May 20, 1999

Clearing the Air in the Land of Smog

L OS ANGELES -- In the summer of 1943, a year and a half after the attack on Pearl Harbor, people were still nervously scanning the skies here to see if anything was going to materialize above the horizon.

Something did.

The Japanese never came, but that summer, for the first time, the sky itself attacked. With visibility reduced to three blocks and residents reporting difficulty breathing, nausea and stinging eyes, local officials decided the mysterious cloud had resulted from a "gas attack" and blamed a nearby chemical plant. But when the plant was shut down, the cloud did not go away.

It never would.

Now when people study the skies here, it is often to measure the smog. The problem grew so much worse as the number of cars in California quadrupled over the next three decades that, in 1977, the worst year on record, smog alerts warning people with respiratory problems to stay indoors were issued on 121 days in Los Angeles.

"The air has been visible for a long time out here," said David Roe, a senior lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund, a New York-based research and advocacy group.

This meant that when state officials finally declared that the sky was falling, you could see it coming down. In the mid-1970's, birds, overcome by pollution, routinely fell from the sky above the San Diego Freeway, and the state began to devise a plan to reduce emissions without disempowering its voters or its motors.

Californians hold strong views on the environment (they are in favor of it), and even stronger views on cars (anyone trying to remove them from their vehicles will have to pry the steering wheels from their cold, dead hands). "You've got a very high majority of people who want clean air, and care about it," Mr. Roe said, "and a 99 percent majority who want to stay in their cars."

This situation accounts for the polarized debate here on how to clean up car and truck emissions, the source of two-thirds of the state's air pollution. "It's very hard to run a debate when one side says you're killing our children, and the other side says you're killing the economy," said Peter Passell, an economist at the Milken Institute, a nonprofit economic research organization in Santa Monica, Calif. "People on both sides have tended to say outrageous things and then settle for whatever they could get."

The two sides seemed to fall willingly into their roles of white-hatted environmental heroes and evil polluters, hats blackened with soot. It was customary for car makers to send an expert witness to the state's hearings on environmental regulations to announce that whatever it was, auto companies were against it.

"That's usually the position you're put in," said Kelly Brown, Ford Motor Company's director of environmental and safety engineering. "Some of the early guys from Detroit said, 'If you make that a law, and I don't have a clue how to do it, you could put me out of business.' I think they believed it. So it started in kind of a contentious way. We've learned to be more artful."

When the California Air Resources Board in Sacramento adopted new low-emission vehicle regulations in 1990, the state assumed the role of technical and legislative laboratory for the nation. The Environmental Protection Agency, with plenty of other messes to clean up, voluntarily ceded a large measure of its authority to California.

"E.P.A. has historically allowed things to be tested in California, proven to be viable and then has adopted them as the law for the rest of the country," said Barry Wallerstein, the executive officer of the powerful South Coast Air Quality Management District, based in Diamond Bar, Calif.

Among the results: The catalytic converter, which is now standard equipment on all vehicles made in the United States, was required first by California in 1975, and auto makers have moved almost exclusively to fuel-injected engines because they could not meet California emissions standards using traditional carburetors.

While there is a long way to go -- California still has the dirtiest air in the nation -- the initiatives have nevertheless reduced the state's air pollution to one-third its level in the mid-1950's. When cleaner-burning gasoline was required by the state in 1996, it reduced pollutants by 20 percent. Because Californians use, on average, more than 400 gallons of gas a year, this was the equivalent of taking 3.5 million cars off the road.

The switch in fuels met some initial resistance from the petroleum industry. That faded, however, when other technologies bubbling in the California laboratory -- fuel cells, gas and electric hybrids, even improved battery-powered cars -- began to threaten the market share of the century-old internal-combustion engine.

Experiments with alternative fuel technologies, though widely publicized, have met with mixed success. In the first round of low-emission vehicle regulations, auto makers were required to make 3 percent of the vehicles they sold in California zero-emitting by the end of 1998.

"The only way you could really meet that," Mr. Brown said, "unless you wanted to consider sails or rubber bands, was with an electric vehicle of some sort."

