Tarnish on Smog Controls

Southern California’s role as a pioneer in cleaning up the air is tarnishing like shiny copper in heavy smog these days. Because that probably is what it will take to get the region back on the leading edge of smog control, we can only say to the critics, pour it on.

A recent federal and state audit of the Southern California Air Quality Management District found the agency delinquent in a number of programs that must work if Los Angeles is to get significant reductions in smog. Federal officials acknowledge that the district has the nation’s toughest smog problems and cannot meet this year’s standards. But the law still requires a full-faith effort, and the audit suggests that is not happening.

Then last week came Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House subcommittee on health and the environment. He waded into the district at public hearings for losing control of the campaign for cleaner air. Citing the audit, he said that the air-quality district lets too many new ventures add new pollution without enforcing rules that require those new industries to reduce smog in existing operations. The state Air Resources Board isn’t cracking down hard enough on automobile and truck exhausts, he said.

Spokesmen for the district pleaded hardship. The number of miles driven by cars and trucks in the region has increased by 50% in 10 years, they said, so that even with the best control technology the ingredients of smog that seep from tailpipes goes up. The climate and topography of the Los Angeles air basin make it a natural smog belt. And, they said, cleaning up the air is expensive, and the federal government’s financial contribution has been “disappointing.”

The explanations are all true. But so is the danger to health that smog poses, and so probably are the latest projections that show that if SouthernCalifornia is not more aggressive about smog control the air will start getting dirtier again in something like four years and will wipe out the decades of effort that recently have produced some fairly clear days.

True, new programs are in the works and new ideas are being floated, but all will take time--some of them probably a very long time.

The Air Resources Board sees some new technology, for example, that shows promise of far more efficiency in screening pollutants out of auto and truck exhausts. Methanol, a hydrocarbon-based alcohol that burns far cleaner than gasoline, is being promoted heavily. Assemblyman Bill Leonard (R-Redlands) recently introduced legislation that would phase in, starting in 1990, pollution standards for cars and trucks so rigid that methanol might be the only fuel that could qualify. Methanol has real promise for the future, but Leonard’s bills have not even been debated, and shifting California’s network of gasoline stations to methanol would be a monumental task.

Why has the pioneering spirit gone out of efforts to control pollution? Larry L. Berg, a USC professor of political science and a member of the air quality district’s board, told Waxman that part of the reason is that policy-makers have swallowed the notion that the public will not pay for clean air and that this has turned them into the role of “brokers of economic interests rather than advocates of clean air.” But polls that he has conducted at USC, he said, show otherwise. In one, 74% of the people involved in the telephone sample said that they would be willing to pay $500 more for a car if it would burn cleaner and reduce air pollution.

If Berg is right and some breakdown in communication between public and policy-maker has turned the people in charge timid, then the more criticism the better.