What's a Climate Action Plan if it Has No Teeth?

The city of Pasadena has released its draft Climate Action Plan, but how will the city achieve an 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions if the plan sets no mandates?

1 minute read

January 10, 2018, 9:00 AM PST

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


Rose Bowl

Angel DiBilio / Shutterstock

Steve Scauzillo reports on the Pasadena California's new draft Climate Action Plan, released at the end of December and mandated by state law.

The summary Scauzillo provides of the city's draft Climate Action includes an inherent critique of the process. That is, that the Climate Action Plan doesn't actually mandate any of the prescribed actions toward cutting carbon emissions.

In other words, the 101-page action plan [prd] released on Dec. 28 is more of a loosely written set of goals containing 27 broad measures. Take this one, for example, known as measure No. T-2.1: “Enhance safe, reliable, and seamless transit services.”

The article goes on to provide an overview of Pasadena's draft Climate Action Plan, including a list of it's main recommendations, a record of the city's recent emissions reduction successes, and the goals for the future set out by the draft plan. Scauzillo focuses extra attention to the transit and renewable energy portion of the plans. 

Sunday, January 7, 2018 in Pasadena Star-News

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