BRANCACCIO: Welcome.
Looks like smog. But if you look at the data — or take a good whiff — the skies of California are a lot cleaner than they used to be, thanks to this states' tough anti-pollution laws.
California is now taking on a new fight - passing the nation's first ever law targeting greenhouse gasses which scientists say contribute to global warming.
But California's long history of environmental protection is under siege. A showdown is looming between California and the federal government over exactly who gets to write the rules in this state.
What's at stake here is more than just the rights of a single state. It's challenging the very idea that local citizens should have a say in how they want to protect their environment.
Sylvia Chase and producer William Brangham have our report.
SYLVIA CHASE:
Fran Pavley drives a 2004 Toyota Prius. It is a hybrid car< at low speeds, it switches from gas to electricity. It's the hottest car for green-friendlies, but this retired schoolteacher is driving more than a car. California Assembly member Fran Pavley is leading the way in a national environmental debate: California versus the auto industry. All because she had the idea she — and California — ought to do something about global warming.
FRAN PAVLEY:
California in my opinion could be one of the states that is most threatened by global warming, We have 1100 miles of coastline, so any kind of sea level rise of course brings on property damage. Air pollution is a huge issue in California. Warmer temperatures will mean more air pollution affecting the health of our citizens. And this is gonna affect our water supply. All three of these areas are directly impacted by climate change.
SYLVIA CHASE: Pavley's answer: A law to reduce the major cause of global warming, greenhouse gases; especially carbon dioxide. The 2002 Pavley Law requires automakers to reduce CO2 emissions 30 percent by 2016. Polls here are conclusive: the public supports Pavley. But auto interests have tied up the Pavley Law in federal court and there is apprehension that the federal government may take the side of industry on Pavley, making it just the latest struggle over citizens' rights to control their environment.
BILL LOCKYER:
Offshore oil drilling. Clean air. Clean water. Wetlands. Forestry practices. Efficiency standards. Greenhouse gases. On and on and on. What I make of it is, the worst threat to the California environment is the Bush Administration.
SYLVIA CHASE: Those are strong words and they're coming from a Democrat. But Bill Lockyer is California's Attorney General. He is worried about not just the long term effects of global warming, but about every Californian's right to breathe clean air now.
BILL LOCKYER:
We don't have any choice in California. There are so many cars in this state and people. It's very important for public health. The number of asthmatics and cancer, lung diseases and so on, dramatically increases if we don't figure out how to clean up our air.
SYLVIA CHASE: At age six months, Aaram Ashley was diagnosed with asthma. His struggle to breathe isn't about global warming. It is with the load of air pollutants that got its name in California: Smog. Latravia is his mother.
LATRAVIA ASHLEY:
But I would say out of out of 100 days, 75 he's having some kind of symptoms, something. If it's just wheezing or dry cough, or something that makes me say, you can't go and play, or you can't run like the other kids, you know.
SYLVIA CHASE:
Aaram's having a good day today, but like many of the six-million American children with asthma, he has been to the emergency room countless times. Tiny ones need to be watched very carefully.
LATRAVIA ASHLEY:
With us, we're adults. Oh, my heart is working so hard, I need to calm down. Or I need to sit down, or I need to take some medicine, or something. He doesn't realize any of that.
SYLVIA CHASE: Aaram and his family live in the town of Long Beach, one of the southern California communities where pollution is particularly hazardous to children's health.
Long Beach - L.A. Harbor, the busiest in the country, generates pollution night and day, with diesel trucks dragging cargo there and away.
LATRAVIA ASHLEY:
We live so close to the port and the docks and all the trucks in and out of town. And we catch it all. The freeway is maybe five or six blocks away from here. So we have it all. And unfortunately, it is where I'm living that makes my son's case so bad.
SYLVIA CHASE: Though it has long been known that pollution imperils asthmatic children, a landmark California study shows that even healthy children are damaged. Last fall in the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, scientists reported that children were monitored over an 8-year period and even those with no lung problems were five times more likely to develop lung damage when they grew up with air pollution.
Dr. Jim Gauderman of the University of Southern California, lead investigator of the study.
SYLVIA CHASE:
I'm not a bioscientist, and you are. How significant is five times more likely?
