Decades of smog lead to war with Trump
In 1953, there were no San Gabriel Mountains — at least, not that Lee Begovich could see.
When the 24-year-old kindergarten teacher moved from Chicago to Southern California that year, Los Angeles was choked with smog — eyeburning, lung-stinging, headache-inducing smog. It hung so thick in the air that it often limited visibility to mere miles for months on end.
So when Begovich looked northeast from her Compton classroom, the Los Angeles topography faded into a gauzy haze, like peering into the smoke-filled backrooms of the era’s bars. But one day that fall, the wind blew hard; it cleared out the intractable smog and for the first time in her life, Begovich saw the outline of the San Gabriel Mountains. She was stunned, she remembered 66 years later.
You wouldn’t hear that story today, said Ann Carlson, Begovich’s daughter and an environmental law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. For the last two decades, the air has been far cleaner. Now, in most panoramic photographs of the city, the mountains sit atop its skyline like a crown.
“People don’t realize just how bad it was and how much better it is today,” said Carlson, who’s writing a book on the region’s history of air pollution.
The city and the state have made extraordinary progress in the past half-century, and it’s largely because of California’s ability under the Clean Air Act to curb dangerous emissions from the biggest polluters around: automobiles.
But last week, President Donald Trump said he would revoke California’s ability to set its own auto emissions standards, a provision that gave the most populous state significant sway over the car industry.
On Friday, California and 22 other states responded, filing a lawsuit that challenged his decision to revoke the waver, which is rooted in Los Angeles’ smoggy past.
Trump’s move enraged environmentalists and residents who knew just how far that exception had allowed the city to come.
With mountains on three sides and an ocean on the fourth, the region’s geography forms a bowl that pens in polluted air, Carlson said. And for most of the year, an inversion layer of warm air acts as a lid atop it, trapping the cooler air and pollution below. It is the perfect petri dish for smog.
Then came the refineries, the smokestacks, the cars.
By the 20th century, the basin was besieged — in 1943, some Angelenos thought, literally.
One July day that year, a heavy yellow-brown cloud fell over the city, said Beth Gardiner, author of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution. It smelled like bleach.
“People really panicked,” Gardiner said. “They freaked out. It was the middle of World War II, and people thought it was a Japanese gas attack.”
Indeed, the Los Angeles Times even called it a “gas attack,” writing, “Visibility was cut to less than three blocks … workers found the fumes almost unbearable.”
Over the year, this public health crisis sent people to the hospital and forced them to miss work, she said. It was less apparent then, but we know now that ozone exposure causes asthma, harms the central nervous system and the lungs and increases cardiovascular disease.
So began the pattern of California setting the tone for pollution regulation in the United States.
“California has always played this role of dragging the rest of the country along behind it,” Gardiner said.
Yet it’s an achievement that often goes unappreciated, she said — one reason, perhaps, that the Trump administration feels it can do away with the waiver that made this progress possible.
“It’s an extraordinary achievement but it’s an invisible achievement,” Gardiner said. “No one ever thinks about it. None of us ever appreciate clean air.”