GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

FIVEThe Establishment ofAutomobile Emission StandardsAS I NOTED in the last chapter, it was in Los Angeles where air pollutiongenerated by the automobile first reached the political agenda. Subsequently,California was the first jurisdiction in the United States to issue automobileemission standards. 1 In order to fully understand the formulation and limitsof California’s clean air policies, in particular those that center on the automobile,researchers must focus their analysis on economic elites. Parallelingmy findings in chapter 3, central to the effort to regulate air pollution emissionsin California are business elites whose economic interests lie in risingproperty values and an expanding local consumer base (i.e., local growthcoalition members).With such elites providing the key political energy behind the effort toimprove air quality in California, especially in the Los Angeles basin, the policyformulation process that established the state’s automotive emission standardscan be most aptly characterized as a negotiation process between locallyoriented economic elites and those national economic forces most closelyassociated with the automobile industry: automobile manufacturers, oil producers,tire makers, etc.I begin this chapter by broadly outlining the history of pro-growthefforts in the Los Angeles area. The area’s population and economic growthare prime causes of its air pollution problem. The second part of this chapterfocuses on the policymaking process that initially established California’sautomobile emission regulatory regime. This process began in the 1940s andended in the 1960s. The importance of the early formulation of California’sautomobile emission regime is that it is here where the contours and trajectoryof the current regime were set. These two parts of the chapter demonstratethat many of the same actors, institutions, and economic interests that69