Fifty Years of Regulating Air Pollution:  What Has It Gotten Us?  What’s Left to Do?

Jane Vise Hall

Outstanding Professor Lecture

California State University, Fullerton

 

7 February 2001

 

          At a time when a new federal administration is poised to abandon a 30 year commitment to protecting the public from unhealthful air, and the key agency in California – and perhaps the nation - has just reaffirmed a difficult commitment to truly clean cars, it’s especially important to consider how far California has come and how we got here, because we still have a long way to go.

            While we still breathe unhealthful air on too many days each year, California has made progress that is nothing short of astounding. As someone who has been privileged to spend nearly 30 years in a ringside seat – and sometimes in the ring – I’d like to share some of my professional and personal experiences with you, along with my observations about how and why California, in particular, has made such giant strides in cleaning up the air. 

            First, some background.  Efforts to control noxious fumes are nothing new in human history.  Horace, in about 40 B.C., protested the damage that smoke and soot did to marble monuments. Nobody did anything about it.  Then, Edward I of England (circa 1300) regulated pollution in London by decreeing “Be it known to all within the sound of my voice, whosoever shall be found guilty of burning coal shall suffer the loss of his head.” (Turco 1997).  In that age, most coal burning in cities was for domestic heating and cooking. Manufacturing tended to locate near the source of fuel, which was mainly wood, and therefore away from population centers.  Beginning in the late 1700s, the Industrial Revolution required aggregations of workers, firms, and markets, so as coal-based industry quickly grew, it also became urban.  Coal-based industrialization became the world pattern, and urban pollution increased accordingly.  In Victorian England, ¼ of all deaths were from lung disease.  The city of Pittsburgh, in 1866, was described as “Hell with the lid off.” By 1911 the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that smoke damage from coal burning cost the U.S. economy an amount (not including health impacts) equal to all of the property taxes paid annually.  Public protest finally led St. Louis to adopt pioneering abatement requirements in 1940.  When London tried to limit home coal use in 1945, however, George Orwell argued that coal fires were “the birthright of a free-born Englishman” (McNeil 2000).  Los Angeles began to promulgate controls, establishing the first regional smog board in 1947.  This was the first official recognition that air pollution does not respect lines on a map, and a coordinated strategy is necessary.

Where Are We?  Where Have We Been?

            We in Southern California live in the epicenter of air pollution. The pattern in this country has been for Washington to follow California’s lead – usually with a considerable lag and often reluctantly.  We are the only state with Congressional authority to enact stricter rules than EPA does for vehicles and fuels, but other states can – and often do – choose to follow California’s lead. So, our story is important across the country and around the world.

Ozone

We have the dubious distinction of being the only region in the nation designated by an act of Congress as having “extreme” pollution.  Unmet deadlines have been extended and voices of doom raised repeatedly.  Throughout the 1970s and 1980s this was a mantra – There is no proof that ozone is a problem, and even if it were we don’t know how to fix it, and even if we did, it would devastate the economy, the automobile industry, and our energy supplies.

We have nonetheless achieved a truly remarkable feat:  last year, for the first time since records have been kept, our region had no health advisories or alerts.  Although the basin still had almost 120 days above the state health-based limit, this is a whopping improvement over nearly double that in 1976. The city of Houston in fact moved into the number one ozone hotspot in the nation.  Federal data show that Southern California made more progress over the past twenty years than any other region in the country, by any measure. Moreover, of the twenty regions nationally that made the most progress, the top five were all in California.

            Why do I call this a remarkable feat?  Consider that between 1980 and 2000 population grew more than 40% and the economy grew nearly 80%, while ozone levels fell more than 40%.  Beyond that, reducing pollution was a politically difficult task and occasionally a cliffhanger in terms of whether we would move forward or not. 

