April 2006 | Features
California Greenin'
The Golden State sets the eco-pace for a green nation
by Kenneth Miller
Last month, a platoon of stars—George Clooney, Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Anniston among them—pulled up to the Academy Awards ceremony in eco-friendly hybrid cars instead of hydrocarbon-guzzling limos. The “Red Carpet, Green Cars” motorcade, an Oscar-night fixture since 2003, has become (in its own way) as distinctive an emblem of the California ethos as the annual return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano.
If the Golden State, home to Hollywood and Disneyland, is a factory for generating lucrative fantasies, it is also a place where enlightened practices—yoga, meditation, driving a strange-looking vehicle that gets great gas mileage and pollutes less—can find their way from the countercultural margins into the mainstream marketplace. When Jen steps out of that Prius in her Jimmy Choos, it’s harder to dismiss environmentalism as the province of hemp-sandaled, snail-darter-hugging deprivation addicts.
But California’s eco-vanguardism is not just a matter of modishness. Over the past few years, while the Bush administration has done its best to gut federal environmental laws, this state has adopted some of the most ambitious such regulations anywhere. In 2004, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) approved the nation’s first set of auto-emissions standards aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, calling for a 25 percent reduction by 2016. The legislature established an Ocean Protection Council to safeguard the coast from overfishing and other abuses, making California the first state to begin following the recommendations of two national ocean commissions—whose finding had been ignored by the White House. In 2005, CARB instituted new rules requiring ships to use cleaner fuel within 24 miles of shore, and Gov. Schwarzenegger signed legislation encouraging public agencies to retrofit their vehicles for biodiesel.
This year has already seen more milestones. Early in 2006, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) approved the largest solar energy initiative in the United States, providing $3.2 billion in consumer rebates—enough to help pay for 1 million home conversions. The Department of Toxic Substances Control banned households from tossing computers, VCRs, batteries and other electronic waste in landfills. CARB designated secondhand smoke as a “toxic air contaminant,” subject (in theory, at least) to the same restrictions as arsenic and benzene.
Remarkably, many of these measures have been championed by the Governator—a cigar-chomping Republican action hero whose favored ride is a 12-miles-per-gallon Hummer. Like any good politician, however, Schwarzenegger (whatever his personal convictions) understands his constituency. “This state’s voters support environmental protection” says Ann Nothoff, California advocacy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, “and they elect legislators who will protect the environment.”
Why do Californians vote that way? Nothoff suggests that the state’s deep-green politics stem from the tension between its extraordinary scenic beauty and its outsize environmental ills. “People are drawn to California because they have an innate appreciation for the natural world,” she says. Then they learn that 90 percent of Californians live in areas where air quality often fails to meet federal standards, and that Los Angeles—for all its broad beaches and rugged canyons—has not only the foulest atmosphere of any American city but also the fewest public parks per capita. Such discrepancies, says Nothoff, “generate a lot of citizen activity and activist passion.”
Indeed, the modern clean-air movement was born in California. By 1947, the smog lay so thick over LA’s growing sprawl—and public outcry was so noisy—that Gov. Earl Warren signed the Air Pollution Act, the first of its kind in the US, authorizing the creation of an Air Pollution Control District in every county of the state. It wasn’t until 1952 that Caltech biologist Arie Haagen-Smit discovered the nature and causes of the suffocating shroud. Three years later, Congress passed the first federal air-pollution legislation, modeled largely (like subsequent versions over the next four decades) on California’s. The state’s pressing needs, as well as its longstanding leadership, were officially recognized in 1990, when an amendment to the federal Clean Air Act stipulated that only California would be allowed to set stricter standards than the feds—after which other states would have the option of following suit. At least half a dozen have done so whenever we have tightened our rules.
California’s clout is not just legislative. “Being the sixth-largest economy in the world,” says Bernadette Del Chiaro, a clean-energy specialist for the non-profit group Environment California, “we can actually have an impact on the market.” The state’s emission standards have long entered into the calculations of automakers, who depend on California for 10 percent of their sales. Its incentives for hybrid owners, the most generous in the country, are helping to make that technology economically viable; fully one-third of all US hybrids sold in 2004 were bought in this state. California leads the nation in wind power, helping to make turbines the fastest-growing alternative energy source. The state is also No. 1 in gasoline consumption, with 30 million vehicles slurping up more than 40 million gallons a day; should we switch to hydrogen (as Gov. Schwarzenegger has decreed we should begin to do by 2010), OPEC might have to file for Chapter 11.
Thanks largely to its citizens’ efforts, California’s skies are clearer than they were in Arie Haagen-Smit’s era, or even 25 years ago. Since 1980, the number of days when LA’s ozone levels over an eight-hour period violated federal standards has dropped from 186 to 88; emissions of carbon monoxide have dwindled by 80 percent, and nitrogen oxide by two-thirds.
A great deal remains to be done, of course. This year, to begin with, legislators will consider a revised version of the Million Solar Roofs bill, which floundered last September amid partisan wrangling over non-union installers. (The PUC’s recent initiative was based on one of the bill’s provisions.) The updated bill focuses on incentives for homebuilders and municipal utilities, as well as providing a way for homeowners to sell solar power back to the grid. An outpouring of public support could help the measure succeed this time around.
That’s not too much to hope for. Whether it’s by calling their assembly member or voting with their pocketbooks—from buying organic greens to replacing lawns with native succulents—Californians tend to be proactive about saving their environment. And what happens in this state, like the line of Priuses arriving at the Oscars, sets trends around the globe.
Kenneth Miller is a former senior editor at People, lately reincarnated as a freelance writer in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Salon, LA Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
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