UPDATE Wednesday, July 6, 9:44pm | Okay, so it turns out there is an app for that. Since I don’t have an iPhone, I have no experience with how to get it — but get it!
Is it worth using? That question may still be up in the air. Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, was engaged enough to comment on my original piece and also to write me directly, correcting by perception that it is necessary for inspectors actually to see, etc., an offending vehicle. It is not.
However, what happens if you report a vehicle? “AQMD sends a letter to the vehicle owner asking them to fix the problem,” writes Atwood. An effective deterrent or another bit of paper in the wastebin of toothless bureaucracy? I haven’t the smoggiest.
What about the police? Can they get involved? Not so much. “The only things we can write cites for is for improper or lack of muffler or excessive smoke starting with VC section 27150[,] which are usually ‘fix it’ tickets,” says Sean Parilla, a commercial enforcement officer for the Long Beach Police Department. “We can cite for engine idle restrictions per Title 13 section 2485 after going through a ARB diesel class. However, the fines associated are a civil assessment between the owner of the truck and the ARB.”
‘ARB,’ BTW, is short for the Air Resources Board, an arm of the California Environmental Protection Agency. Parilla notes that all such violations are ARB violations, and recommends we report offending vehicles directly to the ARB.
Helpful information? Well, it can’t hurt, right?
June 28, 2011, 9:10am | Let me say right up front that when I went jogging across the Gerald Desmond Bridge and back, I did not expect Rocky Mountain air. However I may feel about petroleum-related industries, I accept that there’s an airborne reality in southwestern Long Beach that cannot change overnight.
So it was not so much the carbon-monoxide-spitting cars and mammoth, filth-belching trucks to which I objected, but one little car that putt-putted by, a broken-down hippie hatchback that crested the bridge at a perfectly reasonable speed.
My objection concerned the white-grey smoke that billowed copiously from the tailpipe, a fetor so toxic that within 20 seconds the fumes trailing in its wake dominated the combined redolence of all other proximate motor vehicles.
Despite its name, the Environmental Protection Agency isn’t so much protecting the environment as it is performing a function that, while certainly better than nothing, does not make it the standard bearer of the kind of regulations we need. It really ought to be the case that car manufacturers simply cannot afford to mass-produce non-industrial vehicles that aren’t relatively “green;” and commercial vehicles not availing themselves of the best available emissions-reducing technologies have an a priori punitive fining structure built into their very registration fees to somewhat offset the damage they’re doing (all funds to be used for environmental clean-up, clean-energy programs, etc.).
But the EPA is what it is, and it does have emissions standards, woefully lax as they are. And so I am offended when I spy a driver who does not maintain her vehicle in compliance with those easy-to-comply-with standards.
A couple of decades ago SoCal television regularly featured public-service announcements from the South Coast Air Quality Management District for 1-800-CUT-SMOG, a reporting system for vehicles driving around obviously out of compliance with EPA emissions standards. On more than one occasion in those days when I drove a car and did not own a cell phone, I scribbled down a license plate so I could alert the AQMD of an offending vehicle — and I have no qualms about having done so.
Since I watch a lot less TV than I once did, perhaps I’m just missing them, but I haven’t seen a 1-800-CUT-SMOG commercial since the turn of the millennium — even though environmental awareness is higher than ever and everyone and his brother owns a mobile communication device of some sort. They say there’s an app for everything — except, apparently, for 1-800-CUT-SMOG.
Is the call worth making? Ethically I think it’s a slam dunk. A polluter is a polluter, whether he is Big Business or the little guy.
Pragmatically, though, I’m not entirely sure 1-800-CUT-SMOG is worth the trouble. Consider that for the AQMD to act, one of its inspectors must 1) smell or see the contaminant as it is being emitted, 2) be able to trace the contaminant back to its source and verify that it alone is the actual source, and 3) “confirm that these emission are identical to those described in your complaint.”
While this might work for a factory, immobile and emitting pollutants for hours on end, it seems futile when it comes to cars, which, you know, move around a lot and don’t emit much of anything sitting there on the driveway.
I rather like that the offending car at the center of the piece was hippie- and not yuppie-owned, because, while flower children and their philosophical offspring tend to be far more eco-conscious than most, that demographic comes up far short of a perfect score when it comes to action — even action for Mother Earth. And the folks driving on the Gerald Desmond Bridge that day are far from the first hippies I’ve seen with an ill-maintained exhaust manifold (or whatever the problem was).
In short, talk is cheap, whether that talk comes from the Green Movement or the federal government. The only thing that counts when it comes to the air we breathe is what (aside from our exhalations) goes out into it.
I’m not sure what the right thing to do is when you see someone — be she friend or stranger — not doing her part to comply with clean-air standards.
Doing nothing, though, cannot possibly help.
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