In Search for Clean Air, There’s Hope Amid the Muck

The other morning, on the way to Costa Mesa, the haze was so thick you could spoon it.

As the sun filtered through the yellowish muck, the disc jockey on the radio predicted that temperatures would top 100 degrees by noon, and first-stage smog alerts were probable just about everywhere.

“My advice,” the DJ deadpanned, “don’t breathe today.”

Despite the foul forecast, I was strangely optimistic as I weaved through traffic on my way to work. Events in recent weeks had raised the prospect of cleaner air in the first decade of the next century, beginning with President Bush’s proposal to curb smog, acid rain and toxic emissions.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District has a 20-year plan to impose tough controls on air pollution, from factories to cars, including requiring more workers to car-pool, and to encourage telecommuting.

Call it a long shot. Call it unrealistic. But as a reporter who has paid attention to environmental issues in California for several years, I take a measure of encouragement from these plans, not so much because of what they may do, but what they already have done: elevated clean air to the national political agenda.

The more talk and debate over how to clean up the air we now breathe, the better chance we have of licking the problem, or at least reversing a trend that has resulted in the dumping of several generations of chemicals and potentially dangerous toxins into the atmosphere.

It couldn’t have come at a better time. In recent weeks, the first comprehensive effort to catalogue the various chemicals polluting the atmosphere has been made available by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Orange County, despite the phenomenal growth in so-called clean, high-tech industries, was second in the state only to Los Angeles County in chemical emissions in 1987, the first year of the study.

The report showed that more than 7 million pounds of chemicals, most of which one can’t see, smell or otherwise detect, were released into the air. Some destroy the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Others are suspected carcinogens.

While a number of companies reporting such emissions in 1987 say they have sharply reduced or will end those chemical releases, officials for others say it is a trade-off in our high-tech, consumer society.

It’s easy to dismiss this latest talk of air quality as nothing new. There have been highly publicized schemes in the past to rid our skies of smog and pollution. But none has done the trick, and all the while the cost for improving the air goes up and up and up.

As someone who has called Southern California home off and on for more than three decades, I think improving the quality of life here is worth trying. Crowds have become commonplace--on the freeways, in the supermarkets, at the beaches and in the malls. Add to that an environment that is being stretched to its limits. Some environmentalists suggest we should be fearful.

I, too, am worried. At the same time, I am optimistic. Maybe, just maybe, a new attitude about the need to clean up the air is surfacing.

And as I make my way through the morning traffic, I wonder if I am doing what I can to help the situation. As someone who commutes up to 70 miles a day alone, in a four-passenger car, I know I’m not helping the clean-air movement much. I plead guilty, but consider my excuses: car-pooling is impractical in my job, and mass transit is still a vague concept in Southern California.

Yet the events of recent weeks have gotten me thinking about air quality issues, the solutions and my role. It seems others, from the White House down, are starting to do the same.