Comments
KORETZ POV - As one of the Councilmembers who originally pushed for the creation of a Ratepayer Advocate, I found the man eventually hired, Fred Pickel, to be worthless in that position at his best, and hugely harmful at his worst. That is why I was the one Councilmember who strongly opposed his re-appointment and am thrilled that he is retiring.
His worthlessness was in his routine handling of the job. He would almost always find that whatever DWP was doing was just wonderful after his analysis. If that was always true, what did we need a Ratepayer Advocate for, much less an Office of Public Accountability to support him? If that is really all such a position can do, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea, and we should save ratepayers his $300K salary as well as the cost of his staff and eliminate the department.
However, his only stand-out recommendations have been advocating for environmental harm, something we cannot afford at this point in climate history.
Fred Pickel
As we see the increasingly terrible impacts of the climate destabilization year after year, a scientific consensus says we have less than six years to make dramatic progress in reducing emissions or reach a point of no return. We seem to be on the precipice of electing a president who, through his proposed Project 2025, wants to gut environmental progress and make things even worse. Our greatest hope is to make dramatic progress through the leadership of cities. And Los Angeles is the highly influential global city that must continue to lead the way by example. That was why I created the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, to push the City to do more and faster.
Pickel’s two most notable recommendations have been to do the opposite. He was the leading opponent to a feed-in tariff, to make solar rooftops more financially achievable for businesses, a position I helped to convince the DWP Board to oppose.
Now, Pickel is advocating for his worst position ever—to move the date back for the City to achieve 100% clean energy by 2035 to an unhelpful 2045, wasting the progress and financial investment we made through years of work and scenario modeling with NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). We need to not only achieve our clean energy goal by 2035, but we need to tout it broadly and loudly so that thousands of other cities across the country and the world follow suit. And even then, we may have missed the global turning point. We really should be pulling out the stops to shorten the deadline to 2030.
If we and others put off major climate action until 2045, as Pickel suggests, it may not be my grandchildren that see steeply worsening extreme heat, constant massive forest fires, ever more devastating hurricanes and terrible floods making human life unsustainable on this planet—my daughter and her husband could see this destruction in their lifetimes, as well as the accompanying costs. The insurance industry is already in serious jeopardy trying to meet the cost of disaster clean up today.
Although I believe Pickel’s numbers are exaggerated, even if our electric bills increased by over 7%, wouldn’t that be worth it to improve our chances of survival? Of course, Pickel doesn’t take that into account. He even admits he doesn’t take into account the impacts on the planet or the increased healthcare and insurance costs to Angelenos of greater heat and pollution and disasters.
In his report, Pickel quotes that great visionary Dwight Eisenhower, who said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” I would argue that it is Pickel who is worthless, and our carbon neutrality 2035 planning is everything. We must plan to halt the worst-case scenario and stop nickel-and-diming our collective future. Investing in climate mitigation now is cheaper than dealing with the consequences of a dark future of unchecked climate destabilization later. My child and yours are counting on us to provide the necessary leadership their secure future deserves.
His retirement alone won’t get us out of this Pickel. But it most certainly will help.
(Paul Koretz is a former LA City Councilmember, CA State Assemblymember and West Hollywood Mayor and City Councilmember.)
