First Step to Clean Air

The struggle for clean air over Southern California took a turn for the better Friday.

In a strong show of support for more vigorous smog control, two agencies endorsed a plan that should make the air in their region clean enough to meet federal standards by the early 2000s.

The first vote, a lopsided 16 to 1, was by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which drafted the elements of the plan that address growth and mobility. Hours later, the governors of the South Coast Air Quality District, which will set and enforce air-pollution rules to carry out the plan’s goals, approved it by a 10 to 2 vote.

What they set in motion is a 20-year plan, but as more than 40 years of pollution-control efforts have demonstrated, the struggle for healthful air over Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties is not likely ever to end.

Nor are the tactics of 20 years from now likely to bear much resemblance to the tactics of the past. In many ways, pollution control has been what the military would call a low-intensity conflict with a few big, obvious targets--automobile tailpipes, power-plant smokestacks, oil refineries and the like.

Now, everybody who lives in Southern California is being invited to join in spreading the clean air campaign to cover dozens of polluting activities rather than just a few big ones. More precisely, everybody is being enlisted.

As Times writer Larry S. Stammer noted in a pre-vote report, the battle was spreading to cover not only power plants but also medicine cabinets, patios, lawns and garages. Eventually, rules will be enacted to prohibit barbecues that require fire starter fluids, to change the chemical composition of deodorants, to require radial tires on automobiles, to ban gasoline-powered lawn mowers and make other changes in the way Southern Californians live and pollute.

Most will be relatively minor, less annoying than mosquito bites, but the cumulative effect will extend visibility in Southern California from a present 10-mile maximum to 60 miles, and in 20 years to reduce air pollution to levels that no longer threaten human health.

The plan covers such a long period of time that the second and third stages are no more than statements of goals, because nobody knows what kind of control technology will exist by the first decade of the 21st Century. As the final draft of the plan noted, when the present generation of controls began to come on line in 1968, slide rules were still common in classrooms and laboratories where computers are now the reigning technology.

Yet, there is no sense that the designers of the plan are winging it, because there are enough serious proposals for which technology already exists to give the document a sense of purpose and the district several years of hard work.

More ride sharing will be required, and there is no mystery about technology there. The mobility and land-use planning elements of the program will focus on major efforts to reduce the need for travel by getting people situated closer to where they work, or getting more jobs closer to where they live.

The plan has been five years in the making, the most sweeping proposal ever drafted, anywhere, for fighting air pollution. It was a noble effort, but nobody knows better than the district and its staff that it is no more than the end of the beginning of something grand for Southern California skies and the health of its people.