Los Angeles mayor proposes eliminating climate change office, progressives go nuts

Critics are enraged that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is looking to shutter climate change offices as the city faces a $1 billion shortfall.

Bass, a staunch ally of the progressive left, is taking heat from her own side for apparently turning her back on the imminent threat that is climate change in exchange for balancing the city’s out-of-whack budget. One of the sacrifices the new budget makes is eliminating the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office (CEMO) and shrinking the Office of Petroleum and Natural Gas. This could result in the cutting of the head of CEMO, chief heat officer Marta Segura, as well as the elimination of eight positions across the two offices. Overall, the move would save the city around $950,000, with a whopping $750,000 of that coming from the CEMO cuts.

Because LA is a bastion of progressive ideals, the thought of not throwing endless money at climate change upset locals. An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times claims that “climate change is cooking Los Angeles” and questions whether Bass even cares.

“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,” the writer said, advising City Councilmembers to “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,” the writer, a climate columnist, continued. “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.”

“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,’” another section of the piece reads.

The writer goes on to accuse Bass of downplaying “the dangers of heat, saying that older folks dying in their homes has ‘historically been a problem in Chicago’ but not Los Angeles.”

It remains to be seen if the proposed budget will be adopted, or if LA is so deep down the climate change rabbit hole that they refuse to approve anything that cuts CEMO and other environmental resources.

Writer/Columnist

Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to BizPac Review.

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