You may have seen that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa held a press conference more than a week ago to announce that the city will kick the coal habit. The city’s Department of Water and Power will not have any coal-generated electricity after 2025.

And he made a big deal about it. Former Vice President Al Gore was there to pat Villaraigosa on the back and former President Bill Clinton had a kudos-filled statement. There were all kinds of press releases with self-congratulatory plaudits. “Making Los Angeles the Greenest Big City in America” was the headline on one page.

But here’s a basic question no one seemed to ask: How much is this gonna cost?

I’m looking at one of the documents from the Big Announcement. It’s titled “Villaraigosa Environmental Progress Report,” and it’s impressive. There are color charts and nice photos. It’s 24 pages long and packed with data and measurable results. If you want to know the city’s progress on replacing every bulb in every street light with energy efficient light-emitting diode bulbs, for example, you’ll find that it was 36 percent completed in the 2010-11 fiscal year, and it’s to be 100 percent completed this June. If you want to know how much the municipal greenhouse gas emissions have been cut, it’s 30 percent. Water use is down 20 percent. They apparently measured every green initiative in every way possible. Except for how much any of it costs.

It’s perfectly fine to aspire to be the greenest big city, but this is also a financially stressed city that keeps flirting with bankruptcy and is unable to patch potholes or fix sidewalks that are so bizarrely buckled they look like concrete teepees. I mean, it may well be worth it to spend extra money to quickly replace every light bulb in every street light and traffic signal, but maybe citizens would like to know how much all that costs. I bet a large number would say something like, hey, all that’s great, but maybe we should spend that money improving emergency response times first.

It would be interesting for city officials to pose a question like this: Since we have limited money and have to make hard choices, would you rather have us put cool roofs on buildings and speed up light bulb replacement and fund a UCLA climate change study or have us resurface Wilshire Boulevard and get rescue vehicles to you faster?

Villaraigosa didn’t ask that question. He just went ahead and chose the first option.

As for the decision to hurry up and get off coal by 2025, the city was sure to give us lots of stats: 39 percent of the DWP’s electricity is generated by coal (in plants in other states, by the way), and the decision will cut carbon emissions by 59 percent. But again, there was no mention, no calculation, of how much ratepayers’ already high bills may go up as a result of this decision.

Electricity rates are a consideration for businesses, and an important one for bigger commercial and industrial companies such as manufacturers. It’s one of the costs they look at when deciding where to move.

OK, so here are some stats for city officials: In a three-year span beginning in January 2010, manufacturing jobs increased 4.5 percent nationwide but they declined 4.7 percent in Los Angeles, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data that were highlighted recently by the California Manufacturers and Technology Association. Looked at another way: When the rest of the country was gaining manufacturing jobs, Los Angeles lost 17,500 of them.

So if electricity rates go up, and well above the rates in competing cities, how many more L.A. manufacturing jobs will be lost?

Of course, in Villaraigosa’s mind, that may be a good thing. Closed plants mean even fewer emissions and less water use.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].