Capitol Ideas: Kultursmog Alert
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas: Kultursmog Alert" by Tom Bethell a science talk show on KGO. With one The policy-making elite wants to drive you off the road. of the largest audiences on the West Coast, he has been a prime...
...Now his phone was ringing off the hook...
...Someone has been trying to kill it, then...
...Bill Tucker points out in his book on housing policy, The Excluded Americans, that in New York from 1900 to 1930, developers put up fully 8o,ooo housing units per year, perhaps the greatest housing construction in history...
...The air is already much cleaner than it has been in decades...
...The speakers were introduced by a lob 18 October 19 9 6 • The American Spectator byist for the California Auto Service Station and Repair Association...
...So, in order to put the hoi polloi in their place (buses, preferably), clean air has become the pretext...
...WWe already eliminated 95 percent of the pollution coming from cars," he told me...
...In August, KSFO organized a protest outside the state capitol in Sacramento...
...First They Came for Our Guns, Now They Come for Our Cars...
...BART was included among the world's "great planning disasters" in a book of that name published in the early 1980's...
...Such housing units as do become available are often reserved for people defined as low-income (politically well connected...
...Rent control ensures that landlords opt for single tenants whenever possible...
...Clearly, if the failure rate doubles, the auto-repair business is going to flourish...
...Stop the Tyranny of Unelected Planners...
...A couple of reporters told me that it was the largest rally they had seen in Sacramento in years...
...One paper quoted a scoffer as laughing at this proposition: People believe that "black helicopters are going to land in their yards and take away their old Chevrolet...
...Driving Habit Dies Hard in Bay Area," was the headline...
...The attempt to get rid of "smog belchers" is analogous to the sixties assault on "slums" and "blight.,, We are already hearing talk in Sacramento of a government program to help the poor repair their cars...
...No one ever said that public service would be pretty," he said, when I mentioned his sudden notoriety...
...But the concept of an "invisible threat" has worked wonders for regulators over the years, and they won't abandon it lightly...
...It would have made life easier for everyone except mass transit planners...
...One comment from the press conference appeared as the "last word" in two leading papers the following day...
...Only 532 residential units were constructed in the city in 1995, the lowest level in decades according to the City Planning Department...
...The decline of road building in California, as in other parts of the country, has played a major role in "empowering" slow-growth advocates by causing traffic delays...
...California (among other states) has therefore tightened its automobile emission standards...
...number I have seen is 15 percent," he said...
...All this will "hit the poor hardest," as the press likes to say in other contexts (cuts in government spending...
...But environmentalism trumps egalitarianism, and the press that so ostentatiously affects a concern for equality preserved a discreet silence about this new law...
...No, that isn't the charge...
...Should do," he said...
...Here and there one finds unguarded slivers of truth...
...But fewer than one in ten in the area actually ride it regularly...
...After the Sacramento rally, the papers began to write about the issue-not responding to the real issues raised, but as a deception concocted by ratings-hungry radio stations...
...It is also so complex and obscure and bundled in with so many other new laws enacted on a daily basis that no one can have the slightest idea what is going on unless the news media kick up a fuss...
...You're not supposed to be in here," one journalist told them...
...New cars easily meet the standards, and the wealthy will have little trouble correcting any tuneup problems they may have...
...Three to five thousand people had gathered by midmorning, and the level of anger directed at the lawmakers was intense...
...He praised this new "workable program," which "forces people to address their automobiles' effects on the public health...
...Thirty percent of 24 million is 7.2 million cars failing every two years...
...of the largest audiences on the West Coast, he has been a prime mover behind opposition to Smog Check II...
...Gary Patton, a lobbyist for the Planning and Conservation League was quoted in both the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle as saying: "The basic charge, that somehow there's a conspiracy to take your car and ride roughshod over your constitutional rights, just isn't true...
...Now it was the automobile's turn...
...The fraction of state budgets dedicated to highway construction has declined sharply over the past twenty years...
...San Francisco is now firmly in the grip of no-growthers...
...After the KSFO demonstration, supporters of the new law held a press conference in the state capitol...
...A few days earlier, the Chronicle had likewise ridiculed the suggestion that "the state's new smog check program is a sinister plot to confiscate people's cars...
...Cars in the state have to pass a "smog-check" every two years, and the new standards are stringent enough to ensure that many old cars will fail...
...It will continue as a tourist attraction and a hitech haunt, but it is now so much more expensive than alternative places of business that its long-term decline seems inevitable...
...Conspiracy...
...The California Department of Consumer Affairs issued a statement claiming that "no more than about 30 percent [of cars in the state] are expected to fail the new test...
...In June, the San Francisco Chronicle noted the region's "stubborn reliance" on the automobile...
...The attempt to abolish the dwellings of the poor, as in urban renewal, and then replace it with subsidized or public housing, only makes everything worse, as our inner cities reveal today...
...Compliance with the old system had cost car-owners $250 million a year in repairs...
...Among those who spoke was Dr...
