It’s a Lot Better Than Big Brother : Harnessing air pollution without tears or fears

Smog is smog and pollution is pollution but that is just about the entire universe of simplicity in the fine art, but fiendishly complex science, of air-pollution control. Just ask James Lents, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Or ask the worried business community, which is divided among itself over the AQMD’s proposed “regional clean-air incentives market regulation.”

Stay with us, the issue gets more interesting; the outcome affects the air you breathe.

THE IDEA: RECLAIM, as the program is cutely acronymed, is an attempt to reduce pollution with imagination rather than bureaucracy. Instead of having AQMD staffers issue rulings and bark orders at businesses, telling them what to do and how to do it, RECLAIM would achieve the same goal--a steady, systematic, year-by-year reduction in air pollution. AQMD would set an overall pollution-reduction goal, but allow some companies to do more of it one year, others more the next--and to let them find their own ways of meeting the overall area goal. (Indeed, companies that achieved more pollution reduction than required would earn financial credits that they could then sell to other firms that were behind schedule and couldn’t meet the immediate goal.)

When the basic concept was first broached more than two years ago, many area businesses applauded. By and large they had grown increasingly frustrated with AQMD.

THE HITCH: The RECLAIM approach proposes to leave the decision-making with the individual firms, and minimize the top-down bureaucracy. However, as details of the AQMD’s market-based pollution-control program became known, they struck some businesses as not a whole lot less Kafkaesque than the old system--and about as business-friendly as V. I. Lenin. Enough business people balked that for a moment it looked as if the whole thing was dead.

But then wiser heads got involved, including the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce, L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan and Councilman Marvin Braude. Now the specifics are under serious renegotiation. The AQMD, which did not want to proceed without the support of the L.A. chamber, has agreed to work with business leaders to, among other things, improve the enforcement provisions, reduce the amount and complexity of all the monitoring, simplify record-keeping and reporting (that is, the red tape) and modify technical definitions.

AQMD’s willingness to meet the business community more than halfway is the key to success of this remarkably innovative program. At stake is the future of air-pollution control. If RECLAIM doesn’t work, or is stillborn, what’s the alternative besides the dreaded Big Brother?