Choose your focus

To understand how your vote affects the climate emergency, it helps to know the tangible ways that cities and counties can actually take action. Local leaders have a lot of power to make decisions and influence things such as:

• What energy we use and where we get it from
• How energy efficient our buildings are
• How much and what kind of housing we build, and where
• How much public transit we have access to, including buses, subways and light rail
• What rules businesses, including ports, airports and industrial manufacturing, have to follow to cut down on their emissions 
• How we protect against and respond to wildfires or floods 

Because so many policies address the climate in different ways, it helps to pick the areas that are most important to you and use them to scrutinize candidates’ platforms. Do they seem like they’re taking the problem seriously? Do they have many climate-friendly policies across their platform, or just one or two?

The offices that matter most on the 2024 ballot

The Board of Supervisors, City Council, and state legislature (the State Assembly and State Senate) have the biggest impact on climate policy in your neighborhood.

Your City Council can approve changes to zoning laws that would affect how much housing could be built in a neighborhood. They can push for crosswalks, protected bike lanes and other measures that make streets more walkable or bike-friendly. They also pass laws that affect where the city gets its energy from: for instance, the city councils of L.A. and Culver City and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors all voted in recent years to phase out oil drilling.

Your county supervisor has the same powers over unincorporated parts of L.A. County — that is, parts of L.A. County that aren’t part of a city, such as Altadena, Florence-Firestone, or View Park-Windsor Hills. They also sit on the board of directors for L.A. Metro, so they have a lot of say over how Metro runs and decisions such as how and how quickly Metro buses transition to renewable energy sources.

The city and county governments of L.A. already have robust climate action plans to follow, but elected leaders have to be able to implement them in an equitable way.

The State Assembly and State Senate can spur local cities and counties to take more action on climate. For instance, the state legislature passed a law that required all cities and counties to start composting programs beginning in 2022. Some cities already had them in place, but those that didn’t had to get on board because of the law.

If you don’t agree with what your city leaders are doing for the climate, or if you think cities across California need to work faster, you can focus on voting for state lawmakers who say that they will work to enact stronger laws.