From the ozone graph, it is easy to see several periods of backsliding.  Many issues were involved.  One central question was whether nitrogen oxides (NOx) (as well as hydrocarbons (HC)) must be reduced to control ozone.  Every combustion source produces NOx, and controlling it is tricky.  The utilities were at the forefront of arguments that NOx control would make smog worse.  Well, science demonstrated the necessity of controlling NOx, we did it, and here we are.  (It turns out that NOx control also reduces fine particles and acid deposition.)

Lead

Controlling ozone was a tough technical issue, and it meant taking on the oil industry, utilities and Detroit, but lead reduction was the granddaddy of regulatory battles.  Lead was first added to gasoline in 1921, to boost octane at low cost.  Not surprisingly, atmospheric lead emissions began to rise.  From 1921 to 1971 ¾ths of the lead used in fuels worldwide was used in the U.S. By the 1970s, we had learned that lead causes a loss of IQ and other developmental effects in children and, hypertension in adults. From 1977-1994 U.S. lead levels fell 95%.  What lead to plummeting lead emissions? California, typically moving ahead of Washington, promulgated an ambient standard for lead in 1975, and then quickly moved to reduce lead in gasoline.  The lead industry (abetted by refiners globally) argued that, “it is evident from recent scientific tests that the contribution of lead from (leaded gasoline) to the total human body burden is not significant and, from the perspective of extending the energy obtained from each barrel of crude oil, the use of lead has never been more important.” ( Octel 1976).  EPA argued that California had no authority to regulate fuels. Note this was not the first, nor the last, time the energy industry has used an energy crunch to argue against environmental protection.  Economic analysis then began to play a key role. In the face of relentless arguments that the refining sector would not survive a national lead phaseout, a straightforward cost-benefit analysis (USEPA 1985) established that we would gain $10 in better health for every dollar spent to phase lead out of gasoline.

            So, California stuck with it, and as a result lead levels have been reduced by 98%.  Millions of children experienced lower  burdens of lead than would otherwise have been the case.  Also, without unleaded gasoline catalysts – the first large breakthrough in reducing car emissions –do not work, and so catalysts could not be mandated.  Car makers did not want to install catalysts and refiners did not want to remove lead from gasoline.  Both actions were necessary to meet critical public health needs.  Arguably, EPA would not have promulgated a federal lead standard or phased lead out when they did – even a decade later than California - without our lead, but economic analysis also helped.

Why Did We Do It? 

            Imagine – those of us who were here – the smog of the 1970s compounded by the population and traffic increases since then, without cleaner fuels and vehicles and industrial controls.  The Los Angeles basin of today would be nearly unlivable and could not conceivably have attained the economic growth and quality of life that we enjoy.

Public Health

            The driving force has been public health.  While we are often aware of poor visibility that obscures our view of the mountains, adverse health effects drove most regulation.  For fairly small – and commonly experienced – concentrations of ozone, respiratory-related school absenteeism rises more than 80%.  Even low concentrations of fine particles contribute to higher death rates.   Lead reduces IQs in children. After decades of sometimes-acrimonious debate about whether pollution is harmful, we now ponder how much is harmful and which pollutants pose the greatest risks.

Economic Benefits

            As the air has gotten cleaner, the focus has shifted subtly from public health to the question of whether controls are “worth it” – what are the economic benefits of controlling pollution?  Public health and economic benefits are, however, inseparable. It is the gains in health that generate the largest benefits. Certainly better visibility and protection of sensitive ecosystems are also important, but health drives the economics.  What benefits have those gains generated?

            A decade ago I worked with colleagues here and at other universities to do the first analysis that asked the following question, what would attaining the health-based standards be “worth” to Southern California?   We began the work with some trepidation.  No one had ever linked monitored concentrations to population patterns by location and age, then linked exposure to dose, then estimated how many fewer cases of various illnesses would result from cleaner air, and finally put a dollar value on those reductions.  The bottom line - $10 billion a year – attracted some attention, to put it mildly. Industry hired two think tanks to refute the results.  Was a sum this large credible?  Consider that this reflects exposure at a time – the late 1980s – when over 12 million people were exposed to more than 200 days a year when pollution levels were unhealthful. Health advisories ran well over 100 days each year.  Fine particle levels significantly exceeded the standard throughout the basin.  In 1990, this resulted in 1,600 premature deaths annually, and millions of lost work or school days, along with a variety of other insults to health, such as eye irritation, sore throats, coughs and other respiratory ailments. In the end, our results were published in Science in 1992, and the hired guns ultimately gave up. (Hall et al., Science, 1992, 255:812-817) 

