How decades of L.A. smog led to California's war with Trump over car pollution

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 — eye-burning, 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. 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 UCLA. For the past 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 this week, President 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’s smoggy past. Trump’s move enraged environmentalists and residents who knew just how far that exception had allowed the city to come.


Much more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/09/21/how-decades-la-smog-led-californias-war-with-trump-over-car-pollution/



A view of Los Angeles in 1958. (AP)