Climate change is cooking Los Angeles. Does Karen Bass care?

Los Angeles is still reeling from its most devastating wildfires ever. In the next few months, temperatures could hit triple digits. Yet Mayor Karen Bass wants to eliminate the city’s climate emergency office.

Yes, L.A. faces a $1-billion budget shortfall. But shutting the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office and firing five people who work to safeguard Angelenos from global warming, as Bass proposed last week, is an absurdly short-sighted plan from a mayor who has never made climate change much of a priority — especially when the savings, roughly $700,000, could potentially force the city to forfeit a $750,000 state grant.

City Council members should refuse to go along with this terrible proposal.

The budget cuts would undermine efforts to keep L.A. residents safe during heat waves, which at a national level kill more people than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined. Extreme heat has caused or contributed to the deaths of more than 21,500 Americans in the last quarter-century, researchers estimate, with the numbers rising in recent years as the planet heats up. Last year was the hottest on record globally.

L.A.’s climate office is led by Marta Segura, the city’s chief heat officer. Los Angeles is one of just three localities in the U.S. with such a job, along with Phoenix and Miami-Dade County — until now a point of pride for City Hall.

Although it’s unclear whether the budget cuts would eliminate the chief heat officer position — the mayor’s office won’t say — Bass is seeking approval to delete the language in the Municipal Code establishing the role.

Either way, one of the climate office’s main jobs is coordinating with other city departments during heat waves to keep people safe, especially low-income families and other vulnerable individuals, including the elderly and those without homes. If the climate office is shut down, people who don’t have air conditioning or can’t afford to blast it may have more trouble finding cooling centers. Some neighborhood may not have enough of those centers.

In the long run, Los Angeles could lose momentum on planting trees, adding shade structures at bus stops and taking other steps to bring down urban temperatures — especially if it loses a $750,000 state grant to develop a heat action plan, which the climate emergency office is currently working to finalize.

“Should this Office be deleted, the grant would need to be forfeited,” Vahid Khorsand, president of L.A.’s Board of Public Works, warned last week in a letter to City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, as first reported by LAist.

Bass’ office insists that climate change is top of mind.

The mayor’s press secretary, Clara Karger, said in an email that despite a tough budget cycle, Bass is “committed to her bold climate goals.” She pointed me to an Earth Day news release describing efforts to reduce pollution at the Port of L.A., expand food scrap recycling and add electric car chargers across the city, among other initiatives. She noted that Bass created a “Climate Cabinet” of city officials, which includes an extreme heat working group.

“Climate priorities will continue as a core responsibility of every department,” Karger said.

Felisa Benitez, 86, wipes the sweat from her brow while taking a break from cleaning her electric fan on the porch of her home at the San Fernando Gardens public housing complex in Pacoima in August 2021.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

She also said that L.A. will keep developing its heat action plan, and that Khorsand’s letter warning the city could lose the $750,000 state grant was misleading. She sent me a new statement from Khorsand that contradicted his previous missive: “We do not have any indication from the State that the City would need to forfeit grant funding. Other staff in the City will be available to administer and execute the grant if it’s awarded to the city.”

Those are all very nice words. I hope the ones about the grant are true. But they do little to hide the plain truth.

As more than a dozen advocacy groups — including Los Angeles Waterkeeper, the Center for Biological Diversity and East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice — wrote in a letter to the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, the mayor’s proposal signifies “an abdication of the leadership on climate, environmental health and justice that the City has demonstrated over the past decade.”

“Not long ago, Los Angeles was considered one of the world leaders in climate policy and action,” they wrote.

No thanks to Bass.

When I interviewed her ahead of the 2022 mayoral primary, I was underwhelmed. To her credit, she had released a detailed climate plan, which was a lot more than I could say for her leading opponent, billionaire developer Rick Caruso (who released no climate plan until well after the primary and declined my requests for an interview).

But Bass clearly wasn’t as well-versed in climate issues as several other candidates.