Since then we have done similar work in San Francisco, San Diego and Houston.  We’ve learned a lot – the health science has advanced and we now know that fine particles are about twice as dangerous as our Los Angeles work reflected.  We can now put dollars on even more health impacts, and our modeling approach has become the state of the art. The Houston work completed in 1999 – indicating more than 400 excess deaths a year and a disproportionate impact on poor neighborhoods (Lurmann et al. 1999) - pushed Texas to identify which controls would generate the greatest health benefit, relative to cost, and to adopt related regulations last April. 

The U.S. EPA is now required by law to assess the expected economic benefits (and costs) of cleaner air on a regular basis.  Looking back over twenty years, benefits add up to more than $20 trillion (USEPA 1997).

Less Pollution and Economic Growth Go Together

            Being able to achieve such amazing gains in air quality was in part due to world-class science and successful technology forcing. (Being willing was political guts and public pressure.)    As a result, the debate about whether pollution is harmful is pretty much over.  We know it is. The question of how to control pollution is partially resolved.  The final piece of the puzzle is economics. The major question now seems to be: Is this costly effort worth it, or are pollution regulations “economy killers?”

            Again, California provided the litmus test.  If we could substantially cut pollution  here – and ahead of the rest of the country – and have economic growth that equaled or bettered the rest of the country, then the economic issues clearly are not showstoppers.  So, in 1995, with generous funding from the W. Alton Jones Foundation, members of the Institute for Economic and Environmental Studies – partnering with colleagues elsewhere (Hall et al. 1995)– set out to ask the question:  what happened to the California economy from 1965-1990 as we regulated vigorously and ahead of the country at large?

            The conclusion: in California, incomes grew faster, manufacturing jobs held up better, and even refiners, hit hardest by regulation, had higher rates of return here. Jobs grew faster.  Hispanic incomes, in particular, grew faster here. Notably, the trend was stronger in the 1980s when the regulations adopted in the late 1970s were kicking in, than in the 1970s.  Economic well-being and environmental improvement are complements, not substitutes (Hall et al. 1997). We can have both.

           

How Did We Get Here?

          Put another way, why California?  The answer is complicated, but it comes down to this:  we wanted to and we could.  The “wanted to” is crucial – it is the backbone of political will, which in this case had to be steely and long-lived.

Political Will

 Public support for figuring out what to do and then doing it has been consistent, as shown by every public opinion poll since the 1960’s – smog is life diminishing and we must collectively clean it up, even at some cost.  Notably, the Los Angeles Times has been behind the effort from the beginning, not only editorially, but also  in committing significant reporting resources to the task of learning about and writing about smog, its consequences, and the politics behind the scenes.  Before there were smog agencies in the state, the Times hired a pollution expert to try to sort out and explain why smog was bad and getting worse. Governors going back to Goody Knight and continuing (with some lapses, notably under Reagan) to today have taken tough stands, appointed able and resilient regulatory boards, and generally stayed the course, at least relative to the national pattern.  This was not because it was easy.  In 1977, we almost lost the state lead standard by one vote in the Assembly. In 1991, we got clean gasoline only when ARCO broke ranks with other refiners after a legislature-created committee (of which I was a member) was about to report out the feasibility of alternatives to gasoline.

