With a new Executive Directive issued by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the City of Los Angeles has become the latest California municipality to make a plan to decarbonize its municipal building stock. 

Under the recently unveiled Executive Directive No. 25, L.A.'s Green New Deal: Leading By Example vision, the city will, among other broad efforts aimed at bringing environmental sustainability and economic and social justice initiatives to the fore, "ensure that all new municipally-owned buildings or major renovations be designed to reach carbon neutrality by 2030," according to the memo's text. 

In addition, the directive will make the city the first in the state to adopt the guidelines of the Buy Clean California Act, a measure that indexes and rates on the embodied carbon of building materials for new building projects and renovations. The move aligns "procurement decisions for steel, flat glass, and mineral wool using Sate of California-adopted Global Warming Potential limits" while also examining "additional carbon intensive building materials to include" in the guidelines moving forward. Other cities in the state, like the City of Berkeley, have endorsed the Buy Clean California Act but none have formally adopted the rules as L.A. has now done. 

The move makes Los Angeles the largest city in the country to move toward all-electric municipal building strategies, a movement that kicked off last year when the City of Berkeley launched an effort to ban natural gas infrastructure in new construction there as part of a periodic code upgrade. Berkeley was quickly followed by a succession of other municipalities around the state and country, including Seattle, San Jose, and others. 

L.A.'s plan is a bit more nuanced than that and does not explicitly ban natural gas, but simply sets a goal for carbon neutrality, a vision that is difficult if not impossible to achieve without a substantial reduction in natural gas use. Garcetti's directive also annunciates policy directives for clean energy generation, water harvesting, waste reduction, and urban canopy initiatives