Tellingly, she downplayed the dangers of heat, saying that older folks dying in their homes has “historically been a problem in Chicago” but not Los Angeles. This despite a Times investigation from several months earlier finding that heat killed an estimated 3,900 Californians over the previous decade, with people over 65 especially at risk.

Since then, there have been continued signs that climate is not one of the mayor’s top priorities.

She declined to take a position on Measure HLA, a high-profile ballot measure approved by voters that will result in hundreds of miles of new bus and bike lanes and make it easier to get around L.A. without a car. She withdrew her support for studying plans to turn the three-mile Marina Freeway into parkland and housing. Her promise of a car-free 2028 Summer Olympics appears certain to fail amid a huge funding shortfall for buses and trains.

Bass did commit to powering the city with 100% climate-friendly electricity by 2035, a goal set by her predecessor, Eric Garcetti. But that public promise didn’t prevent a strange incident in which the L.A. Department of Water and Power quietly seemed to back away from the ambitious 2035 timeline. The department changed course only after climate advocates and Yaroslavsky raised concerns (and after I started asking questions).

More recently, Bass responded to the Palisades and Eaton fires — which killed 30 people, and which scientists say were made worse by global warming — by suspending a crucial clean energy requirement for new homes.

Firefighters battle the Palisades fire on Jan. 7.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

As part of a wide-ranging order to help people rebuild in Pacific Palisades, Bass waived a rule that new homes be all-electric. As a result, many builders will install gas furnaces and water heaters that emit planet-warming carbon pollution. Although Bass framed the decision as a way to make rebuilding faster and cheaper, I talked with several experts who said suspending the clean energy requirement would accomplish neither goal.

Speaking of which, do you know which city employees are developing plans to help Angelenos switch from gas to climate-friendly electric appliances? The staffers at the climate emergency office whom Bass wants to fire.

“The city and the state have goals to transition to clean energy. If we eliminate this [office], it’s going to make it so much harder for the city to actually reach those goals,” said Agustin Cabrera, policy director at the social justice nonprofit Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education, or SCOPE. “And it’s just a huge red flag for [environmental justice] communities who are constantly being told that they’re not a priority.”

It’s not just the climate emergency office that Bass wants to cut.

In their letter to the budget committee, environmental groups accused Bass of taking “a chainsaw to other key departments,” including a proposal to cut 159 positions at L.A. Sanitation, which they said could increase the risk of sewage spills, like the one that dumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay in 2021.

The groups also noted that Bass would cut the planning department’s entire environmental justice team. L.A. has a long history of forcing low-income people of color to live alongside busy freeways, oil and gas drilling and other polluting industries. Hence the planning department’s environmental justice work, which the agency describes as “ensuring meaningful community participation in the planning process to promote equity.”

Apparently now that we have a budget crunch, resolving those inequities isn’t so important anymore?

If anything, Los Angeles should invest more than ever in climate and environmental justice as temperatures rise, wildfires get even worse and scientists learn more about the how unhealthy it is to breathe dirty air.

Instead, Bass’ budget cuts would tell the world that L.A. is no longer interested in being a climate leader — right as city officials advertise the Olympics. And as President Trump’s desperate efforts to support planet-warming oil and gas leave Americans — the vast majority of whom want strong climate action — desperate for leadership.

As several people have written to the City Council since Bass announced her budget proposal: “I urge the Budget and Finance Committee NOT to attempt to fix one crisis while causing another.”

ONE MORE THING

Just a reminder: We’ve been putting out a new Boiling Point podcast every Thursday! Today’s episode features a panel discussion I moderated at last week’s Society of Environmental Journalists in Tempe, Ariz. We talked about the first 100 or so days of the Trump administration — and how to keep making progress on climate.

You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. The panelists were climate scientist Emily Fischer, California state Sen. Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach), Montana-based environmental activist Anne Hedges and former federal official Nada Wolff Culver, who helped lead the Bureau of Land Management under President Biden.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.