The Hurdles To La’s Olympic Climate Claims

Can the Olympics be good for the climate? Probably not. But Los Angeles is trying to get as close as it can to greening the games.

Los Angeles officials are hoping their hosting of the 2028 Olympics will juice the city's transformation from a traffic- and smog-choked metropolis to something akin to “the healthiest city in America,” as former Mayor Eric Garcetti said when LA first won the bid in 2017.

"The world's watching," said LA City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who along with Mayor Karen Bass met with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, Saint-Denis Mayor Mathieu Hanotin and other French officials last week to get guidance from the hosts of this summer's games. "Political careers and reputations are on the line to really drive the change that we want to see for Los Angeles."

Hidalgo pegged her city's Olympics to a sprawling plan to reduce car dependency, build out bike lanes and boost mass transit. Bass is doing much the same. The year 2028 is peppered throughout the region’s transit plans, from the county’s e-bike contract to the Brightline high-speed rail to a multi-agency roadmap to cut transportation emissions by an additional 25 percent ahead of the games.

They've already learned some important lessons. First up is keeping their claims modest.

Paris originally touted its games as carbon-positive through the use of offsets. But two years ago it quietly changed the goal to halving the emissions from prior events. Last year, the Swiss Fairness Commission found that FIFA had engaged in greenwashing by branding the 2022 World Cup in Qatar as carbon-neutral.

“The claim of being carbon-positive backfired,” said Martin Müller, a professor of geography and sustainability at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and lead author of a Nature study that found games have become less sustainable over the past 30 years. “Organizers are now watching their language.”

The summer games on average emit between 1.5 million and 3.5 million metric tons of carbon, equivalent to the annual emissions budget of a large city under the Paris Agreement to keep global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to Müller. That’s largely due to air travel and building construction.

LA’s Olympic organizing committee has touted its plans to avoid building any new permanent venues, relying instead on stadiums like the Coliseum and the Rose Bowl.

But officials are no longer touting their initial goal of being "energy positive," or generating more energy through renewable sources and energy efficiency than the energy needed to power the games. And the committee has yet to put out its own emissions targets. “The sustainability plan is under development,” said Kim Parker Gordon, a spokesperson for LA28, the private non-profit that is the organizing body for the city’s Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The second lesson is to start early.

“The main takeaway from our time in Paris was really using our '28 Olympics as a catalyst for accelerating all the things we want to do,” said Yaroslavsky. “It makes it more achievable when we know we have a drop dead date of '28.”

Paris was unable to complete all of its transportation projects and Hidalgo has said the system “won’t be ready” in time. That would be a bigger problem for LA — which, like Paris, is not planning to provide parking at Olympic events — because of the city's sprawl.

"It’s not as big an issue for Paris," LA City Councilmember Paul Krekorian said. "You need a car in Los Angeles."

LA will also have to borrow 2,500 buses for the games to augment its existing supplies, and there’s no guarantee yet they'll all be electric. (This challenge is compounded by the fact that the city can’t get federal credits to buy from the largest electric bus maker, BYD, due to those buses being Chinese-made, said Matt Petersen, Garcetti's former sustainability czar and the CEO of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator).

“There's a real risk that if we aren't intentional, there could end up being diesel buses, which is unacceptable,” said Yaroslavsky. “And so we're really going to be relying on the federal government to step up and help us procure those buses in time.”

To that end, Bass announced Tuesday the Los Angeles region had secured nearly $900 million in federal funds for infrastructure and rail expansion in advance of the games. Some will go to LA Metro’s priority list of 15 Olympics-adjacent projects which includes station upgrades, bus-only lanes, and the Inglewood rail to SoFi Stadium.

“There’s no time to waste in strengthening our local infrastructure and transportation system to be ready to welcome the world for the Games,” she said in a statement.

Victor Goury-Laffont contributed to this report.

This report first appeared in the California Climate newsletter. Sign up today.