A Drastic Plan to Banish Smog

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

The first gray-brown stains appeared in the azure skies above Los Angeles before the outset of World War I. During World War II, the summer haze was beginning to sting the eyes and shroud the mountains that ring the city. By the mid-'50s, Los Angeles' smog, as the noxious vapor had been dubbed, was sufficiently thick and persistent to wilt crops, obstruct breathing and bring angry housewives into the streets waving placards and wearing gas masks. Oil companies were urged to cut sulfur emissions. Cars were required to use unleaded gas, and exhausts were fitted with catalytic converters. But as the city continued to grow unabated, so did its choking smog.

Now, after more than 30 years of struggling to clean up what has become the nation's No. 1 air-pollution problem, California officials have taken decisive action against the primary source of the trouble: the unfettered use of fossil-fuel-burning private vehicles in a city that has long been in love with the automobile. By a vote of 10 to 2, the directors of the south coast air- quality-management district, a regional agency with authority over Los Angeles, last week adopted a sweeping 20-year antipollution plan. It will not only drastically curtail automobile use in the Los Angeles basin but also convert virtually all vehicles to the use of nonpolluting fuels by 2009. "The public is ready for change," declares Jim Lents, executive officer of the management district. "This plan signals the beginning of that process."

The proposal, referred to simply as the L.A. plan, is 5,500 pages long and 3 ft. high, and was five years in the making. It calls for elimination of 70% of smog-producing emissions in the Los Angeles area by the year 2000. In the plan's first five-year phase, 123 separate regulations will ban the use of aerosol hair sprays and deodorants and require companies, regardless of the cost, to install the best antismog equipment available. But one of the plan's primary objectives is to break the city's addiction to the internal-combustion engine. First, it imposes stricter emission standards and forces employers to encourage car pooling. Then it calls for conversion of most vehicles to methanol and other cleaner burning fuels. Finally, in a Buck Rogers phase that assumes rapid advances in fuel-cell technology, it calls for a massive switch to cars, buses and trucks powered by electricity.

"It's quite a remarkable achievement," says David Howekamp of the Environmental Protection Agency. Adds Richard Ayres, chairman of the National Clean Air Coalition: "It's a bold attempt to grapple with the real pollution problems." The EPA is expected to approve the Los Angeles plan and use it as a blueprint for a federal program that will include cities like Chicago and New York.

Critics of the plan, however, believe it will prove a costly, unrealistic mistake. Though estimates place the cost of the initial phase at about 60 cents a person a day for the first five years, or about $2.79 billion a year, opponents believe the price tag could be as high as $15 billion a year. A study prepared at the University of Southern California calculated the resultant loss in jobs -- mainly from companies forced by added antismog costs to relocate -- to be in excess of 30,000. "This area used to be called the promised land," complained Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, one of two members of the district management board who voted against passage. "Now it's going to be a wasteland."

The plan still faces several bureaucratic hurdles. But the real test will come when Los Angeles' 8 million car lovers begin to feel the pinch. This is, after all, the city synonymous with freeways, drag races and even the drive- through church. As a former resident puts it, "In L.A. the first question is not What do you do? but What do you drive?" Will Angelenos really trade their Ferraris for car pools and their fuel-injected Chevy V-8s for electric roadsters? That remains to be seen. "We're for cleaner air, for damn sure," says Robert Harnar, a public relations executive at Ford. "But the old adage is that people in L.A. want buses and mass transit so all these other guys will get off the freeway."

With reporting by Gisela Bolte/Washington and Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles