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Boiling Point
A New Look at L.A.’s War on Smog
00:25:40
Los Angeles has long been famous for its smog — and while things are better today, the fight isn’t finished. Sammy Roth talks with L.A. Times columnist Patt Morrison about her new podcast on the city’s smog history, and what it will take to build a future with truly clean air.
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- [00:01]
Pat Morrison
This is an LA Times Studios podcast.
- [00:08]
Sami Roth
My name is Sami Roth and I'm the climate columnist for the Los Angeles Times. This is boiling Point. If you live in the LA Basin, you know it's a good clean air day when you can go outside and you can actually see the mountains. Not just a shadowy outline of the mountains, but all the peaks and ridges nice and sharp and clear. The San Gabriels, the Santa Anas, the Santa Monicas. I'm actually looking at the Santa Monicas right now through the seventh floor windows of the LA Times office building in El Segundo. I can just barely make out the Hollywood sign. The air quality seems decent. A few months ago, the American Lung association came out with its annual State of the Air report. For the 25th time in 26 years, Los Angeles was ranked the smoggiest city in the country. The LA Long beach metro area was number one for ozone pollution, number five for year round particle pollution, and number seven for short term particle pollution. The air we breathe here in Los Angeles just isn't healthy, especially if you live next to a freeway or an oil refinery or the ports. But especially from the 1940s through the 1980s, the smog was way worse. It's almost hard to believe how bad it was if you didn't live it. My colleague Pat Morrison, a fellow columnist here at the Times, has been writing about LA's terrible air quality for years. She's gone back through the newspaper's archives and found photos of people wearing heavy duty gas masks to protect their lungs as recently as the late 1970s. I'm guessing some of you listening to this are old enough to remember that, but I'm definitely not. Fortunately, we don't have citywide smog alerts anymore. That is a big win, and it took a lot of work to get here. And the history of how we got here is more important now than ever because President Trump is trying to make it harder to keep cleaning up LA's air. So I was so glad to hear that. My colleague Pat Morrison, and after all her years writing about air pollution, is going to be hosting a special six part narrative podcast series. Specifically, she's hosting a podcast series about the history of smog in Los Angeles. She's gonna tell the stories of the people and policies and technologies that brought us the better Los Angeles we know today. And she's gonna help us understand why better isn't good enough. We're gonna share Pat's podcast with you on the Boiling Point feed when it comes out later this year. But for Now I caught up with Pat and she gave me a little view. Here's our conversation.
- [03:05]
Southern California Edison Representative
During one of the most severe windstorms Southern California experienced in more than a decade, the Palisades and Eaton fires ignited, leaving heartbreaking losses in our communities. Now, as we build back, we're building stronger, cleaner and more resilient in communities most vulnerable to dangerous weather conditions and wildfires. Southern California Edison is placing power lines underground, hardening the electric system by installing wires with protective coating and adding advanced technology to help keep communities safe. So when Southern California faces the next storm, the next most severe event copied.
- [03:53]
Sami Roth
Helicopters structures adjacent here at Pipe Road.
- [03:57]
Southern California Edison Representative
We'll be ready. Learn more@sce.com disasterrecovery California lawmakers big Oil.
- [04:06]
California Environmental Voters Representative
Is Slick, Don't Slip Big Oil lobbyists are working hard to roll back climate and clean energy progress to keep their profits soaring and California hooked on their dirty, expensive energy. We can't afford to slip on Big Oil's slick PR and lobbying keep California moving forward with affordable clean energy and transportation. Learn more at don'tslipca.org, paid for by California environmental voters.
- [04:34]
Sami Roth
Pat, thank you very much for being with us on the Boiling Point podcast.
- [04:38]
Pat Morrison
Sammy, it's always a delight to talk to you.
- [04:40]
Sami Roth
So I'm very excited to hear all about your Smog podcast and to give our listeners a preview of it. Before we do that, you're a little bit of a legend here at the LA Times. And by a little bit, I mean a lot of a legend. For folks who may not know your history here, tell us how long you've been at the Times, how you got here, give us a little bit of your history.
