CLEAN AIR: A promise still elusive for Inland region

Guaranteeing healthful air for all Americans was a political no-brainer for Congress back in 1970.

The Clean Air Act spurred a new era of tailpipe and smokestack regulations and had bipartisan support unheard of today. It sailed through the House and Senate with just one dissenting vote. President Richard Nixon signed it eagerly.

“This is the most important piece of legislation, in my opinion, dealing with the problem of clean air that we have this year and the most important in our history,” Nixon said at the bill signing ceremony.

Nixon had created the U.S. Environmental Protect Agency earlier that year.

At the time, public attention focused on smog-choked Southern California, on Midwest rivers so polluted that they caught fire, and on the devastating effects of pesticides like DDT on eagles and other wildlife.

Nixon felt that a strong federal role in cleaning up the environment was a political inevitability, so he embraced it, said S. David Freeman, who was an attorney in the Nixon administration and later served as the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Nixon’s motives also were political, Freeman said an interview. The president feared that if he didn’t take strong actions to protect the environment, Democrats would seize the issue and use it against him in the 1972 election.

The Clean Air Act set health standards, which are essentially legal limits, for various pollutants in all regions of the nation.

President Jimmy Carter later amended the act by requiring the EPA to review scientific studies on air pollution health effects every five years and then adjust the health standards for each major pollutant as needed to protect people.

One of the most persistent air pollutants in Southern California is ozone, a lung-irritating, corrosive gas that forms when airborne emissions cook in the summer heat. The current health standard for ozone — .075 parts per million parts of air averaged over eight hours — was set by the George W. Bush administration in 2008.

President Barack Obama angered environmentalists in 2011 by delaying the EPA’s plan to impose a tougher ozone standard recommended by the agency’s science advisers. The panel of scientists from around the nation reviewed scientific research and concluded that the Bush standard didn’t sufficiently protect people.

Obama said in 2011 that he wanted to wait until this year to give the economy time to improve. Now the EPA isn’t expected to propose a new standard until sometime next year.

So far in 2013, ozone levels in Southern California have surpassed the current ozone standard on 83 days. The smog season got off to a fast start — in June, only two days met the federal ozone standard in the air basin between the Pacific Ocean and the San Bernardino Mountains.

The region faces a 2024 deadline to meet the ozone standard every day.

The most recent data also shows that the average levels of fine-particle pollution still exceed the federal standard in Mira Loma, Rubidoux, Fontana, Ontario, South Central Los Angeles and parts of the San Gabriel Valley. Fine particles are linked to heart attacks, brain ailments and shorter lives, among other harm.

We have a long way to go before we realize the vision of the Clean Air Act, Freeman said.

Failure to meet health standards means that some people are getting sick and dying from the air they breathe, Freeman said in an address to health and environmental journalists last year at USC.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study released this month estimated that more than 200,000 people die each year because of air pollution.

“The house is still burning down,” Freeman said, yet “There is no sense of urgency.”

This story originally ran in the Press-Enterprise on September 5, 2013.  Check out the story there.