Trying Harder on Smog
Southern California’s leading clean-air team could not have gotten a faster start on the tough new phase of their drive against smog if they had been shot out of a circus cannon. In a recent rare day on which the politics and technology all went its way, the team ordered more pollution out of the skies than in any single sweep since the 1970s.
It was a day to remember, partly because new rules adopted by the South Coast Air Quality Management District will mean major reductions in pollution and partly because there are not many days like that in the smog-fighting business.
While an overflow crowd--made up largely of furniture manufacturers--watched from a nearby room on closed-circuit television, the board ordered the use of new techniques for painting furniture that will take 22 tons of hydrocarbons out of Southern California air per day. The combined output of hydrocarbons, which mix with nitrogen dioxides in bright sunlight to form smog, from all oil refineries in the Los Angeles area is 16 tons.
The politics worked right down to board Chairman Norton Younglove’s keeping a quorum at work until long after the normal quitting time when earlier efforts at tough rules might have collapsed because the strong anti-smog votes would have been en route home for dinner.
At the risk of spoiling the fun, it has to be said that cleaning up the air has a great deal in common with cleaning up broken pottery from a tile floor. The big pieces are easy, but the slivers and shards take forever. Last week’s day of work is cause for celebration primarily as a sign of new determination to find the shards, and not because the endof the fight against smog is anywhere in sight.
This fall the district will adopt a new five-year plan designed to move the region closer to clean air by changing the way Southern California lives from mowing lawns to commuting to work. After the plan is adopted, it will take 123 rule-adopting sessions like last week’s to put it into action.
A rule to require the use of methanol as an alternative to gasoline in automobile fleets, including car-rental fleets, will come later in the fall. Tighter rules will be required for power-plant boilers and other industrial heat processes to keep squeezing down nitrogen oxides.
But these are skirmishes. The war itself may come down to the slivers of pollution--the 15 million automobiles in Southern California that can make or break an effort to clean up the air.
Changing the way Southern Californians use their autos may come down to major decisions about planning future growth so that new housing is built closer to jobs or new jobs are built closer to housing. Intervention in economic decision-making on that scale will be an abrupt change from generations of decision-making, not only about where to build but how to use automobiles to make decisions about where to live or work come out even.
That will require bringing more Southern Californians into decision-making than couldbe accommodated in an overflow building with closed-circuit television. The most hopeful signin that respect is the determination to make the clean-air campaign work that was so evident at the recent dramatic and important board meeting.
