Photo by iStockphoto.com/choness
You may have heard about the Green New Deal resolution that was introduced in Congress last week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey. It offers a vision for simultaneously tackling climate change, environmental injustice, and economic inequality that's both ambitious and pragmatic. The reaction was mostly positive, but there were naysayers, of course, who questioned whether the kind of progress called for in the Green New Deal was really possible.
Those folks should have been in Los Angeles this week. If they had, they would have seen exactly what policies consistent with the Green New Deal look like when they're announced.
On Tuesday, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power announced that they are abandoning plans for repowering three gas plants and, instead, going all in on generating the city's electricity with clean energy.
"This is the beginning of the end for natural gas," the mayor declared, and he went on to describe how the city is planning to phase out fossil fuels. Other elected officials spoke about the environmental injustice caused by fracked gas plants and the good union jobs that will be created by the construction of new storage and transmission capacity. And everyone was excited that Los Angeles, like other cities around the country, is taking the initiative to fight climate change, even as the Trump administration shamefully shirks its responsibility.
Both the Green New Deal and this announcement might seem like they came out of nowhere, but they've actually been years in the making. Sierra Club staff and volunteers have been working with the LADWP and the mayor's office to reach this outcome since the day six years ago that the city announced it would no longer use coal. Now that hard work has paid off spectacularly.
Have you ever flown into LAX at night? Imagine that vast carpet of lights all powered by clean energy. If Los Angeles can do it, show me the city that can't.