...The cost of repairs will be too high to keep many cars legally on the road...
...So what we have here is one more instance in which the burden of regulation will be overwhelmingly borne by the poor...
...A recent Chronicle article noted the "strong demonstrations of the growing political power of the environmentalists on the coast...
...still hasn't picked up the story, and the Los Angeles Times has scarcely mentioned it...
...If you stop building new housing you hurt the poor downstream...
...Dies hard...
...Cars are going to become even more expensive than they already are...
...The policy elites who run the country resent the American "love affair with the automobile," of course, and particularly the unchained condition of the working class...
...For "people" we should read "the policy-making elite...
...Plans for new roads and "cookie cutter developments" are today "little more than dusty maps buried in county archives...
...We need to be reminded on such occasions that the First Amendment applies to all and that the media enjoy no special privilege...
...In the inevitable poll it was "found" that 70 percent have a favorable or very favorable impression of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system...
...In the 1970's, thousands of employees were laid off by the state Division of Highways...
...I drove there with friends who happen to own a couple of older cars...
...BART's construction was kept going with funds set aside for a new "southern crossing" bridge across the bay, never built...
...A dozen or so demonstrators wearing sun hats and recreational clothes sat in the back of the room but were soon shooed out by media types in regulation attire...
...Sinister plot...
...The pollster, paid for in part by the Pew Charitable Trust, was quoted as saying: "People believe that the future has to belong to public transit because there's just so much capacity on the roads and freeways...
...The man from the American Lung Association said the new regs were "part of our effort to push for a smokefree outdoor program," and Air Pollution Control officer Norman Covell said that "everybody has danced to the tune of regulation in California," including Campbell's Soup...
...CAPITOL I D E A S by Tom Bethell a science talk show on KGO...
...Until talk radio got into the act, that is...
...We heard from a woman from the Natural Resources Defense Council who said that "io,ooo people die needlessly each year," then from another who said "I am a mom and I have asthma," then from another asthmatic who said she heard the same griping when anti-smoking regulations were introduced...
...The American Spectator • October 19 9 6 19...
...There was very little press coverage of Smog Check II until Disney-owned KSFO and KGO in San Francisco began to hammer away on the subject, week after week...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell's allusions to Kultursmog are quite appropriate to this story, which is about smog, the media, and the cultural war...
...Amendments to the Clean Air Act, signed into law by George Bush in 199o, oblige the states to remove still more particles from the air...
...You could hear muffled booing and roaring coming from the corridor outside, as state legislators came strolling by...
...Those ticky-tacky, cookie-cutter houses must go the way of the smog-belchers...
...The new law was openly debated by the legislature, promulgated in public places, signed into law by Pete Wilson...
...What the planners find so hard to understand is that it is only the free market that helps the poor...
...A California Tea Party Is Being Bom...
...No more than...
...He estimates the new program will cost California consumers $2 billion...
...Suddenly the press conference was over and I ran backstage to ask the Auto Service Station man, Dennis De Cota, if his organization would benefit from the change...
...With the exception of a reporter from KQED, the journalists openly sided with the regulators...
...But where their own agenda is at stake, they have not the slightest intention of doing so...
...It's the migrant workers in their rusted Datsuns, the laborers in their vrooming old Buicks, who are going to be hit the hardest...
...He thought that should double under the new law...
...The new smog standards are set at different levels in different parts of the state, and the air quality in the Bay Area is considered to be okay, even by the smog police...
...Apartment occupancy rates are at record highs-over 98 percent all over the Bay Area...
...But talk radio in L.A...
...But such sentiments cannot be openly expressed...
...As to the limited capacity of roads and freeways, that was created by blocking almost all future road building...
...It is in Los Angeles and Orange Counties that most of the cars are going to fail the test and fall into the bureaucratic bog reserved for "gross polluters...
...I called Martin Keller, a Log Cabin Republican who went to Sacramento with Governor Wilson and landed a job in what he surely expected would be a quiet bureaucratic backwater: chief of the Bureau of Automotive Repair...
...The following placards convey the flavor: "Poor People Need to Drive, Too...
...We're beating the remaining five percent to death with billions that could be better spent elsewhere...
...As the despised populace was officiously turfed out, the sense of class war was strong...
...Most of the remaining pollution comes from stationary sources and from nature...
...I asked him what percentage of cars had failed the test under the old standards...
...Bill Wattenburg, a scientist formerly with Lawrence Livermore labs who now hosts San Francisco, with "no Republicans," as Mayor Willie Brown told Bill Clinton earlier this year, is the last place one would expect something like this to begin...
...Just as the market does not make new automobiles for poor people, so it is with housing: the poor "inherit" older housing that the upwardly mobile have vacated...
...TOM BETHELL is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution and TAS's Washington correspondent...
...Without so much as a travel permit they are allowed to roam about freely in their horrid little smog-belchers, shunning the public transportation that has been so thoughtfully provided for them, and taking up valuable freeway space...
Vol. 29 • October 1996 • No. 10