JIM GAUDERMAN:
Well, it's fairly significant. We know that kids lungs develop until they're about 18, or 20 years old. And so, the lung capacity that they have at that time is what they're gonna carry with them the rest of their life.
SYLVIA CHASE:
I must say, I find it shocking.
JIM GAUDERMAN:
Yeah. We're shocked, too. We certainly got into this study because we thought air pollution might be having some level of effects on kids. But when we saw that it was affecting their long term growth over the entire adolescent period, and leaving them at age 18 with a significant fraction of kids that had clinically low lung function, we were shocked.
[BEGIN CLIP]
NARRATOR:
Los Angeles suffers the worst blanket of smog in its history! The giant clouds hover...
[END CLIP]
SYLVIA CHASE: The study results were a bad blow in a state that has tried hard to clean up its air all the way back to the days when Los Angeles and smog were synonymous. California became the first state to mandate auto smog devices and had been showing the world how to clean up air well before Republican President Richard Nixon signed a new Clean Air Act in 1970.
Acknowledging California's undisputed leadership, the Clean Air Act all but exempted the state, permitting it to adopt stricter-than-federal standards. The feds have traditionally taken a "you-go-girl" attitude toward California's leadership.
But that all changed when Los Angeles-area authorities tried to clean up diesel. Their scientists had long known that diesel emissions exacerbated asthma, but concluded they were also a major source of cancer-causing pollutants. And so, in 2000, new rules were adopted regarding new buses, trucks and other fleet vehicles.
Kurt Weiss is a lawyer at the Air Quality Agency.
KURT WEISS:
It said that when we required fleet operators to purchase vehicles, they had to use clean burning fuels. Our fleet rules were really about adopting alternative fuels in southern California. We were just telling people: "when you go out and buy a car, buy the cleanest burning vehicle available."
SYLVIA CHASE:
Weiss says it was no surprise when engine and petroleum industries took his agency to court to block the rules. But industry lost all the way until they got to the U.S. Supreme Court. Then, something totally unexpected happened. The Bush administration took industry's side against the air quality agency. The agency was taken aback.
KURT WEISS:
Sure we were surprised. Remember, we had won in the district court in Los Angeles, in front of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, so we were headed to the supreme court with fairly high hopes, with two wins under our belt.
SYLVIA CHASE:
Until the US government stepped in.
KURT WEISS:
And then, and then we knew we had a real fight.
SYLVIA CHASE:
That must've been a very big disappointment.
KURT WEISS:
Well it wasn't a happy moment, no.
SYLVIA CHASE: With the federal government arguing against California, California lost 8 to 1. And it wasn't the first time. California was also forced recently to water down an alternative energy vehicle law. The Bush administration took the side of the auto industry in court, arguing that California's emission controls would also effect fuel efficiency — and fuel efficiency is something only the federal government is allowed to regulate.
SYLVIA CHASE:
Why would the federal government side with industry?
BILL LOCKYER:
Because they rubber stamp whatever business wants. That's their primary philosophy. If business wants it, it's good. That's where they are.
SYLVIA CHASE: Attorney General Lockyer sees a pattern. When California moves toward stricter standards for motor vehicles, the Bush administration responds that federal law prohibits it.
He is peeved that Republicans are rolling back a longstanding conservative principle that states have the freedom to govern their own affairs, something that Republican President Ronald Reagan enshrined.
BILL LOCKYER:
Reagan had an Executive Order, 12612, I believe it was, which said, if there's a state law that's stronger than federal enactment, let the states be the laboratory. Let them enact or use their stronger state statute in these air quality areas and federal government abstain from these fights. Well, that policy's gone.
SYLVIA CHASE: In 2003, when California elected a Republican governor, not even this Hummer-driving, macho icon could ignore the overwhelmingly pro-environment sentiments of his 35-million constituents. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned "green."
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER:
When it comes to the environment, status quo is not an option.
SYLVIA CHASE: The Governor unfurled flower-friendly programs like the Breathe Easier campaign. Noting that cars put 27-hundred tons of pollutants into the air daily, he very publicly crushed a car of the class he calls "gross polluters."