- [05:03]
Pat Morrison
Well, I decided to try to get into the LA Times through my college Occidental by trying to get a class credit. And I managed to finagle my way through that process and then into the LA Times before there were even security guards, walked up to the city desk with my pathetic little packet of clips and said, hi, can I work for free for college credit? And this was the LA Times. They weren't going to turn down free labor, especially a woman of which there were very few, and one who spoke Spanish. So I was in and they would have had to drag me out.
- [05:38]
Sami Roth
And how many years later have they not dragged you out?
- [05:41]
Pat Morrison
Well, let's see, I was 18 when that happened, so I wasn't even old enough to drink when I went to lunch with the guys, which is why I remember their stories so well.
- [05:50]
Sami Roth
One of the things that you do in your columns That I think is so valuable and so important is that you put the events of the day in context. You write so much about the history of Los Angeles and about how it came to be the city. It is the things that brought settlers here that create tourism, the history of industry and oil and settlement in the valley and agriculture and how LA has changed over the centuries and the decades. I'm so curious how you first got interested in smog and the role that smog has played in the history of Los Angeles. Talk about that a little bit, why that's so interesting to you.
- [06:27]
Pat Morrison
Anyone who was here long enough ago, as I have been, to know that you come to Los Angeles and it may be weeks before you even know there are mountains because you can't see them, thinks, what happened? What changed that? And our smog story is one of our success stories. People live every day with the consequences of bad smog, even though they can't see it now. When you put gas in your tank and there's that little condom around the gas pump, that's a recapture to make sure that the fumes don't go out and create smog. When we talk about landfills and carting off garbage to landfills, the reason we have landfills is because we used to let people burn their trash in their own backyards. Everybody had a backyard incinerator. And my goodness, the smoke that emitted from backyards across Los Angeles was terrible and contributed very much to. To the smog. That's over now, but we have landfills as a consequence. And then, of course, our cars. Why we drive the cars we do today, it's because of the smog and how we needed to fix the cars to make sure that they were not polluting the city in the fashion that they had not only the city, but across Southern California for decades. The thing we love most, our cars, was the thing that was killing us.
- [07:47]
Sami Roth
You write so evocatively, and I'm sure you're gonna get into this in the podcast series about how bad it used to be. You know, how you really. How there were smog attacks where you couldn't see down to the end of your street. It was so bad how people wore gas masks. I mean, there are photos of this in some of your stories. I mean, do you remember those times? Talk about what it was really like. Cause it's hard for me, as someone in my early 30s, to really even understand what that must have been like. It feels almost impossible.
- [08:18]
Pat Morrison
I was not around for the worst of it, and I'm thankful that I wasn't. But you truly could not see the end of your street. There were car crashes and motorcycle crashes because people could not see the traffic ahead of them. It was like darkness at noon. Sometimes the attacks were so bad, school children were sent in from recess or got home from riding their bikes home from school, and they could hardly breathe. They had to lie down for an hour to recover their breath because the smog was so terrible. And Los Angeles county, which for decades was the most prosperous agricultural county in the whole United States, L.A. county, was seeing agriculture die literally on the vine. Vegetables, fruits were turning brown, were turning bronze color and dying within a matter of weeks. So agriculture was being killed off. All of the prosperity and the allure of Los Angeles was disappearing under this brown, sticky, greasy clay cloud of smog.
- [09:18]
Sami Roth
As bad as it sounds, one of the things I've been most fascinated by reading your columns is how it was. I mean, clearly it was reviled and something needed to be done about it, but in ways, it seems like it was kind of glorified. I mean, in one of your pieces, you noted someone was selling bottles of LA Smog, you know, breathe the air that the stars breathe. I mean, what was going on with that? How did people enjoy it?
