Episode 26: LA's Green New Deal with Dr. Kelly Kay

7:58PM Aug 22, 2022

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Campus Connections

Sophia Possidente

Dr. Kelly Kay

Keywords:

green new deal

umbc

la

city

mayor

power

los angeles

scalar

dwp

transitions

scale

ibew

system

environmental

union

generally

planning

energy

important

research

Hello and welcome to retrieving the social sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. qualitative, quantitative, applied empirical, normative, and retrieving the social sciences. We bring the best of UMBC social science community to you. Today on retrieving the social sciences, we're thinking about the social science of environmental policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change. And what a coincidence, the United States Congress has very recently passed a bill that despite its seemingly unrelated name, appears to have important provisions to do exactly that. The inflation Reduction Act was signed into law by President Biden on Tuesday, August 16, after a prolonged but ultimately successful process of maneuvering by members of the slim democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. In fact, Vice President Kamala Harris had to intervene to break a tie in the Senate. But regardless of the process, the bill will ultimately direct the federal government to spend upwards of $369 billion in the realms of green energy and climate change mitigation seems like a pretty big deal. But of course, the devil is always in the details. So it will remain to be seen how these funds are implemented by the federal government to create successful green outcomes. That's a question that resonates with the research of a scholar who recently visited UMBC virtually to deliver a lecture on the green New Deal, not the green new deal that's been discussed in various Washington policy circles and on the campaign trail. This green New Deal is a real set of policy priorities that was launched in 2019 by the mayor of Los Angeles, Dr. Kelly Kay, Assistant Professor of Geography at UCLA, has studied these policies in detail over the past few years. Dr. Kay, who also holds an affiliation with the UCLA Institute of the environment and sustainability, discussed her research on the political economy of the environment. And this year's UMBC, Geography and Environmental Systems seminar series. Let's take a listen to a condensed version of this lecture to learn much more about the complexities of environmental policy, and the potential for the green New Deal as well as the inflation Reduction Act to produce a variety of complex and politically consequential outcomes.

Hi, everybody, thank you so much for being here today. And Andy, thank you for the invitation to speak. So my talk today is primarily going to be focused around some ongoing work that I've been doing with one of my doctoral students, Andrea fornaro. And it's focused on understanding the challenges for just energy transitions in Los Angeles, and for cities more generally. So the project on the LA Green New Deal was a collaborative effort between myself and one of my PhD students. And we decided to submit for some funding to do research together on a topic that interested both of us, but wasn't really central to either of our work. So in early 2020, we came together and we applied for and received funding from a local private foundation, we were all set to hit the ground running, and then COVID-19 hit, which I'm sure we all have our COVID research stories. But luckily, we were pretty able to adapt both, you know, being in Los Angeles, and having to talk to a lot of policymakers that we're used to having meetings on phone or zoom. So this research project that was really important to us because it provided us with an opportunity to keep doing our research, sort of in the height of the pandemic. So today I'm going to be mostly presenting on a paper that Andrea and I have revised and resubmitted to the journal political geography. So the project combines sept 22, semi structured interviews of one to I think our longest was three hours, with an extensive review of recordings and minutes of city and public utility board meetings 40 years of LA Times, articles on energy and climate issues in the LA Times being the paper of record for our study site, and then a variety of other reports and materials, particularly materials produced by consultants hired by the LA Department of Water and Power to conduct viability studies and economic impact studies. So in April 2019, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the LA Green New Deal and ambitious plan to shift the city's power system to 100% renewables by by 2045 this was aligned with several state level policy requirements, including the State of California's renewable portfolio standard, but had a faster implementation timetable. And there are other differences as well. But I think that's maybe the most notable. The decision to transition this system was going to be supported by the largest energy modeling exercise ever conducted, which la DWP contract contracted the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory and roll to complete with the results of that modeling finished, the city council has since voted to move on the timetable on the LA Green New Deal up committing to 100% renewable power now by 2035, which is feeling like it's just around the corner. And so now 10 years sooner than they are required to by the state of California. So a major piece of this decarbonisation plan and sort of the focus of the article that Andrea and I wrote, because it was an important element that that causes a lot of conflict with the utilities union was a focus on retiring three natural gas fired power plants, the Haines harbor and Scattergood generating stations. So these three facilities are a absolutely huge part of the LA DWP power system. The three generating stations alone account for 40% of LED WPS total capacity. But really importantly, here, they currently make up 89% of the utilities capacity within Los Angeles County. So, you know, almost all the power that's not produced outside of LA is being produced by these facilities. So the just the decision to reduce reliance on them will have major impacts on the city and many critics have cited concerns about reliability issues that may be caused by taking them fully offline, pointing to for example, rolling brownouts, which was a big problem during the summer of 2020. When record high temperatures across much of the Western US created huge demand for power to run air conditioners and meet other household demands. And this is likely to become an accelerating issue. The rolling brownouts meant that many many people's power across Southern California had to be sort of strategically in blocks shut off because there wasn't enough power to go around.

