The Smog Showdown Still to Come

The version of the Clean Air Act that crawled from the political rubble in the U.S. Senate this week would give much of the nation a better tool for cracking down on smog. But Southern California, with the dirtiest air in America, is not the rest of the nation, which is why the bill is not strong enough in one key area where we most need help.

After one of the most grueling battles over any issue in recent history--and the one that produced all the rubble--the Senate has cleared substantially tighter anti-pollution rules. But the House version, tougher in some places and weaker in others, will be different. So, many battles will be fought all over again in conference.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 has always controlled pollution from automobile tailpipes and, in theory, toxic emissions from industrial smokestacks. The Senate plan tightens up both, but it breaks new ground on acid rain and in prodding oil industry chemists to produce cleaner-burning fuels.

The acid-rain provisions represent a major break mostly for Canada and the northeastern United States, where forests and lakes are slowly dying in acid baths that result mainly from pollution caused by coal-burning power plants. The South Coast Air Quality Management District wants to go even further than the Senate in developing cleaner fuels, but that is not the most serious flaw in the bill as Southern Californians see it.

What bothers California’s regulators, who will have to crack down harder than other states to meet air standards, is the disappearance of what the smog specialists call the “federal presence” clause. For 20 years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been required by law to enforce smog laws itself in any region that refuses to do enough to meet clean-air standards. That has never happened. But one reason it has not is that regulators could threaten to use it against violators when the smog got too thick.

The EPA tried for years to shirk the responsibility and finally succeeded in getting rid of the federal presence clause in the Senate version. For state and local regulators, that clause is like having a heavyweight boxer walk with you through a tough neighborhood--it gives you confidence that somebody will back you up. The House so far agrees with the regulators that the clause must be maintained. So Washington’s clean-air wars are not even half over.