- [09:42]
Pat Morrison
Well, L. A tried to have a sense of humor about things, even as twisted as that may have been. And there was indeed someone producing canned smog. And it was a souvenir. You could put a stamp on it and send it back to your relatives. And the label was this bright Technicolor multicolored label that said, breathe the air the movie stars breathe. And it had klieg lights and starlets in bikinis. And it didn't clean up the smog, but it was a joke that maybe made us feel a little better. And I have a collection of several varieties of that, including a very rare smog crying towel that shows people standing in front of City hall wiping their eyes and wearing gas masks.
- [10:25]
Sami Roth
You've gotta put this on display somewhere. There needs to be a museum exhibit of your collection.
- [10:30]
Pat Morrison
It's going on display at USC probably while our podcast is coming out.
- [10:34]
Sami Roth
Well, there you go. That's the promotion we need right here. I can't wait to see that. One thing I'm really curious about why now for this podcast, if this is, as you say, a success story, and obviously the air is so much cleaner now than it was during these times you're describing, why did you feel like this was a moment that these stories need to get told? What's motivating you?
- [10:58]
Pat Morrison
Part of the reason that it was a success story is that LA stood up to and also worked with Detroit and with car manufacturers to get cleaner cars. California for years had a waiver from the federal government about requirements for pollution standards. And we of course have our own formula for gas to deal with smog. But now all of that is at risk. More than 60 years later, the Trump administration wants to end those waivers. Now, whether Detroit is going to make smoggier cars again, I doubt. But this is a battle that's now on the horizon. Again, we can see the horizon thanks to the regulations of the past 60 years. But what would happen to Los Angeles if these regulations were rolled back, if these waivers did not exist? So it is a clear and present danger of the moment for Angelenos who were born here. Long after the visible smog has disappeared. Now there's still smog. You just can't see it as often. But this is a problem that Los Angeles and California will be grappling with in the next few months and years that we need to come to terms with.
- [12:05]
Sami Roth
Yeah, I think it's important to note here that even if things are a lot better than they once were, you can definitely see past the end of your block now. And the mountains are visible on a lot of days that the Los Angeles area, the Inland Empire, San Bernardino, Riverside, as well as the San Joaquin Valley, they still usually rate as having some of the worst air quality in the country in terms of smog, ozone, particulate matter, these really minute air pollution particles that can get into your lungs and cause heart problems and other organ issues and long term diseases. You know, even if you don't see it, as you said, these are really serious health problems. And that's before you get into even climate change, the carbon dioxide emissions that are getting generated by heavy industry and by our cars. Do you have any worry that by, and I don't mean this as an accusation, but do you have any worry that by highlighting how bad and visible that it used to be, compared how it is now, that there might be some folks who react and say, well, it looks so much better now. Why do we need to get so much stricter and change the vehicles we drive and clamp down and do all of these expensive regulations? Because I think that's the narrative from the Trump administration and from a lot of folks who don't like regulation. They say, this is a problem we've solved. Why do we need to do all of these additionally painful things? It looks so much better. Do you worry about that at all.
- [13:29]
Pat Morrison
People already think that it is a problem that has been solved or that it looks so much better.
- [13:34]
Sami Roth
It.
- [13:35]
Pat Morrison
And I think that paradoxically, the Trump administration's actions about waivers will make people more aware of the smog and they will have a better perception of the fact that this is still a problem. In Southern California, we get exactly those reports about the Inland Empire, about the Central Valley as well, about all the way to the Colorado river and the Imperial Valley. The smog is persistent. It is dangerous to health, it is dangerous to business. And just because you can't see it the way you usually to, which is to say not see much of anything else, does not mean that California does not have to keep up the fight, that LA cannot be vigilant. We've got the World cup coming up, we have got the Olympics coming up, how athletes are going to fare in our pollution and our heat. And then just the acceleration, as you point out, Sammy, of climate change exponentially, day after day, week after week, we're going to see smog accelerate as climate change puts more pressure on the topography, on the environment and on our own human activities.
- [14:42]
Sami Roth
You've done so much reporting on this over the years and I don't want to spoil the podcast for people because I hope folks stick around and listen to the whole thing and I'm very excited about it. You've got a great guest list. You've got, gosh, I won't say everyone, but you've got some exciting, high profile guests and interesting people. Have you learned anything new that you didn't already know during your deep historical research here? I'm just, I'm curious what's standing out to you that you might not even yourself have already realized.
