Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is gunning for a green and just pandemic reopening based on an international agenda that ties COVID-19 recovery with concerns about climate change.
“Returning to normal is not the goal,” Garcetti told journalists at a July 15 C40 Mayors’ virtual press conference on Zoom. “It’s not the goal with climate. It's not the goal obviously with COVID-19. We want to take these moments to reimagine what normal is because if normal means pollution, if normal means inadequate healthcare and if normal means divisions in society, then that's not an acceptable norm.”
Garcetti is the chair of C40, which is an international network of 96 city mayors including New Orleans, Freetown, Seattle, Lisbon, Melbourne, Montreal and Rotterdam. Mayor Emeritus of New York City, Michael R. Bloomberg, is the C40 Board President.
In California alone, coronavirus cases have risen to 347,634 and deaths to 7,227 as of July 16. In response, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a new cycle of shutdowns this week.
Indoor restaurants, bars and breweries, wineries and tasting rooms, movie theaters, family entertainment centers, zoos, museums and card rooms are closed again after having re-opened briefly, according to the state’s COVID-19 website.
"It's time to invest in good-paying high-quality jobs and careers for our people to support workers and our most vulnerable communities and to improve our public health and our air quality to invest in our public transportation,” Garcetti said. “We know that there is a long road back but we are one voice. We joined together as one organization, one community and we bring together youth activists, climate scientists, trade unions, and global business leaders. We call on every level of leadership to seize this moment, to reverse the course, to rewrite the rules of our social compact and emerge with a reaffirmation of our commitment to the global green new deal and to run full speed ahead towards the future.”
While Garcetti was announcing the global plan, C40 Mayors’ Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery, he did not immediately respond when asked how Los Angeles might change by accommodating a green economy or green new deal.
“We need to look at the whole picture and reckon with how these problems are interconnected with each other and take action and that means, first and foremost, putting sustainability and climate justice at the center of how we move forward from COVID-19, which has been the mission of this organization since its outset,” said Garcetti. “It's what our global green new deal is all about that we announced last summer to connect the end of ecological degradation with the economic displacement of too many people.”
The agenda was created by the C40 Global Mayors COVID-19 Recovery Task Force, which was established this year at the direction of Garcetti and chaired by Mayor of Milan Giuseppe Sala.
“We want to go forward with different sort of normal, a new normal when it comes to pollution, when it comes to displacement, when it comes to healing the planet and economic opportunity,” Garcetti said. “Crisis can confuse or it can clarify and I'm confident that this will be a moment of clarification and of action.”