LA Green New Deal Update

Question: What do Mayor Garcetti, oil drilling, gas appliances, and styrofoam containers all have in common?

Answer: Los Angeles is saying goodbye to all of them

That was the gist of December’s Green New Deal signing ceremony and Mayor Garcetti’s last official act in office.

Sierra Club leaders attended a special Green New Deal event to sign the newly passed ordinances to phase out oil drilling, decarbonize new construction, and ban styrofoam containers. These are all key steps toward implementing LA’s ambitious and equitable Green New Deal.

The event took place at Colton St. Community park, directly facing an active oil pumpjack, underscoring the message that these ordinances have very real consequences for how the city is run. Not only are we eliminating the production of oil in the city of LA, but we’re also limiting its use in buildings and its use to make plastics and styrofoam.

During the same ceremony, the mayor noted the importance of the just-released Just Transition Strategy, a first-ever framework for creating a pathway for workers in oil drilling to find new employment. This strategy shows how to provide oil extraction workers impacted by phase-out policies with the necessary support to transition their skills into jobs of comparable, family-sustaining compensation or retirement in ways that promote livelihoods and dignity. Central to the strategy is the work to properly remediate closed oil well sites and integrate input from frontline communities and sovereign Native Nations, on whose ancestral homelands Los Angeles is built, in community visioning, remediation and land use redevelopment planning processes.

The Sierra Club has been pushing every step of the way for these policies. Our Clean Break committee volunteers have advocated for the oil drilling ban in Los Angeles since 2013. We helped create and sat on the Just Transition taskforce, and we’ve actively pursued building electrification policies in LA. We’ve advocated for the styrofoam ban and other single use plastics phase out.

While these fights aren’t over, its important to celebrate huge steps forward and the allies who made them happen. Sierra Club life member and former mayor Eric Garcetti, posed with Club leaders for this celebratory photo: 

Left to right: Environmental Justice Committee member Emmanuel Alcantar, Political Committee member Susana Reyes, Life member Eric Garcetti, CA Climate and Energy director Monica Embrey and Angeles Chapter Director Morgan Goodwin. Photo by Morgan Goodwin

Signing ceremony:

Photo by Morgan Goodwin

Photo by Morgan Goodwin