- [15:10]
Pat Morrison
I think for me what was surprising was how personal it was to everyone we interviewed. A woman who is an 11 year old in 1959 wrote a letter to Governor Brown. This was Pat Brown who read it to the state legislature. She was talking about how her teacher's eyes were so full of tears, she was crying so much on the playground during a fire drill, she couldn't even see the students. We talk about people who have such a personal story to tell about what it was like to live with the smog day in and day out. I found that a former mayor of Los Angeles may have started our war with Detroit because he very publicly traded in his Cadillac for a Rambler when he found out about smog being an emission as a consequence of driving. And we also hear the words of a long dead Caltech professor who is the one who discovered the link between smog and what comes out of the tailpipes of our cars. And so these voices telling these personal stories as it was all happening, I think makes it seem very immediate and very personal. Apart from the regulatory landscape, apart from the fights over the rules and the business changes, it's that people lived with it and died with it.
- [16:33]
Sami Roth
We'll be back after a quick break.
- [16:46]
Southern California Edison Representative
During one of the most severe windstorms Southern California experienced in more than a decade, the Palisades and Eaton fires ignited, leaving heartbreaking losses in our communities. Now, as we build back, we're building stronger, cleaner and more resilient in communities most vulnerable to dangerous weather conditions and wildfires. Southern California Edison is placing power lines underground, hardening the electric system by installing wires with protective coating and adding advanced technology to help keep communities safe. So when Southern California faces the next storm, the next most severe event, helicopters, structures adjacent here by we'll be ready. Learn more@sce.com disasterrecovery hey, Los Angeles, did you hear?
- [17:47]
Environmental Advocate
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- [18:44]
Sami Roth
You know, one of the things I found frustrating reporting about climate change is how long we've known this is a problem and how much delay there's been how much denial. And reading some of your columns about air pollution and the history of smog in Los Angeles, it seems like once again there were folks who knew this was a problem a very long time ago and it still took us quite a while to solve. I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about Ari Hagensmith, this chemist from Caltech and who I think is going to feature in your podcast. Talk about his role in sort of helping to figure out this problem very.
- [19:23]
Pat Morrison
Early on, Ari Hagensmidt came here from the Netherlands as a scientist who was interested in smell, and he was studying pineapple and some of the chemical processes that make smells what they are. When he looked into his own garden, and all he had to do was lift up his eyes unto the hills, as it says biblically, and he couldn't see them in Southern California. So what was this stuff? He started looking into it, and in pretty short order, he's the man who delivered the bad news that our cars were what was creating the bulk of the smog in Southern California. Up until then, we'd kind of thought, well, it's the war. We've got lots of wartime defense industries. Once the war is over, once we have won the war, then the smog will go away. It didn't happen that way. We had won one war, but we were losing the other war against smog. So from his laboratory in Caltech, where he climbed onto a roof and used experimental equipment to gauge and measure Ari Hagensmit found this out, that we ourselves were the problem in Los Angeles. With our love of cars, we have met the enemy, as Pogo said, and it is us. This man should have won a Nobel Prize for this particular work.
- [20:45]
Sami Roth
And I'm guessing, one, he did not win a Nobel Prize, and two, everyone in Los Angeles and all of the auto companies and industry didn't respond by saying, okay, great, we'll stop driving or we'll switch to another kind of fuel. Now, thank you for telling us this.
- [21:00]
Pat Morrison
Yeah, right on both counts there. Because people were quite ready, even during the war to say, okay, it's industries that are doing this. And then a little after the war, it's all right, well, there's some other Post War Industries, L.A. is booming. We have to pay the consequences. But to hear that your car, your own beloved car, the one that got you from A to B, from work to your suburban home, out to the beach, up to the mountains, that that was the culprit, that was the guilty party, which meant that you were the guilty party. Nobody was happy hearing that.