Okay, so on the night of the LA Green New Deal rollout, which was being celebrated at a large party at the mayor's residence, IBEW. 18 was protesting outside. And this was a story that several informants for the project told us interestingly, either from the side of being at the party and having the party disrupted, or from the side of being outside the party and protesting the LA Green New Deal. So while tensions between labor and environmental goals are certainly not unusual in decarbonisation planning, Los Angeles is generally thought to be a fairly progressive city, and its unions generally don't support or not like anti environmental in their positions generally. So this isn't necessarily par for the course here. Yet the Union itself and its advocacy arm working Californians have been actively protesting the plan and and the mayor himself. This has manifested in then running attack ads against America study financially supporting his opponents and other anti environmental candidates for local office to try and create a counter block against him and picketing outside la DWP offices and in other prominent locations around the city. And the photo on the screen is a photo of one of these many working Californians protests against the LA Green New Deal. So what happens? How do we understand the opposition of IBEW 18 A generally progressive union and a generally progressive city and perhaps most importantly, what lessons can be drawn from the case to inform just energy transitions in the future and in other places? In our article, Andrea and I argue that the opposition of IBEW 18 can be explained by three types of what we are calling sort of scalar mismatch or scalar misalignments and these scalar misalignments are things that are likely to cause issues for many municipal scale decarbonisation plans, not just Los Angeles is. So, um, I'm gonna go through each of these scalar mismatches, starting with first the misalignment between the current and future geographies of Los Angeles is power system. And the map on the screen which is pulled from the report that we produced, I think really highlights the spatially expansive nature of the DWP system, which brings power from across the western US into the LA basin. This system currently depends As on the production of power in five states, which are connected through 3600 miles of transmission lines, and 10,400 miles of distribution lines. There are currently plans for the system of transmission and generation to move further east. So for a variety of reasons, including California state laws, path dependencies, economies of scale, and land prices in Los Angeles and Southern California generally, the city is slated to become even more dependent on out of state facilities with this rapid transition to renewables. This trajectory is alarming for organized labor because it means that new jobs and both construction and maintenance are unlikely to be located in Los Angeles.