General MOTORS soon began leasing its battery-powered EV1 car through Saturn dealers in California, but the car's range was limited. With the drumbeat growing for fuel-cell cars and other hybrid-powered ultra low-emitting vehicles and super ultra low-emitting vehicles, the electric car looked like an expensive dead end.

More than a year ago, Ford and DaimlerChrysler formed a partnership to develop fuel-cell cars; recently, G. M. and Toyota formed an alliance to do the same. Ford and DaimlerChrysler have vowed to have a demonstration fleet of 30 fuel-cell cars and 15 buses on the streets by next year -- in California, naturally.

Despite this progress, there have been detours. Last year, smog in Los Angeles crept back up to levels unseen in more than a decade, and the cause was easy to identify.

With the first set of low-emission vehicle standards, California created a loophole large enough to drive millions of small trucks through, and that is precisely what happened. Sport utility vehicles were permitted to pollute at two and a half times the rate of passenger cars, just as Detroit was recognizing their potential to deliver wide profit margins. The American passion for these vehicles became the Frankenstein of the California emissions laboratory.

"The fact that you could sell them legally without very expensive control standards was certainly something the industry took advantage of," Mr. Roe said. By the time regulators woke up to what was going on in California, sport utility vehicles constituted nearly 60 percent of vehicle sales.

Last fall the state's Air Resources Board imposed new regulations treating sport utility vehicles and most pickup trucks as passenger cars. The move delighted environmental groups, who considered it overdue, and dismayed auto makers, who again insisted it would be nearly impossible to meet the new standards in five years, as required. But the board fit two Ford Expeditions with larger catalytic converters that brought them into compliance.

In fact, Ford had already improved the performance of its sport utility vehicles nationwide so that they could nearly meet today's auto emissions standards, prompting California to tighten its rules. "A lot of people in the industry say it was Ford's fault," Mr. Brown said. "It makes you the skunk at the picnic at an industry meeting."

But for all its apparent zeal, California has occupied the regulatory fast lane largely because the Clean Air Act pushed it there, while the E.P.A. has followed the state's efforts from a politically safe distance.

"One of the difficulties of moving programs along at the Federal level is that there are large parts of the country where smog is just not perceived as a threat," said Mary Nichols, an E.P.A. administrator from 1993 to 1997 and, earlier, the head of California's Air Resources Board under Gov. Jerry Brown. "There is sort of a delicate interplay in terms of how far and how fast you can actually push the industry, and in California they are willing to push harder and faster than the Feds are."

Robert Stavins, a professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, said California has led not so much by example as by mistake. The first mistake, he explained, was allowing the air in its most populous cities to get so bad that it brought about the second mistake: forcing the rest of the country to scrub its air as expensively as Los Angeles.

Auto makers "were not particularly attracted by the idea of producing two kinds of cars," he added, meaning one for California, which accounts for 10 percent of the domestic car and truck market, and another for everywhere else. While the auto industry resisted regulation "as if it were essentially the Great Depression being brought to America in the 1990's," in Professor Stavins's words, once it lost those early battles, the war was effectively over. It was no longer even a question of whether it was desirable to set the same standards for Sioux Falls, S.D., as for San Francisco, but how quickly to implement them.

"The reality is that from an economic perspective, a uniform, nationwide standard doesn't make sense," Professor Stavins said, "because the damages associated with air pollution, and the costs of achieving the standards differ tremendously, depending on whether you're stuck in the Los Angeles basin or in the middle of the Great Plains. But many people are upset about the political issue of different standards. They believe that there ought to be the same standards for everyone for fundamental things like clean air."

In California, there is always something in the air; these days it is as likely to be an idea as a particulate. "When the Clean Air Act was adopted in 1970, it required huge cuts in emissions and set very tough deadlines," said Gail Ruderman Feuer, a senior lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is based in New York. "Everyone said it was impossible. Then lo and behold, they found catalytic converters. That was a technology-forcing act. That's how we have clean cars today."