- [21:30]
Sami Roth
I mean, in a way, aren't we still dealing with that same political dynamic 75 years later with climate change, where people are just clinging to their cars and freeways? Is it not kind of the same reaction now?
- [21:43]
Pat Morrison
We're absolutely doing that. Clinging to our cars, clinging to the freeways, clinging to practices that produce more methane, produce more. More elements that accelerate the climate change. At least we have cars that may or may not be cleaner, depending on what you drive. There was a point where 10% of the cars in Los Angeles county accounted for 90% of the smog, of the car generated smog because they were old, they were dirty. All those figures are tipping now. But we still have not relinquished our idea that we ourselves are the ones who are generating some of this and that we ourselves can do something about it.
- [22:22]
Sami Roth
Are you going to be in your podcast getting into Wally Rappel and the early development of EVs, the fact that we've actually had electric vehicle technology for quite a long time.
- [22:32]
Pat Morrison
I spent a couple of delightful hours with Wally Rappel at Caltech. He was telling me about the great race of 1968, when MIT started on the east coast and Caltech started on the west coast with a team with more or less electric cars, and how they pushed and prodded and blew things up on their way to try to win. The race to be the electric car to beat the technology has come a long way, longer than 3,000 miles. But he remembers it so clearly, and his story is just delightful to hear. And it also shows how science can think outside the box and deliver results that are really radical and that can become mainstream for all that they seem radical in the moment.
- [23:14]
Sami Roth
That's amazing to me because there's a famous film from 2006, who Killed the Electric Vehicle? Which. Which talks about events from the early 2000s where there was an auto industry sort of plot to stifle EV development. But you're talking about stuff that was happening in the 1960s. I mean, we've had solutions to this for a really long time.
- [23:36]
Pat Morrison
Well, cars used to run on all sorts of things. They used to run on steam, and that didn't last very long for all kinds of technical reasons. But science loves these challenges. All right, if we can't make it run on potato vodka, what can we do? And so we'll try A, we'll try B, we'll try C. And it's really remarkable, not only how science has had some ideas, but how resistant a lot of industry has been to those ideas. You have to figure out what the profit margin's going to be before you're going to get people to say, okay, let's try that.
- [24:05]
Sami Roth
And pat one thing. All of these victories that were won over the years on smog and reducing pollution from tailpipes and these deals that were made with Detroit, this was not a partisan issue, right? I mean, it was Republicans who were doing a lot of this stuff back in the 60s and 70s.
- [24:21]
Pat Morrison
This is a time when you had pro environmental Republicans. You had Richard Nixon creating the environmental Protection agency. You had the Clean Air act, the first George Bush made it his mission to try to defeat acid rain. And in California, we had not only Democratic Governor Pat Brown, but Republican Governor Ronald Reagan creating an air resources board for the state, exchanging letters with Ari Hagenschmidt, the Caltech scientist who discovered that car as being the chief source of smog.
- [24:51]
Sami Roth
And, you know, President Trump now talks all the time about wanting the United States to have the cleanest air. Clearly, those are just words that don't mean a lot. At what point, to your mind, did clean air become a partisan issue? I mean, when did California and the Republican Party start parting ways on this issue of clean air? When did that happen?
- [25:11]
Pat Morrison
I think national Republicans parting company with clean air in California was probably maybe around 2000 or so. Although you had George Bush the second George Bush, who was from Texas, who saw that in Houston, Houston had the second worst air in the country. So there were connections to pollution, to oil production. And these were of some concern more locally and regionally than at a state level, because the opportunity to pummel California was maybe too tempting in the trade off versus clean air.
- [25:47]
Sami Roth
Interesting. That's sad that that happened, because you'd think clean air is something that everybody could just rally around. I mean, that's why Trump continues to say he wants clean air. Because in theory, everyone is in favor of that.
- [26:00]
Pat Morrison
In theory, everyone is in favor of that. And then when you start putting it to the cost of doing business, to the cost of human health, the tangibles versus the intangibles. We fought this battle before in Los Angeles 50, 60 years ago. And the prospect of having to fight it again with the federal government is a pretty dispiriting one.