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER:
Every time we terminate even one of those cars, we take another step towards cleaner air and protecting our environment. I knew I was going to get the word "terminate" in there somehow, right?...All right, bravo, one more car destroyed.
SYLVIA CHASE: Some of Schwarzenegger's fellow Republicans in Washington don't see it his way. When California drafted regulations to reduce the 130 tons of pollutants per day produced by small engines like lawn mowers and leaf blowers, Missouri Senator Kit Bond argued that thousand of US manufacturing jobs would be forced overseas if the products were regulated.
In 2003 he tried to block regulation of the the industry. With Schwarzenegger's muscle, Senator Diane Feinstein carved California free of the Bond restrictions, but 49 other states have lost their rights to regulate these machines.
And Senator Bond is raising even bigger questions about why states are setting there own emissions regulations in the first place, ordering up a study of the rationale for an overlapping state/federal system.
BILL LOCKYER:
It's an interesting thing. Here we have all these Republicans now controlling the federal government who used to believe in state rights. The federal government is too big. We don't want it to grow and boss us all around. They're in charge. So what are they doing? They're using the federal authority to boss us all around.
SYLVIA CHASE:
Which brings us back to Fran Pavley, who wants California to tackle global warming by reducing tailpipe emissions, responsible for 25 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. These gases build up in Earth's atmosphere, trap heat from the sun, heat up the globe. Every fossil fuel burned adds to the buildup. And scientists say reducing it won't be easy, it will require decades, even if the US and other countries focus right now on reducing C02.
But President Bush has made it clear that reducing CO2 is not on his agenda.
PRESIDENT BUSH:
Our economy has slowed down in a country -- in our country. We also have an energy crisis. And the idea of placing caps on CO2 does not make economic sense for America.
SYLVIA CHASE:
Then, in 2003 his Environmental Protection Agency took a further step, reversing agency policy saying EPA has no authority to regulate CO2.
But Jeffrey Holmstead, chief air quality official for the federal government says the Bush administration is doing something about climate change.
JEFFREY HOLMSTEAD:
We think that there are better ways to deal with this issue then by just adopting regulations. We spend almost $6 billion a year developing, working on new technologies, working in partnership with other countries and so we think those are the better way to do it as opposed to just passing regulations.
SYLVIA CHASE: Fran Pavley says California can't wait. Her law passed and seven other states have committed to follow California's example.
But, as in the past, the auto industry sued California. The argument is the same: federal law about fuel efficiency pre-empts California's right to act.
BILL LOCKYER:
They're claiming that the only way that the automobile industry could meet those standards is to deal with fuel efficiencies. Well, we're not trying to regulate fuel efficiencies. We know that's pre-empted.
FRAN PAVLEY:
California has the exemption under the federal Clean Air act to regulate tailpipe emissions. That's what we're doing.
SYLVIA CHASE:
They're saying, "Listen. All we wanna do is regulate tailpipe emissions. We didn't say anything about fuel economy."
JEFFREY HOLMSTEAD:
The only way to regulate tailpipe emissions is by improving fuel economy. I mean there's no difference between regulating tailpipe emissions and regulating fuel economy.
SYLVIA CHASE:
So you think they're just being cute here.
JEFFREY HOLMSTEAD:
Oh yeah.
SYLVIA CHASE: Though Holmstead says he's dubious about the Pavley Law, he told us it's too soon for the government to take a position on it.
Well, what if the feds-- what if the federal government-- the Bush Administration steps into this automobile industry lawsuit against the state of California? What then?
BILL LOCKYER:
I expect they will. I mean, if there's any prediction that's reasonable is that they'll be on the side of Detroit.
SYLVIA CHASE: It would be another formidable alliance that could profoundly limit citizen's rights to make choices about their environmental quality. For the Ashley family, the choice is to leave town.
LATRAVIA ASHLEY:
If I had the money today, I would be gone. And I wouldn't look back. I would not look back. I mean, if your child is as severe as mine, then yes, you should move for your child's sake. It's not worth my son's life.
SYLVIA CHASE:
Where do you want to move?
LATRAVIA ASHLEY:
We want to move to Portland, Oregon or Washington — Seattle, Washington. Somewhere where it's green, lots and lots of green trees. And the air is so good, you can taste it.
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