Tough Laws Can Help Us Breathe Easier

When the U.S. Supreme Court, with a brisk shove from the Bush administration, delivered its recent decision halting a South Coast Air Quality Management District effort to curb sooty diesel trucks and buses, the message between the lines was much clearer than the legal rhetoric of Justice Antonin Scalia’s 8-1 majority opinion: Los Angeles, drop dead.

With the decision, the White House was given another tool to advance its assault on clean-air regulations. To the free market ideologues who make the decisions about the air we breathe, requiring businesses to take specific steps to lower the amount of pollutants pouring into our skies is anathema. Last year, the administration stopped implementing measures that forced old, heavily polluting power plants to retrofit their smokestacks when adding new generating capacity. In January, President Bush proposed loosening fuel economy standards by allowing automakers to bump up the weight of all their cars into categories requiring fewer miles per gallon -- meaning, among other things, more gas guzzlers polluting the air and warming the atmosphere. And, in late April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would postpone for 11 years, to 2021, the deadline for making L.A.’s air healthful to breathe.

Direct regulation may be cumbersome, and it may ruffle feathers, but it works. In 1970, when the federal Clean Air Act was passed, L.A.’s air was so foul that it exceeded ozone standards fivefold. In 1975, one year before the AQMD was formed, the city had 118 days that surpassed the ozone standard. But as regulations took hold, the skies cleared. Smog alerts plummeted from 121 in 1977 to just seven in 1996. For four years, from 1999 to mid-2003, there were no alerts.

The picture was never perfect, of course. L.A. was still shrouded in a noxious brew of ozone, carbon monoxide, particulates and nitrogen dioxide -- brown as bourbon and just as sour. And now, with regulation out of favor, smog is staging a comeback. Last year, for instance, nearly one day in five exceeded federal health standards, earning the Southland the dubious distinction, under federal law, as the only ozone “extreme nonattainment” area in the U.S.

Controls imposed on everything from cars’ tailpipes to oil refineries and from water heaters to bakery ovens were what spurred California’s progress.

The leap forward began in the mid-1970s, when California mandated lead-free gasoline. Besides the obvious benefit, especially to children, the change led to the introduction of advanced air pollution equipment on cars. Catalytic converters started stripping nitrogen oxides -- the prime building block of smog -- from automotive exhaust. As technology improved, regulations tightened, cutting emissions. A 2004 Toyota Camry is 98% cleaner than a 1970 Chevy Nova. By comparison, a typical lawn mower, which is an unregulated product, used just 45 minutes a week spews the equivalent pollution of 43 new cars driven 12,000 miles a year.

Incremental rules contributed their share of reductions too. The AQMD’s push to take volatile organic compounds out of paint, for example, knocked nearly 9% of those ozone precursors out of the air. Perchloroethylene -- a dry cleaning chemical that poisons groundwater, suffocates the lungs of laundry workers and leaves a residue of toxins on your freshly pressed shirts and blouses -- is under banning orders that will be completed in 2020. This is why all those chemical-free dry cleaners are popping up around town. Similarly, the state-imposed (and shamefully abandoned) zero-emissions vehicle mandate produced the hybrid car market.

The “fleet rule” recently struck down by the Supreme Court would have pushed things further. The AQMD wanted to require public agencies and certain private companies buying new diesel buses, trash trucks, street sweepers, airport shuttles and taxis to go for the cleanest vehicle on the market. The rule targeted a chief pollution culprit: diesel, which accounts for nearly a quarter of all the nitrogen oxide emissions (a leading cause of respiratory disorders) and 70% of the total cancer risk from air pollution in Southern California.

The measure was mild. It merely called for picking the least offensive engine from among those available, but if implemented it would have stripped 4,870 tons of emissions from the air each year. The hardship to companies affected has to be weighed against the public good. And if you talked, say, to the parent of one of the half-million California kids with asthma -- thousands of whom ride school buses each day, breathing diesel fumes that exacerbate their illness -- you might start to think that requiring companies that transport kids to abandon diesel is a good idea. So why did the U.S. Department of Justice, in its friend-of-the-court brief, urge the Supreme Court to vacate this benign yet effective regulation? Because this administration is acutely uncomfortable with government interference in business. As U.S. Solicitor Gen. Theodore B. Olson told the Supreme Court, “The twin objectives of the Clean Air Act are, one, to produce cleaner air, but two, to do it in a way that does not disrupt the national economy and the marketing of motor vehicles, which is an important part of the economy of this nation.”

Of course the administration would never say it is comfortable with smog. When the EPA announced last month its plans to extend all clean-air deadlines in California by more than a decade, it didn’t admit that this was a setback for clean air. Instead it insisted that the standards it would impose in 2021 would be stricter than if it had kept to the original deadline. But it has taken away any sense of urgency.

To reach those standards would take not only strict enforcement of current regulations but also creative new approaches to achieve the massive reductions in emissions called for. It would take regulating locomotives, ships and construction equipment, and (as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed last week) the removal of hundreds of thousands of not-so-very-old, heavier polluting cars from the road. But the kind of measures needed would take considerable political will -- including at the federal level -- that just isn’t there.

And, so, the pressure will be on to jettison the current standards with vague promises of better regulations in some distant future. The result is all too predictable. Our bad air will worsen, and long before 2021 rolls around, someone will be proposing another extension. But more time won’t solve the problem: Only tough new laws can do that.