Los Angeles Without Gas-Powered Cars? ~ Here’s a Breakdown of What’s Inside Mayor Garcetti’s ‘Green New Deal’

[dropcap size=big]C[/dropcap]an L.A. save itself from climate change? This week Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a wide-ranging plan to more or less give it a last-ditch shot. His outlined proposal would tackle everything from homelessness, transportation, renewable energy, the local water supply, and air quality in an effort to attempt peak possible sustainability as a metropolitan center within our lifetimes.

The language the plan would have been unimaginable just ten years ago. Now, Garcetti’s “Green New Deal” arrives as an obvious co-opting of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s increasingly popular proposal for a federal Green New Deal policy.

Garcetti’s updated environmental plan is essentially an accelerated and renamed version of his administration’s Sustainability Plan from 2015, others noted. In broad strokes, here’s what the mayor is proposing. The Green New Deal calls for the city of Los Angeles to:

• Develop, with L.A. County, a countywide strategy to end oil and gas production and extraction.
• Build a renewable energy infrastructure that provides 100% of the city’s energy by 2045, mostly from solar panels and solar powered batteries.
• Recycle 100% of the city’s wastewater into “beneficial reuse,” by 2035.
• Make all buildings within the city net-zero carbon emitters by 2050.
• Build 45,000 affordable housing units by 2035 “and increase stability for renters.”
• Electrify L.A. city buses and the Metro by 2030.
• Cut all transportation greenhouse gas emissions by 100% by 2050 by increasing the number of electric vehicles on the road to 100% of vehicles.
• Reduce industrial emissions by 82% by 2050.
• Create 300,000 green jobs by 2035.
• And end homelessness in the city by 2028, when L.A. hosts the 2028 Olympics.

The mayor’s Green New Deal surprisingly sparse on hard and specific policies to meet these, and many other goals. Many of the goals are modified versions of previous sustainability or green plans, or actually dial down goals when it comes down to specifics, said Alissa Walker, urbanism editor for Curbed LA.