L.A. Mayor Garcetti Walks Lockstep with Obama on Climate Change

In the aftermath of last week’s U.S.-China climate change agreement, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti proposed on Friday that the City of Angels host a summit next year of leaders of Chinese and American cities to promote limiting greenhouse gas emissions in both countries.

In November President Barack Obama traveled to China and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and esablished a climate change agreement between the two countries. The USA and China are among the world’s biggest economies and biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.

Garcetti joined Obama in China in an effort to continue to attract Chinese tourism and Chinese business development in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reported that the mayor also delivered a speech on urbanization and sustainability at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

“Given the president’s agreement, I think me being here this week was perfect timing,” said the green energy enthusiast. Garcetti pointed out that his being with Obama on the trip will solidify that the upcoming summit will be held in Los Angeles. “If I hadn’t been here, the mayor’s gathering could have landed anywhere, but I think L.A. is well positioned.”

According the Heritage Foundation’s Chief economist Stephen Moore, who wrote in the Daily Signal, the agreement Obama signed with China “is not a planet-saving climate-change pact. Rather, this plan represents unilateral economic disarmament by the United States as Beijing continues its quest to replace America as the globe’s economic superpower.”

Moore, a former writer on economics and public policy for the Wall Street Journal, contends that the pact will satisfy the agenda of the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency in “strangling U.S. energy security and production with new anti-carbon-dioxide mandates.”

Meanwhile, Moore points out that “Raising China’s energy prices by transitioning to highly inefficient forms of electricity production conflicts with Beijing’s strategic mission of economic pre-eminence, and adherence to the agreement is doubly unlikely to happen at a time when the Chinese economy has shown signs of slowing down.”

Moore asserts that China– and most of our other international competitors–are responding to the new climate change agreement by “dancing a little jig this week.”