How Los Angeles Cleaned Up the World’s Air Pollution

We live in a time of unheralded environmental victories. Dolphins and whales swim in New York and San Francisco harbors. Lead has been eliminated globally in gasoline for cars and trucks. And Southern California has cleaned up its air.

That last one is more important than you might think. On today’s episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at UCLA and the former acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. She's also the author of a new book, Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air, which was released last month by the University of California Press.

Ann and Rob discuss why cleaning up LA’s air was so important to cleaning up the world’s air. They chat about why LA initially misdiagnosed the causes of its terrible air pollution, how it got them right, and what we can learn from the city’s eventual inspiring success.

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.

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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:

Ann Carlson: We should talk more about the Clean Air Act itself because it’s a pretty extraordinary piece of legislation — hard to imagine something like that passing today.

Robinson Meyer: As you are a professor of environmental law, I can’t think of a better topic to talk about. So one, there’s a few nuances that are important. The first is that California is early to air pollution law, so it’s beginning to explore how to regulate cars by the time that the Clean Air Act passes. But the second is this distinction that you’ve begun to draw in this conversation between technology following versus technology forcing regulation, where California had adopted technology following regulation, and that made it kind of captive to the car companies.

Can you talk a little bit about why the Clean Air Act is different and why it was different? And did people understand maybe how different it was when they were writing it?

Carlson: I think they did understand how different it was. And what they did was, instead of focusing on whether technology was available or what was possible to demand of auto companies based on that technology, they focused on public health. And the basic overarching idea in the Clean Air Act is, we are going to set standards that protect public health. We’re not going to worry about cost. We’re not going to worry about technological availability. We’re going to tell manufacturers, for example, you cut pollutants by 90% by 1975 and 1976, depending on the pollutant. We understand there’s no technology. Go out and invent it. That’s the technology-forcing part of the statute.

Of course, the auto manufacturers say they can’t do it. Lee Iacocca famously says that Ford will stop manufacturing vehicles if the Clean Air Act passes. Ford continues to manufacture vehicles to this day. He, of course, was engaged in hyperbole, but that gives you some sense for just how intense the opposition was and how kind of panicked the manufacturers were. But that technology-forcing statute, again, combined with California’s authority to regulate, set off this arms race to really figure out how do we cut pollutants dramatically.

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned:

Ann Carlson’s new book: Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air

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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.