Years ago air pollution was considered California’s bane, a result of development and the cars it brought; but a couple of technologies, the catalytic converter and better additives for the gasoline the cars used, has worked wonders, though ideologues still deny it.
An excerpt.
Daniel Weintraub: Clearing air on California's success in pollution fight
By Daniel Weintraub -- Bee Columnist Published 12:01 am PDT Sunday, August 6, 2006
One of the biggest successes of government regulation over the past generation has been the project to clean California's air. But most of the state's residents have no idea how things have changed, or why.
In a recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, half the adults surveyed said they believed the air quality in their region was worse today than it was 10 years ago, and another 13 percent said it was the same. Only 21 percent said it was better.
But by almost any measure, the air is cleaner today in just about every corner of California than it was a decade ago. And the progress over the longer term has been even more dramatic.
The change is all the more impressive because it has come amid the state's relentless growth. California's population of 37 million has nearly doubled since 1970, when the effort to clear the air began in earnest. Over the past 10 years, we've added 5 million people. But still the air gets cleaner.
Twenty years ago, smog alerts were fairly common, especially in the Los Angeles region. In a first-stage alert, school districts were warned to use caution when allowing children to play outside. In a second-stage alert, businesses that produced a lot of ozone, a major ingredient in smog, were told to cut back their operations or switch to cleaner burning fuels. Now those warnings are relatively rare.
The transformation began in the mid-1970s, with the federal Clean Air Act and the phasing out of leaded gasoline. The lead in fuel caused many problems, but one was crucial: It prevented the use of catalytic converters to clean the exhaust, because the lead poisoned the devices.
Catalytic converters are filters that reduce an engine's emission of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxide, which come from burning fuel and are the major ingredients of smog. The introduction and development of the catalytic converter and the invention of cleaner burning fuels greatly reduced the amount of pollution produced by cars and trucks.
The other big change, especially in the past 10 years, has been the reduction in pollution from diesel engines.
Before 1993, the average sulfur content of diesel fuel was around 3,000 parts per million, according to the California Air Resources Board. Cleaner-burning fuel introduced in the early 1990s reduced that to 500 parts per million. Soon, it will be 15 parts per million.
