’re not immersed in this stuff, it’s likely to happen eventually.

So I asked Garcetti how he saw residential solar power fitting into his New Deal.

“It’s definitely part of the mix,” he said. That day, Garcetti added, he had asked the LA Department of Water and Power to ask private-sector solar providers to pitch their ideas for making a cost-effective transition.

The key, he said, will be ensuring that energy jobs that pay well aren’t replaced by low-wage work.

“We don’t want to become the next West Virginia,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.