Smog Title Is All Yours, Houston, and Welcome to It

Houston, you have a problem.

Last year’s numbers were no fluke. For two years running now, Houston has breathed in worse air than Southern California.

By the end of this month, Los Angeles will almost certainly have handed over the title, the sash and the crown to the new smog capital of America, Miss Houston.

Oh, it’s grand, it is, being on this side of the punch line for a change.

If L.A.’s smog was great comic material, its solutions were even funnier: Getta load of L.A., where you can’t paint your kid’s treehouse with certain oil-based paints. Where you can’t burn stuff outdoors, and you have to use specially formulated lighter fluid and self-starting charcoal to fire up the barbecue grill. Where the bakeries can’t pump the scent of fresh-baked bread into the air.

Turns out those wacky Southern Californians, those spoilsports on surfboards, that no-smoking sprout crowd, had a point after all. Houston’s eight-county pollution zone has an inkling why four Southern California counties have all those hilarious regulations:

Because opening up a quart of some oil-based paint was like opening up your own private backyard smog factory. Because lighter fluid alone accounted for about 2 tons of pollution, and in prime summer barbecuing season, 4 tons. Because the perfume of fresh-baked bread floats on the wings of ethyl alcohol, which created 4 tons of organic junk every day, as much as a medium-sized oil refinery, of which Houston may have more than it does bakeries.

To get a grip on America’s worst ozone--the stuff you can’t see by itself but that is one of smog’s three chief ingredients--Houston is in for what we out here like to call some lifestyle changes:

Its hard-hat brigades may not be able to fire up their bulldozers until after lunch. The Saturday morning power-mower crowd may have to wait until Saturday afternoon. The suburbs blame the urbs and the refineries blame the cars. Worse, after giving up Texas’ divine right to drink and drive in 1987, Houston drivers may soon have to start holding it to 55 on the freeway.

Somebody inclined to believe in karma and all that California hoo-ha might almost get to thinking that when Houston got the pro football expansion team that L.A. was angling for, it got the L.A. air to go along with it.

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Barry Wallerstein is not the kind of man who would say this, so I will:

Houston called him in the way Standard Oil would invite Red Adair--to help with a big, messy emergency.

Wallerstein is the executive director of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and three weeks ago he went to Houston to teach a crash course--process and PR, education, local vs. state regulations, the Cliff’s Notes versions of L.A.’s half-century war on the Smog Monster.

“When I was riding to the hotel from the airport,” he recollected, “the taxicab had on an NPR station in Houston, and the lieutenant governor--in Texas it’s the lieutenant governor who sets the legislative agenda--was saying that his No. 1 legislative priority for the year was air quality.”

Has any California governor, has any mayor of Los Angeles ever said such a thing?

Texans, Wallerstein surmises, are “so shocked that they’ve had higher ozone levels than Los Angeles that the public understands the issue quite well. Otherwise why would the lieutenant governor put this at the top of his list?”

What L.A. has spent 50 years fixing, Houston has to do in two. Its plan must be down on paper by December, and up and running in 2002, to obey the federal Clean Air Act of 1990, a law championed and signed by President George Bush, whose son is the present governor of Texas and the Republican candidate to get his father’s old job.

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OK, everyone, all together now: We’re Number Two!

Some blue-ribbon titles, some gold-medal rankings California would just as soon pass along. In recent years the nation’s richest and most populous state has come in second to Texas in prison population, licensed gun dealers and people without health insurance . . . second to Mississippi in the proportion of children living in poverty . . . second to New York in lowest rates of home ownership.

And now, two years without so much as a first-

stage smog alert. Take notes, Houston, lest one day y’all find you no longer live in the Lone Star State, but the Lone Lung State.

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Columnist Patt Morrison writes today for the vacationing Al Martinez. Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.