Clean Air: It Just Might Work

California’s clean-air campaign, which spends a lot of time under siege, had two days last week that made it look as if it all might work.

One of the good days was more a morale boost for the people in charge of pollution controls than the kind of day that actually makes smog go away. But the other was the announcement of an important early test of whether the state has the patience for a new approach to cleaning up pollution. For more than 20 years, it has been able to make big gains by controlling major polluters--power plants, refineries and the like. Now it must go after large numbers of smaller sources. It must trap pollution by the handful, not by the truckload.

The first good day was Monday when guests of the State and Los Angeles Area Chambers of Commerce showed up to hear a discussion of what the invitation called “Draconian clean-up measures” being proposed to clear away Southern California smog. The Los Angeles Chamber says it agrees with the goals of clean air but is sharply critical of what the South Coast Air Quality Management District says will have to be done in the future to reach those goals. With its mention of possible economic decay and vanishing jobs, the invitation seemed to promise a program that would hang Southern California’s bold new 20-year cleanup plan on the wall and take a bull whip to it.

The guests, instead, got a group of panelists that amounted to a fan club for clean air. Before they spoke, Hitachi Ltd., one of the conference sponsors, released the results of a poll of Los Angeles residents, 58% of whom said they had seriously considered moving out to get away from the smog. Nearly half said that major industry is most responsible for paying for clean air. Nearly half also said they would be willing to car pool or take mass transit to help wipe away smog.

The audience heard a state senator call for a ban on trucks at rush hour. A planner said that regional government capable of handling environmental, social and economic problems as parts of an inseparable package was essential but warned that nothing would work until people trusted government again. An oil executive said that his industry waited too long to take clean air seriously and had some catching up to do. And so it went.

The outcome might mean nothing more than that the sponsors failed to invite the right speakers. We choose to believe it demonstrates that the effort to get clean air has as much support as efforts to get clean water and that the question is not whether but how the goal is reached.

The other big day involved a move by the state Air Resources Board to require manufacturers to make deep cuts in the ingredients of smog that escape into the air every day from deodorant spray cans. Regulating something as seemingly harmless and personal as a spray can is something new for most Californians. It probably will take time for it to sink in that the total pollution from the cans that seem too small to matter is about the same amount that escapes into the air every day from an oil refinery. How people react in the end will have a lot to do with whether Southern California can change the fact that it has the dirtiest air in the nation, because it is just such cuts by the handful that will be the pattern of the future.