- [26:21]
Sami Roth
You have a long historical perspective, Pat. You've been writing about this for a long time. You've been in Los Angeles a long time. Would you call yourself an optimist? I mean, do you think we're gonna figure this out and really get air pollution and carbon emissions down to levels that healthy and sustainable? And if so, how long is it going to take?
- [26:41]
Pat Morrison
Because it is a regional and a global problem? That's a difficult question. As we learned during smog, smog does not observe political lines drawn on maps. It moves where it wants to go. Climate change doing the same. So it becomes a global matter for global technology, for global buying into. But for Los Angeles, the example we have been able to set for ourselves I think is optimistic. I don't know that I would still be here if I felt we were going to go backwards on this issue. Every urban place now has smog. We just have a topography that's conducive to more smog, more concentration of it than elsewhere. But I think that the idea that we're going to let big ideas in and make them work for us is still a seductive one, and it may be a hard sell, but once we're on board, we're open to big ideas in la. That's why we're LA in the first place.
- [27:34]
Sami Roth
La. I love it. I don't wanna. I know you're still hard at work. You're going through historical archives, you're doing interviews. How soon do you think people will be able to listen to your show?
- [27:44]
Pat Morrison
We're looking at sometime later this fall. Maybe the new formulation of gasoline will have switched over by then.
- [27:51]
Sami Roth
You heard it here first, folks. Sometime this fall, Pat Morrison's series on smog coming to the LA Times. Pat, thank you very much for being with us on Boiling Point.
- [28:02]
Pat Morrison
Happy to do it. Thanks, Sammy.
- [28:08]
Sami Roth
Hey, everybody, one more thing. It's Labor Day next week and I'll be on vacation, so Boiling Point is taking a break. We'll be back in two weeks. See you then. Thank you for listening to Boiling Point. I'm your host, Sammy Ross. My producers are Mary Knoff and Jonathan Shiflett. Sound design and original music by Jonathan Shiflett. Elijah Wolfson is our editor. Denise Callahan is our studio manager. Ben Church is our production manager. Nick Norton is our engineer. Special thanks to LA Times Studio president Anna Magzanian, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Argentina and Executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, Terry Tang. Boiling Point is executive produced by Darius Derek Shon and created by me, Sammy Roth.
- [29:10]
California Environmental Voters Representative
Altadena and the Palisades are in the process of rebuilding after the devastating wildfires on the ground. In Rebuilding after the Fires is a new video podcast series from Rebuild SoCal partnership that includes explores the stories of those working to rebuild. Communities are being reconstructed with the help of Anvil Construction, bringing experience and empathy to their work.
- [29:33]
Sami Roth
It's very emotional as you can imagine, but our guys and girls will take the time to sift through the ashes with them.
- [29:39]
California Environmental Voters Representative
One by one, thousands of homes will be rebuilt.
- [29:42]
Southern California Edison Representative
We are skilled union carpenters and we're ready to go to work.
- [29:45]
Sami Roth
The operating engineers Local 12 has made a commitment to the community here and we're going to be here for the long haul.
- [29:52]
California Environmental Voters Representative
Rebuild SoCal partnership is following the journey of the families, communities and small businesses as they come back to life. Stories of unbearable tragedy and unlimited hope. Tune in to the podcast Rebuilding Los Angeles for stories you will not forget. California Ratepayers face some of the nation's highest electricity costs with the decades old solar policy at the center of debate, Net energy metering was introduced in the 1990s to boost rooftop solar by letting homeowners sell excess power back to the grid at full retail rates. But now the California Public Advocate's Office reports that households without solar are subsidizing those with rooftop systems through higher electricity rates. The Fix the Cost Shift Coalition points out that this shift has led to equity concerns. Solar adoption concentrates among higher income homeowners, while costs burden renters and lower income families. Assembly Member Lisa Calderon authored legislation to address the cost shift while maintaining solar incentives at 76 to 82% of current levels. Support assembly member Calderon and help fix California's electricity crisis. Learn more at fixthecostshift. Org that's fixthecostshift. Org.