Cutting Edge Science

            While we have other pollution problems, ozone was the driving force behind early clean up efforts.  The difficulty was that no one was sure what to control – which emissions had to be reduced?  In 1950 Arlie Hagen-Smit generated smog in a laboratory at Cal Tech.  At that moment the possibility of controlling ozone became real.  His work pointed clearly toward oil refining and oil products as the key culprits.  Unburned hydrocarbons evaporating into the air and nitrogen oxides from combustion were transformed by our nearly ubiquitous sunshine into smog.  This was not the familiar pollution of Eastern and Midwestern cities. Hagen-Smit was vilified.  A consulting firm was hired to refute his work.  It stood up when it was replicated and extended by Arnold Miller.  We went after hydrocarbons.  This is only one example of thousands of research results in California labs that have led to effective controls.

            While the atmospheric chemists were busy sorting out what chemicals were most critical in forming smog, the health scientists were hard at work determining which pollutants caused what kinds of harm and at what levels.  California researchers have produced some of the best – and most policy-relevant – studies identifying how and whom smog hurts. 

            The science was essential to sustaining the political will.  Work such as Hagen Smit’s showed what was possible and what should be controlled. The work of the health scientists showed why it was necessary.  This work ultimately makes sound economic assessments possible, assessments that are indispensable in the arena in which many battles are now fought.

Technology Forcing

            It was apparent early on that industries that polluted, or sold polluting products, were not anxious to step up voluntarily and offer to pollute less or develop cleaner products.  That placed the burden of how to go about this on regulators.  This test has largely been met with technology forcing regulations.  Since no one would admit to knowing how to achieve a given reduction in emissions, the state (or a local agency) would simply determine that a certain emissions rate seemed possible and order industries to reduce emissions to that level by a specific date.  Generally, this rate was based on some technical evidence that it could be done.  This route has led in many cases to very impressive reductions.  New cars today are 90% cleaner than 1980 cars.  Benzene is largely out of fuels.  New power plants produce less than 1/20th the pollution of older ones.  Diesel exhaust is finally coming under control. Even charcoal for the backyard BBQ is cleaner.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The central issue now is what comes next?  What is the magic fuel or technology that will support continuing environmental progress, especially in the face of rapidly rising populations, incomes, and associated demand for cars and other energy-dependent consumer goods?  Do we have the political will to move forward, or will we sit down and rest on our laurels?  Worse, will be backslide under pressure from Washington? And, what about the one and a half billion people living in poor countries who breathe unhealthful air outdoors and at home?

In spite of the unparalleled progress in California, and the significant improvements nationwide, there is still a lot left to be done.  Southern California still has over 100 days a year of high ozone levels, and particle levels high enough to threaten life and health somewhere in the region on almost half of all days.  We have done little to address the contribution of air pollutants to water pollution or to ecosystem damage. Moreover, there are ominous signs that Washington is about to begin an attempt to dismantle important controls on power plants, diesel fuel, cars, and refineries.  In addition, we have hardly begun to deal with indoor air pollution, which contributes more to daily exposure than outdoor pollution for most people, and has devastating effects on the health of women and children in developing countries.  There are many unknowns about precisely how particles are formed in polluted atmospheres, yet these fine particles are the most serious public health issue now posed by air pollution, contributing to 50,000-60,000 early deaths each year in the U.S.   Very significant economic benefits are to be gained from continuing progress nationally – for the year 2010 alone, about $110 billion (USEPA 1999).

Around the world, growth in energy demand  also threatens increased pollution – we already know that the Pacific Northwest receives pollution from China, apart from the threat to health in developing countries worldwide. In 1997, the World Bank reported that air pollution costs China eight percent of its GDP annually in health-related losses.  Worldwide, one and a half people breathe unhealthful air. We need to look beyond conventional fossil fuels if we are to ever have truly clean air.

            Environmental justice – the idea that poorer families and minorities should not suffer disproportionate impacts from pollution – has recently become a significant focus.  When we turned our models to the question of how effects are distributed within the region, the results were unsurprising.  People living in the highest income areas experienced lower ozone levels, and the poorer areas with higher pollution levels were also minority neighborhoods (Brajer and Hall 1992). This pattern is consistently repeated in virtually every study.  This is an area ripe for further work.  Do we willfully pollute poorer areas more, or do poor people move to polluted areas because the rents are lower?  Either way, this is a serious equity issue.

