Dirtiest Air

By a vote of 375 to 41, the House sent to the White House a bill to keep the Consumer Product Safety Commission alive with budgets of $42 million in fiscal 1991 and $45 million in 1992. President Bush was expected to sign the measure (S605). The agency has been slowed in its mission by battles between consumer and business interests over how far it should go to keep hazardous products off the market. This bill makes it easier for it to obtain a quorum to conduct business.

The U.S. Senate's $123-billion version of a new five-year federal transportation program could have been tailor-made for Southern California. In some respects, it was. Now Californians must buckle down to getting something very much like it from the House and persuading President Bush that it is a better plan than his own. California's share of the money in the bill would be $17.8 billion.

Years of analyzing what Southern California must do to clean up its air and agonizing over whether that would be asking too much will come to a show of hands Friday. The region's chief smog control agency should demonstrate overwhelmingly that it is ready to do what is necessary to make the dirtiest air in the United States as clean as the air over industrial centers anywhere. The region has no choice. Cleaning up Southern California's air is not just another metropolitan beauty contest.

California's clean-air campaign, which spends a lot of time under siege, had two days last week that made it look as if it all might work. One of the good days was more a morale boost for the people in charge of pollution controls than the kind of day that actually makes smog go away. But the other was the announcement of an important early test of whether the state has the patience for a new approach to cleaning up pollution.

Your editorial on California's zero emission vehicle mandate ("Electric Car Advocates Receive a Shock," Nov. 27) mischaracterizes today's electric vehicle market. You argue that auto makers now say they can produce electric vehicles in 1996 and 1997, sooner than previously claimed. In fact, America's car companies produce electric vehicles today. The problem is not production, it is sales. There are simply too few buyers for EVs with today's technology. As that technology develops and costs decrease, the number of buyers will increase.

Less than a year after residents defeated a plan to build a power plant in South Gate, the controversial proposal appears back on track. The surprise resurrection of the 550-megawatt project has unleashed a new round of opposition from the blue-collar city and some of its neighbors in southeast Los Angeles County.

The state Air Resources Board would make a lasting, negative contribution to California's decades-old smog problem if it moves today to undo the state's electric vehicle mandate. Responding to months of heavy lobbying by auto makers and the oil industry, the board's staff will unveil proposals that probably will back the state away from the requirement that 2% of cars sold in California in 1998 emit no pollutants.