Council Backs Garcetti's Aggressive Smog Reduction Plan

LOS ANGELES, CA - The Los Angeles City Council today backed Mayor Eric Garcetti's emissions reduction plan, which follows a more aggressive schedule than that of the state for meeting targets for cutting greenhouse gases.

While Gov. Jerry Brown is requiring that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, the most significant cuts would not occur until 2030, when emissions must reach 40 percent below 1990 levels.

Garcetti's front-loaded plan, which the council adopted, calls for large reductions sooner. Most notably, the mayor's schedule requires that the city reduce emissions to 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2025, five years earlier than what's set by Brown's statewide goal.

Councilman Paul Koretz, who pushed for council support of the more ambitious phase-in schedule, urged his colleagues not only to "take this strong action today," but to "continue taking another and another action in the future."

"We have to keep going and we have to continually show the world that the city best known for cars and freeways, smog and conspicuous consumption ... can lead the way toward a new way of living," he said.

With Los Angeles emissions levels already 20 percent below levels in 1990, the city is outpacing the statewide goal of matching 1990 levels by 2020, or in four years.

The ramped-up plan adds pressure for the city to do something in the intervening years before reaching or exceeding the statewide 80 percent goal in 2050, first with the 45 percent reduction by 2025 and a 60 percent cut by 2035.

Brown's plan calls greenhouse gas emissions to reach:

• 1990 levels by 2020;
• 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030;
• 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

The council and Garcetti's plan calls for emissions to reach:

• 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2025;
• 60 percent below 1990 levels by 2035; and
• 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

The city's emissions reduction efforts are aimed at helping to prevent the warming of the planet to a level that would create a tipping point, when the disastrous effects of climate change become irreversible.

As a way to spur more urgent action, a global climate deal reached by world leaders in Paris last December called for efforts to cap the increase of the global average temperature at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That limit has since been reached, according to some reports, with the 1.5 degree temperature rise met in February.

City News Service