Los Angeles launches its own Green New Deal

Last week Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the city’s Green New Deal, with concrete plans to be carbon-neutral by 2050.

Mayor Garcetti said in his announcement, “Politicians in Washington don’t have to look across the aisle in Congress to know what a Green New Deal is — they can look across the country, to Los Angeles. With flames on our hillsides and floods in our streets, cities cannot wait another moment to confront the climate crisis with everything we’ve got. L.A. is leading the charge, with a clear vision for protecting the environment and making our economy work for everyone.”

The Los Angeles Green New Deal was created to address the city’s largest producers of carbon emissions, including its buildings, transportation, trash, and electricity.

Los Angeles’ Green New Deal aims to tackle all major identified facets of the city’s economy, systems, and structures that are currently contributing negatively to climate change. The plan will aim to completely eliminate single use waste items such as plastic straws, styrofoam, and take-out containers (sending no trash at all to landfills by 2050) ; recycle 100% of the city’s wastewater by 2035; create a zero-emissions transportation system; and transition the Port of Los Angeles to becoming carbon-emission free, among other things. Mayor Garcetti also promises that the Los Angeles Green New Deal will create hundreds of thousands of new, green jobs. It is a multibranched plan that will serve as a model and inspiration for other cities and policy makers.

Sanjana Karanth at Huffpost reports, “The city’s Green New Deal is an aggressive expansion of the Sustainable City pLAn the mayor created in 2015 to reflect more recent environmental studies that have shown the need for rapid and more radical solutions to combat climate change.”

As part of the Sustainable City pLAn, the city has already made notable strides towards carbon-neutrality including installing the most amount of electric car public charging stations of any U.S. city and developing solar power initiative policy that led to Los Angeles becoming the #1 Solar City in the U.S.

What other cities have progressive and concrete plans for radically reducing carbon-emissions? Does your city? How might local level lawmakers creating their own versions influence the Green New Deal Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced on the federal level?