Taking a cue from environmentally-conscious legislators in the nation’s capital, Los Angeles–area municipal entities are making plans to transform and repackage the region’s existing sustainability goals under the mantle of the Green New Deal with the aim of eliminating carbon emissions and boosting social equity. This week, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti unveiled a wide-ranging “Green New Deal” plan for the city that calls for eliminating carbon emissions in the city entirely by 2045.
Like the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez– and Ed Markey–backed Green New Deal initiative, Garcetti’s vision for the future of L.A. aims to unify environmental and social policy to reduce the city’s carbon footprint. Under the vision, Los Angeles would reduce building energy use by 44 percent by 2050, reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita by 45 percent by 2045, and ensure that 75 percent of the new housing units built in the city would be less than 1,500 feet from a transit stop, among other goals. These efforts would be guided by new job training initiatives that would help deliver economic promise to the city’s residents.
Under the plan, the city hopes to shore up its chronic water issues, as well, and plans to source up to 70 percent of L.A.’s water locally while capturing 150,000 acre-feet per year and recycling 100 percent of the water used within city limits by 2035.
Simultaneously, Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the country, is crafting a long-term regional sustainability plan with the help of BuroHappold, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and social justice nonprofit Liberty Hill Foundation.
The initiative will deploy a “set of strategies and actions for creating a resilient, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable county,” according to a press release, and calls for eliminating on-road diesel particulate emissions by 100 percent by 2035, sourcing 80 percent of water locally by 2045, and achieving carbon neutrality countywide by 2050.
The team behind the plan recently unveiled a draft proposal, available at OurCountyLA.org, that is being workshopped with the help of community members and over 630 stakeholders from 292 regional organizations.
If the plans are successful, they would signal a major shift in how the county’s 10 million inhabitants live their lives and could reshape the county’s built environment and transportation infrastructure.
Mayor Garcetti’s plan, however, has come under fire for not going far enough from environmental groups like the local chapter of the Sunrise Movement, the youth-driven organization that helped develop Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal legislation. Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, told Curbed that because the mayor’s plan only posits a reduction in VMT and relies heavily on the use of electric vehicles, “nothing that’s listed here will produce more than a 5 percent reduction,” adding, “It probably won’t bring them anything.”
