Smog Control--Step by Step

A visitor to The Times recently warned of a revolt once Southern Californians understand how a tough new crackdown on air pollution will affect them. Most of them, he said, know little about its details, including the fact that they won’t be able to cook on outdoor barbecues.

In a sarcastic editorial reflecting the Wall Street Journal’s let-em-bite-dust style of private enterprise, a writer describes “once proud men (being) rendered pathetic” by the seemingly insurmountable task of lighting charcoal for a barbecue without pouring starter fluid all over it. The writer predicts mass defections to Northern California to avoid the smog crackdown and to get away from gridlock.

The visitor clearly is prepared to do his part to make certain that Southern Californians never get the details straight. There will be no prohibition against barbecues, only against using petroleum-based fluid to get a fire started. Many people abandoned starter fluids long ago, get along famously with alternatives and are never pathetic.

Heaping ridicule on one vulnerable aspect of a complicated argument is perhaps the oldest trick in debate. The barbecue proposal--one of 220 that will be put in regulation form over the next several years--serves its purpose well.

As for mass migrations, large areas of Northern California eventually will have to draft smog plans nearly as tough as the one recently approved by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the biggest of the state’s smog agencies and the one with the toughest job. And gridlock in parts of the north makes southern roads a piece of cake.

As Times writer Larry Stammer reported last week, some businessmen worry about the high cost of complying with rules requiring tighter pollution controls and, in some cases with good cause. But the air district already is searching for ways to help people through the rough times that the new regulations might cause. And the plan states quite clearly that no new rule will be put into effect without an analysis of its effect on business and on the lives of people generally, so that there will be no surprises.

In fact, a more accurate picture of the district than the one casting it as a collection of barbecue cops came into focus a week ago when its executive director, James M. Lents, and Southern California Edison Co., which had spent $1 million trying to kill the smog-control plan, announced a compromise that looks good to us.

If the technology works out, Edison will get more time, and spend less money, to reduce the output of oxides of nitrogen from its gas- and oil-burning power plants in Southern California by more than the original plan required. Some members of the district’s policy board are leery of the plan, partly because it was negotiated by Lents during a time when many businesses were denouncing the board publicly for trying to set up a smog dictatorship.

As with all aspects of the plan, it will be rigorously reviewed as time goes on, first in Southern California, then in Sacramento and, finally, in Washington. Nothing too tough or too soft is likely to make it through that review. And in the meantime, the important thing is that the plan is in place.