Rocio Gomez prepares to take off on a Blue Bike during a bike helmet giveaway in 2023. A $50 million carbon emissions reduction grant from EPA announced Monday, July 22, 2024, will include $11.8 million to expand Blue Bike bikesharing in New Orleans.
The city of has been awarded nearly $50 million for programs aimed at reducing by as much as 38,000 metric tons over the next five years, including an expansion of and , commercial and city building energy conservation programs, and residential solar panel installations, the federal announced Monday. The New Orleans grant was one of 25 nationwide totaling $4.3 billion, according to EPA, and could result in reducing greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 971 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent by 2050, about the same amount emitted by 5 million homes over 25 years, the agency said.
The New Orleans money will fund seven projects aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the primary greenhouse gas, and four worker training programs designed to support the projects: The projects align with the city's Climate Action Plan and the Regional Planning Commission's Southeastern Louisiana Priority Climate Action Plan, and if they continue through 2050, would remove 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions from the atmosphere. "This grant represents a significant investment in the health and resilience of our city and reaffirms our commitment to environmental stewardship and social equity," Mayor LaToya Cantrell said in a statement. Greg Nichols, New Orleans' deputy chief resilience officer, called it “the city’s largest ever investment in climate action.
" Nichols said it would likely take about a year to get each of the grant programs operating, and information about how to apply for E-bike rebates, solar installation subsidies, or participation in the commercial building benchmarking program won’t be available until then. Where individual grants are aimed at “historically underserved areas,” the city is using the Biden Administration’s Justice40 program definition: “those that are historically marginalized and overburdened by pollution and underinvestment in housing, transportation, water and wastewater infrastructure, and health care.” Biden’s Justice40 executive order mandates that at least 40% of benefits of certain federal investments, including these projects funded under the Inflation Reduction Act, must flow to disadvantaged communities.
A White House Office of Management and Budget , based on Census tract information, includes portions of Riverbend, Midtown, Uptown, Gentilly, the Upper and Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans East and Algiers. The seven new miles of protected bikeways will be identified based on the city’s Moving New Orleans Bikes plan, which was developed after a series of open houses attended by more than 300 residents. They’re likely already identified among proposed lanes listed on the 2020 .
Meetings will be held in neighborhoods identified for the new lanes, and their construction will be followed by household surveys to determine community satisfaction with the work, city officials said. The funding for creating a system to benchmark efforts by commercial properties to reduce emissions through energy conservation efforts is patterned after other national efforts developed by building standards coalitions, Nichols said. The money will largely support staff in the city’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability, including the purchase of software that would be used by building owners to report their energy use to the city.
It also would support legislation expected to be considered by the City Council in the future to require such reporting by commercial buildings, similar to ordinances adopted in other cities, Nichols said. The program is designed to anticipate national commercial building energy performance standards being adopted by Congress in the future as part of the nation’s broader efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he said. “The act of commercial buildings benchmarking their usage alone now has been shown to reduce emissions by about 2% annually,” Nicholls said.
The municipal building decarbonization program follows efforts by the city begun in 2015 to make its buildings more sustainable. City building retrofits will include upgrades in energy-efficient lighting, heating and air conditioning systems. The reforestation program will involve both the Department of Parks and Parkways and Sustaining Our Urban Landscape, or SOUL, and will be used to expand a that received $8 million from the U.
S. Department of Agriculture in 2023. The increased funding of installations will include two existing local installers, one aimed at developing installations in leased housing and the other at supplying more traditional purchase-and-install projects.
The grant “will enable New Orleans to implement critical greenhouse gas reduction measures, reinforcing our commitment to sustainability and the well-being of all Louisianans,” U.S. Rep.
Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, said in a statement. “It will also help significantly reduce the city's carbon footprint, promote economic and green job growth, and create a healthier environment.”.
