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[ LOS ANGELES ](https://mail.citywatchla.com/los-angeles)
# The Emperor Still Has No Clothes: Eric the ‘Green’ is NOT an Environmentalist
February 13 2020
Written by Kenneth S. Alpern.
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**ALPERN AT LARGE**--Still looking for your next gig, huh, Eric? Senator? County Supervisor? Governor? Lobbyist?
Yep, count me in as someone who remembered you in your first term after voting you in, hoping you'd balance the moneyed interests and the citizenry...and your latest "Green New Deal" still is just the latest in [Eric the Empty Suit](https://www.lamayor.org/sites/g/files/wph446/f/page/file/20200210ExecutiveDirective25.pdf) trying to show he stands for something.
Californians love the environment, and love putting money behind principle, and love to see their tax dollars get wisely spent.
But you're not an environmentalist, and the only "green" you've truly embraced is that involving Dead Presidents.
You aren't popular, and the last time you brokered a City/LAUSD funding measure, the voters slammed it dead.
Fortunately, the City allows a lot of backroom deals, so your photo-op of LA's Green New deal with a "diverse" coalition is cute but it forgets one group of voters:
THE TAXPAYERS.
For those of us who remember the happier days of when rail transit, the environmental movement, and affordable housing was in the hands of the grassroots (and with folks like Bill Rosendahl who never forgot them), it's a sad day to see how it's now all top-down with lots of publicly-funded money going to interests who don't want to fix a problem...but just want to make money off of it.
Eric the Green is NO environmentalist: you favored SB 50 (and so did much of the City Council you work with, to be fair), which is as UN-environmentalist as it gets.
Eric the Green is NO environmentalist: you've let homelessness become a growth industry to be profited off of by special interests, rather than a mental illness/public welfare nightmare that threatens to turn L.A. into a public health and crime-plagued nightmare.
Eric the Green is NO environmentalist: we should be thrilled that $1.3 billion to get the [Westside Subway](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-11/metro-purple-line-westside-subway-federal-funding?utm_source=Essential+California&utm_campaign=dcecb58d0c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_02_12_01_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6e35f7f85b-dcecb58d0c-86403681) to and beyond the 405 freeway, but most of us are just wondering how terrible the Westside will be as Eric the Emperor turns the Westside into one big Downtown because of it.
Eric the Green is NO environmentalist: traffic and pedestrian deaths are up, road quality is down, and the quality of our air and water is as suspect as it’s ever been.
Yet not all of us are young and/or naive and/or plagued with a conflict of interest, Emperor Eric.
Some of us know what real environmentalism is, and what a real economist proclaims and urges, and what green space, more trees, and proper management of Planning to avoid Third World-style overpopulation means in a 21st world that chooses not to forget science.
Eric the "Green", you're NO environmentalist. And unless someone in Sacramento appoints you to some office (how good is Feinstein's health, anyway?), your political career is probably ending soon.
Because when you have no clothes, political or moral or otherwise, sooner or later the citizenry gets it.
*(CityWatch Columnist, Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D, is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties, and is a proud husband and father to two cherished children and a wonderful wife. He was (termed out) also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Outreach Committee, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee and Vice-Chair of its Planning Committee. He was co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chaired the nonprofit Transit Coalition and can be reached at* . *He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at* [*www.fogl.us*](http://www.fogl.us/)*. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)*
*-cw*
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