News

With greater housing density all but guaranteed in California, urban mobility and traffic congestion have become pressing public policy issues. VX News, to inform public discussion, spoke with John Rossant, CEO of CoMotion, about both the future of mobility and his upcoming CoMotionLA conference in LA November 14-16th. The latter will draw to Los Angeles some of the world’s most influential leaders and innovative companies (public & private), as well as the municipalities who are pushing the boundaries of mobility. In doing so, it will offer conference participants opportunities to meet, connect and strike deals with many of Mobility’s key stakeholders Additionally addressed at CoMotionLA will be the challenges of rewiring cities.

Following the announcement that California had been awarded 1.2 billion dollars in grant funding for hydrogen, Mayor Bass, members of the Los Angeles City Council, and POLA, hosted a conference at the Port of Los Angeles to celebrate and voice their intentions towards utilizing the grant to create a hydrogen hub, a major step forward for the region in terms of reaching zero emissions goals. The grant will help LADWP create one single platform where distributed energy resources like Electric Vehicles (EVs) and EV chargers, energy storage, solar photovoltaic systems (PV), and demand response infrastructure can be controlled, in response to grid needs. Doing so will enable LADWP to quickly rebalance the electrical system after an extreme climate event like wildfires, heatwaves or tropical storms. VX News brings you the complete transcript from the announcement, featuring comments from the Mayor, Gene Seroka, Councilmember Tim McOsker, Nancy Sutley, and Aram Benyamin.

Just a day after announcing that the state of California is suing five of the biggest oil companies in the world for damages caused, and to be caused, for their ‘decades-long campaign of deception’ surrounding climate change, Governor Gavin Newsom also announced, via an interview with the New York Times at Climate Week NYC, his intention to sign two recently passed California climate bills, SB253 and 261. These two bills will require major companies to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, a move with national and global repercussions. The Governor also spoke at length on California’s continued commitment to a green low carbon future, as well as his view that California is where the future happens first.

As the process to begin pulling together the City of LA’s yearly budget moves forward this fall, LA’s City Council is also beginning efforts to seriously explore a Capital Infrastructure Plan (CIP), a document that provides a long-term, unified direction for investment in a city’s infrastructure. VerdeXchange News spoke with Investing in Place’ Executive Director, Jessica Meaney, on how the city’s budgeting could better address the needs of the city, improve equity and be more transparent. Meaney opines that the current way of doing things is failing to serve residents and why her organization’s work to push for a Capital Infrastructure Plan for the City of Los Angeles has been so important.

While the Port of Los Angeles’s Executive Director was in Asia and Australia this week to meet with various groups to promote trade in LA, Director Gene Seroka was interviewed by Bloomberg Asia’s Heslinda Amin and David Ingles to discuss where the Port stands at the midpoint of the year and just before its peak season. Based on the high inventory levels and the movement of some cargo to other ports around the country, Seroka anticipates a lower than usual peak season.

During the previous three years of drought, California managed to reduce water consumption by 7 percent; still not achieving  Go

TPR shares this op-ed by former member and board president of the Southern California Rapid Transportation District (RTD) and MTA board, Nick Patsaouras, who outlines the historic and political origins of LA Metro’s policing contracts in the 1990s and subsequent degradation of security on the system. Highlighting the work of former MTA Police Chief Sharon Papa, Patsaouras highlights the necessity of having consistent, dedicated personnel specifically hired, trained, and deployed to work in and address crime, security, and quality of life challenges on LA’s transit system.

With another $4 billion from the Biden administration & Congress on its way to electrify and cut emissions at our nation’s ports, the federal government is continuing to demonstrate the need for modernization and innovation of our maritime infrastructure.

In April of the year, the EU adopted reforms and new targets for its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to expand the scope of the market-based program that is central to the EU’s decarbonization strategy and update targets aimed at achieving 62% reductions in carbon emissions by 2030. VX presents this timely point/counterpoint on emissions trading as a ‘tool in the toolbox’ for incentivizing carbon emissions reduction.