California’s Smog Story Is Tale of 2 States

When it comes to smog, California is increasingly displaying a split personality.

Though air pollution has been in steady retreat in the state’s coastal urban areas, it remains a stubborn menace in fast-growing and more conservative inland regions.

The reasons are varied. Building booms in the desert kick up a lot of dust. The boosterish politics of growing communities are often hostile to stringent regulations.

Moreover, California’s prevailing winds blow from west to east, compounding home-grown inland emissions with smog that migrates from the coast. At the same time, political shifts in Sacramento have weakened support for broad clean-air policies.

In the San Joaquin Valley, progress against smog is so lackluster that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last month reclassified the sprawling mix of farms and suburbs as “severely polluted,” a designation meant to kick-start more aggressive control measures. Environmentalists filed a lawsuit Thursday against the EPA to speed up enforcement of regulations in the valley.

The valley experiences more smoggy days than Los Angeles and New York City combined. While the area’s air quality is somewhat better than a decade ago, Sequoia National Park, which is immediately downwind, now has the most polluted skies of any national park in the country.

Local officials lay the blame on pollution drifting in from the Bay Area, where recent growth has partly reversed past progress in cleaning up the air. But other air-quality officials and environmentalists blame the EPA and the San Joaquin Valley Air Quality Management District for being soft on pollution.

To the south, in the Coachella Valley, careless developers and lax enforcement of dust controls, combined with dry weather, helped reverse the trend toward clean air and send concentrations of airborne particles soaring. Cars grind dust into tiny particles that easily lodge in the lungs and have been linked to respiratory illness.

Some of the nation’s toughest dust-control measures were prescribed there in the early 1990s and, in fact, the Coachella Valley achieved federal standards for particles. But growth overtook the gains, and now officials are playing catch-up.

“Developers did not implement dust controls, and the inspectors got a little lax once we attained the standard,” said S. Roy Wilson, a Riverside County representative on the South Coast Air Quality Management District board.

In the southeastern corner of the state, some of the nation’s worst haze plagues the Imperial Valley. Environmentalists and local residents blame dust, pesticides and diesel exhaust from farms and machinery. But the EPA recently spared U.S. agriculture from stringent new cleanup measures by fixing the blame on Mexican border towns.

The fight against smog in those areas resembles the early years in the campaign for clean air in Los Angeles. Regulatory programs are relatively young and kept in check by industry pressure in the absence of vocal citizen opposition.

“They are new to this, and they are slower to pick it up,” said Jim Boyd, chief of staff for the state Resources Agency and former executive officer of the state Air Resources Board. “Unlike Los Angeles, with 50 years of experience at this, the politics are more conservative and there are not the kinds of environmental movements you see in other places.

“There were far more clean-air champions in the Legislature in the past,” Boyd said. “Today I don’t see as much interest in regulatory intrusion. There’s a lot of people who are new in the Legislature, and they seem to think California has a great program, and they don’t need to dirty their hands with it.”

Demographic changes, too, have reshaped debate in Sacramento on environmental issues. One-third of Californians are Latino, and their clout is felt in the state capital with the ascendancy of the Latino Legislative Caucus. Although health and environment are priorities for the caucus, air-quality concerns are more narrowly focused.

“The politics on air pollution has changed a great deal over the last decade,” said Kip Lipper, consultant to the state Senate Environmental Quality committee.

There are fewer strategies aimed at promoting regionwide cleanups, Lipper said.

“For the people who advocate on air-quality issues in the Legislature, there’s a distinct Latino and children’s health focus and concern about environmental justice. The traditional approach to reducing air pollution is not as much in the forefront.”

The far-flung inland valleys are the fastest-growing regions of the state, much as Los Angeles was a generation ago. That means they must reckon with pollutants blowing in from big cities as well as a surge of home-grown emissions.

“They tend to view [air pollution] as other people’s smog falling on them over which local people have relatively little political clout, but nobody takes as much time to look at the sources in those areas, so there’s not as much advocacy to clean them up,” said Ward Elliott, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Each day, about 1,100 people are added to California’s growing population of 34 million. Many of them will buy sport utility vehicles or motor homes, both big polluters. More smoke-spewing ships will dock at Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors to bring them DVD players and soccer shoes.

They will paint kitchens and spray underarm deodorant, releasing a spritz of pollution with each application. They will get stuck in traffic on the way to work, adding to tailpipe exhaust. At work, their new jobs require new power plants to keep them running.

In contrast to the inland area, populous coastal cities have posted impressive gains in fighting smog, despite having far more sources of pollution.

San Diego and Santa Barbara counties, ranked among the nation’s severely polluted communities several years ago, now meet the federal health-based limit for ozone, a lung irritant and one of the main ingredients of smog. Ventura County and the Bay Area expect to attain that important milestone in the next few years.

Even in the smoggy Los Angeles region, days of unhealthful ozone--a colorless gas--are down by 75% and peak concentrations of it have fallen by two-thirds in 15 years.

This year, the Los Angeles Basin reclaimed the national ozone crown from Houston, but, ironically, during a record clean year across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

More reductions are on the horizon for the region as new controls kick in for automobile tailpipes and diesel trucks and buses. Vehicles account for about 70% of the smog-forming emissions in California.

“Emissions are going down every year,” said Joel Schwartz, senior scientist for the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. “Every day, older cars are replaced with newer vehicles. The air is going to get cleaner even if we did nothing else, just counting the regulations that are already on the books. The war on smog has been an amazing success.”

Yet, the campaign for clean air still faces serious challenges along the coast.

After years of progress, the Bay Area recently stumbled on the path to clean air when a surge of growth unleashed pollution that knocked the region out of compliance with the federal ozone standard. Under a revised cleanup plan that state officials approved Thursday, it will take five years, millions more dollars and a 271-ton-per-day cut in emissions to return air quality to where it was in 1995.

“You think of the Bay Area as forward-thinking and urbane, but when it comes to regulating power plants, oil refineries and large industrial emissions, the Bay Area is less aggressive than Los Angeles,” one air-quality official said.

Across California, people routinely inhale air that scientists know is hazardous to human health. Every day about 61 million pounds of pollutants are spewed into the air statewide. So many chemicals fall from the sky that they crack rubber, pollute waterways and change the flora and fauna in brushy interior valleys.

Air-quality officials take pride in pointing out how well the state stacks up against federal ozone standard. Yet numerous scientific studies show that the standard does not protect people’s health and that microscopic airborne particles may be a greater hazard.

Indeed, progress against particle pollution has been modest. On a typical day, a person in Southern California inhales about 10 million such particles. About 8,800 people die prematurely each year in the Los Angeles region from particle pollution, according to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

UCLA’s annual Southern California environmental report card, which was released last month, gives California a grade of C for its effort to reduce year-round concentrations of particle pollution.

Veterans in the fight for clean air say that lately California may have been a bit too quick to pat itself on the back for clean-air accomplishments rather than to redouble efforts to keep smog at bay.

“The air has been relatively clean, so people are thinking we have licked this problem, but it could go downhill pretty quickly,” said Richard Turco, an atmospheric scientist and director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment. “Are we becoming complacent about this? I’m afraid so.”