Cleaner Air Worth the Cost
Blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court from pushing polluting trucks and buses off the roads, California is forging ahead with a plan to buy its way to clearer skies. Credit Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s coalition-building powers for moving the smog-cutting initiative forward, and the Legislature for coming up with the best ideas for funding it.
Old clunkers, trucks and cars alike, are only 5% of the registered vehicles but account for half of vehicular air pollution. Targeting old vehicles is one of the most efficient ways to reduce smog, which has been thickening again in the Los Angeles area after years of better air quality. Yet last week, the U.S. Supreme Court axed a rule by the South Coast Air Quality Management District that required fleet operators to choose cleaner vehicles when they replaced old diesel trucks and buses. Only federal regulators have such authority, the court ruled.
The new anti-smog initiative would help take those and other “gross polluters” off the roads by making it financially attractive to replace them with less-polluting vehicles. Safeguards are needed, though, to prevent the abuses that occurred in a similar program aimed at private cars in the 1990s. Sometimes, scam artists exploited the plan. The program, paid for mostly by the oil company Unocal, gave the company pollution credits for each car removed and little incentive to stop cheaters.
Though Schwarzenegger voiced a strong commitment to the new project, he shied away from saying how it could be funded. Getting rid of the most-polluting vehicles would cost the state up to $400 million a year. There’s talk of a voluntary car registration fee. That’s hope, not a commitment.
Lawmakers have come up with better ideas: an extra cent or two a gallon for gasoline, and a vehicle registration hike. Schwarzenegger won his job in part by promising to get rid of a vehicle fee increase instituted by Gray Davis. But the amount at issue now -- $2 a year -- isn’t worth fighting over, even on principle.
Car dealers strangely oppose even this teensy increase, even though junking old polluters would cause some new car sales. California’s gas taxes already are lower than those in 28 other states.
These very modest increases would measurably reduce smog if the program were effectively run. Smog causes asthma, especially among children, and can weaken the human immune system and worsen other health problems. Compare the price of treating an asthma patient with an extra $2 a year to own a car. Quite a deal.
