Stalling on Smog

The first government agency with a mission of cleaning up Southern California’s air had to fight its way through a wall of business opposition just to get started. No matter how much the agencies change, that wall stays about the same.

The early agencies squared their shoulders, got the public behind them and made smog control not only possible but also respectable. But for too many years after that the key word in the name South Coast Air Quality Management District was coast , as in coasting . Last year, under pressure from the federal Environmental Protection Agency and others, the district agreed to try harder. It hired a new director, persuaded the Legislature to give it more authority, drew up a master plan of attack and set out to make up for the time that it had lost haggling with pollution lawyers over pounds of smog instead of laying a foundation for going after it by the ton.

Nobody, particularly corporate pollution experts, complained in those sleepy days that the agency was not doing enough to plan ahead and to educate the public. But now they want the public to know that the district is moving too fast, probably in the wrong direction, and without letting the public in on the problem. Even some people who are supposedly rooting for the district to clean up the air talk of the reorganized agency as a collection of zealots who will not listen to reason.

Enough of this spilled out in a public meeting last week to make two points obvious. Business is lining up to stall for as long as possible any attack on smog that is made with spunk and conviction. Unless it is careful, the smog district could play into the hands of businesses like utilities and refineries that benefit financially every month they can stave off tougher pollution controls. The air-quality district--and its executive officer, James M. Lents--has put together a plan that includes ruling heavy trucks off freeways at rush hour, increasing the incentives for car-pooling in hopes of reducing peak-hour traffic by 25%, and then going after a broad range of pollution sources. Those would range from still tighter pollution controls on power-plant smokestacks to a ban on gasoline-powered lawn mowers.

Some industry spokesmen now appear on the scene, arguing for delays while alternative clean-air strategies are run through computer models to see whether there is a less expensive and less intrusive way to clean up the air.

We have no quarrel with playing with alternative strategies on a computer, but nobody has yet made a case for doing nothing else until the alternatives either prove themselves or fall by the wayside. The district is, after all, starting out on a 20-year schedule toward air that will be clean enough for Southern California to grow in. It cannot possibly do the sort of damage that business worries about in the first couple of years of that program.

At the same time, the district must be wary of risking a backlash against its plan that for the first time relies on some change in peoples’ habits instead of almost entirely on control technology--the centerpiece of the fight on smog for 40 years.

The district must promote the big picture of a growing Southern California that will not be able to breathe its own air for more than a few years if everybody keeps going it alone--doing what is comfortable and familiar. It must use every ally that it can find in making certain that Southern California gets that message. But it must at the same time keep moving ahead with the important elements of its master plan.