Clean Air

Congressman Levine has finally raised the most significant problem facing all of us in California when and if the Department of the Interior and the oil companies increase the number of oil-drilling platforms offshore. Air pollution will come to areas it has not yet poisoned and it will increase in areas where pollution already exists. Each platform releases ozone-producing oxides of nitrogen into the air from its huge diesel motors, and ocean breezes push the pollution onshore. We already have a sorry situation in the Santa Barbara Channel, where oil drilling has severely compromised the beauty and the safety of a nearby park and has visited the gray pall of smog upon the most beautiful city in California.

Just as the Department of Defense has been arrogantly exposing citizens every day to the risk of toxic contamination by its willful and secret transport of rocket fuel on the world’s busiest freeway through the country’s largest metropolitan area here in Southern California, so the federal Department of the Interior is signing away our coastal air and tourist attractions.

Thomas Hobbes, the great English conservative philosopher, wrote in his “Leviathan” that all men had certain basic rights: life, safety and air that they could breathe. Our Republican Administration does not recognize those rights, nor does it “get the government off the backs of the people” when it secretly endorses practices that compromise the health and pursuit of happiness of the citizens who elected it.

JEAN ROSENFELD

Tarzana