The second moment of scalar mismatch that we discussed in the paper and that we talk a bit about in our report has to do with jurisdiction, which is related in some ways to the geographies of the power system, but it's distinct as well. Jurisdiction presents major issues, not just with the LA Green New Deal, but with municipal scale Green New Deal planning, more generally or decarbonisation planning more generally. So within Los Angeles, the mayor's office has actually a quite a lot of power over the utility over city budgets, city regulations, zoning planning within the city and within the county, but they're also bound by many constraints as well. The mayor is bound by term limits, and the next mayor, you know, the next mayor may not have the same priorities, the same specific vision of how decarbonisation might happen, the same focus on climate or energy at all. And I think Furthermore, and this is important for any municipal scale Green New Deal planning, the mayor is required to maintain a balanced budget, presenting limitations for the kinds of deficit spending that the federal government, for example, could be able to do to create jobs and smooth the transition. So lastly, the third major trend that we found in our interviews. And the third dimension of scalar mismatch that we look at, is the difference in the scales of political engagement between the mayor and the union. So to boil it down even further, the mayor and the Union are both engaging in climate change related politics, but they're doing so in different arenas. It was well known at the time of the Elliott Green New Deal, that Garcinia national political ambitions. There was a lot of talk at the time that he was planning on running for president. And he was, I think, importantly, operating in environmental politics at the international scale. So for one key example, Garcinia is currently the chair of the city's Climate Leadership Group, a global network that's sort of commonly referred to using the shorthand C 40. This is an international group of local politicians, a lot of mayors who have come together to try and take action on climate change sort of appealing to a higher scale. Gar study assumed the chair ship of sea 40, shortly after announcing the LA Green New Deal, and there was some speculation amongst the people we interviewed for this project, that he took this bold action in Los Angeles, at least in part to bolster his credentials, so he could assume this prestigious chair ship. So to briefly wrap all of this up, I began by posing the question, how can we understand the opposition of IBEW a team and generally progressive union and a generally progressive city and perhaps most importantly, what lessons can be drawn from the case to inform just transitions in the future and in other places? To address the first piece, I have argued that there are several critical scalar misalignments in this specific case that helped to explain why IBEW 18 had such strong opposition to the LA Green New Deal. So to remind you, these are the current and future geographies of the energy system, the limits imposed by the mayor of LA's jurisdiction, and the scales of political activism and engagement that the mayor and the Union are each respectively engaged in. So these scalar issues are front and center in the LA case, but also speak to issues that could plague other municipalities attempting to decarbonize their energy systems. I will also say that impacted communities when it comes to just transitions that all impacted communities need to be engaged and accounted for at all stages of the planning process. I think this was a huge oversight. And the you know, it's we're several years on and still trying to rectify this strong opposition from the DWP union.

Campus Connections, Campus Connections, Campus Connections, Campus Connections, Campus Connections.

Now it's time for Campus Connection, a part of the podcast where we connect today is featured content to other work happening on UMBC's campus. Today, our fantastic production assistant, Sophia, brings us a highly relevant article recently published by one of our former guests. Sophia, what is this friend of the program been up to?

On today's installment of Campus Connections, we're looking at the work of Dr. Eric Stokan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UMBC and a faculty affiliate to the School of Public Policy. Dr. Stokan has written repeatedly on sustainability and local government, but it's his 2020 paper "Stainability Synergies or Silos: the Opportunity Costs of Local Government Organizational Capabilities," that will be taking the focus today. The paper discusses how governments, specifically local ones, reallocate resources towards increasing sustainability and how those decisions are made. Reducing the city's environmental impact is amazing, but it's also time consuming and extremely costly. So there are a certain amount of risk calculations involved when deciding where to allocate funds. Dr. Stokan's paper touches on these calculations, as local governments balance the desire to improve their communities with the reality of the resources that they have to spend. The paper found that many US cities are more committed to traditional economic development than broader sustainability goals. However, those who involve both in their planning, combining the interests of each ,are able to maximize their capabilities and resources more effectively. Additionally, research showed that providing tax incentives to encourage sustainable practices isn't an efficient use of resources. In fact, because of the opportunity costs of this method, cities that predominantly rely on it may struggle to expand their policies in the future. As we learned both in today's lecture rebroadcast and Campus Connections, the movement to go green isn't completely straightforward. There will be setbacks, naysayers, and financial difficulties on the road to renewable energy. However, preserving the planet for future generations is well worth the cost.

I'm really glad to hear about Dr. Stokan's fascinating article and to learn more about the nuances of climate policy as it concerns American cities. Thanks again, Sophia. And thank you for tuning in once again. Join us next time and until then, keep questioning.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Jefferson Rivas. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent UMBC events. Until next time, keep questioning.