 

The Essential Lessons

            Some fairly simple observations fall out of California’s story.

1.      Air pollution is a public health issue, first and foremost.  Ozone threatens the development of children’s lungs, contributes to asthma attacks, causes school absences, and in addition makes people feel lousy – burning watering eyes, chest pain, cough, and nasal irritation. Fine particles cause loss of life, onset of chronic bronchitis, hospital admissions from multiple causes, and lost workdays.  (This is the short list.)  Air toxics that contribute to cancer and birth defects are an increasing focus, especially the risks of diesel exhaust.

2.      Pollution-related illness and loss of life reduce economic productivity and impose tremendous costs on families, firms, and governments.  It, on the other hand, is no surprise that healthful air contributes to a healthy economy.  Intelligent and effective regulation, even when costly, has been worth it.

3.      Strong and sustained political will is necessary.  This comes initially from public insistence, and then from leadership: leadership in science, in technology, in the regulatory forum and in the statehouse.  Breakthroughs in science then inform the public in support of effective environmental policy.

 

California recognized early on that public health was at risk.  A series of far-sighted governors, legislators, and political appointees to regulatory boards picked up the baton and carried it a great distance. Persistent and well-informed citizen and environmental groups took up the cause.  In this effort public and private groups alike were enabled by press coverage, world-class science and, I would hope, some economic common sense in recent years.  What happens next will depend on whether the state continues down the well-trodden and successful path of the past 30 years.  Especially at a time when the federal government seems determined to sit down on the job, California’s leadership is crucial for the nation as well as the rest of the world.  Enormous resources have been committed in the past to persuading California politicians, regulators and scientists to back off.  Fortunately, in most important regards, these efforts have failed.  They will only continue to fail if we continue to invest in research and education, and if the public continues to be made aware of the risks posed by a polluted environment.  Universities have been central to California’s success because the work done within them provides the technical basis to determine what to do, and at the same time informs the public about the trade-offs inherent in collective action mediated by government.  Ultimately, over time and after the dust has settled, public will carries the day.  California’s experience tells us that we can look toward clearer days ahead.

Sources

Brajer, Victor, and Jane V. Hall, 1992, “Recent Evidence on the Distribution of Air Pollution Effects,” Contemporary Economic Policy, 10(2): 63-71.

 

Hall, Jane V.,  et al., 1989, Economic Assessment of the Health Benefits from Improvements in Air Quality in the South Coast Air Basin, Final Report to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, Diamond Bar, CA.

 

Hall, Jane V., A.M. Winer, M.T. Kleinman, F.W. Lurmann, V. Brajer and S.D. Colome, 1992, “Valuing the Health Benefits of Clean Air,” Science, 255(5046): 812-817.

 

Hall, Jane V., et al., 1995, The Automobile, Air Pollution Regulation and the Economy of Southern California, Report for the W. Alton Jones Foundation, Institute for Economic and Environmental Studies, California State University, Fullerton.

 

Hall, Jane V., 1997,  Air Pollution and Regional Economic Performance:  A Case Study, Ed., Elsevier Press.

 

Lurmann, Frederick W., et al., 1999, Assessment of the Health Benefits of Improving Air Quality in Houston Texas, for the Office of the Mayor, City of Houston, TX.

 

McNeill, J.R., 2000, Something New Under the Sun:  an Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World, W.W. Norton and Company, New York.

 

Octel, 1976, Worldwide Gasoline Survey, London.

 

Turco, Richard, 1997, Earth Under Siege:  from Air Pollution to Global Change, Oxford University Press, New York.

 

USEPA, 1985, Costs and Benefits of Reducing Lead in Gasoline:  Final Regulatory Impact Analysis, Washington, D.C.

 

USEPA, 1997, The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act: 1970 to 1990, Washington, D.C.

 

USEPA, 1999, The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act: 1990 to 2010, Washington, D.C.