The new all-electric Nissan Leaf. (Photo: Josh Cassidy)

This week, California officials are voting on the toughest new regulations in the country to promote cleaner cars. If passed, by 2025, 15% of new cars and trucks sold in the state would have to be powered by batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or other technology that produces little or no air pollution.

These kind of tough mandates have been tried before and they failed. But officials are confident that era of electric vehicle as finally arrived in California. That’s becoming the case in the Bay Area, which has been a strong market for advanced cars since the first Prius came out a decade ago.

“This is a Prius V,” says Joe Testa at Downtown Toyota in Oakland, showing one of several new Prius models that Toyota is releasing this year. “It’s the longer, wagon style, so it has a little more room.” Testa says there’s already a waiting list for the new Prius Plug-in, which comes out in March.

Toyota came out with hybrids ahead of other carmakers, maybe because the company anticipated changes in the market. Or, as some believe, it was due to a California state agency.

“We have been at the forefront of encouraging, and some would people would say forcing, new technologies. The Prius hybrid electric vehicle is an example of that,” says Tom Cackette. Chief Deputy Director of the California Air Resources Board.

California’s Clean Car History

Cackette says to see California’s legacy of shaping national car policy, you have to go back to 1975. The state had a growing smog problem, so the air board required cars to have catalytic converters. The federal government followed. California then tightened air pollution rules for cars. And tightened them again. “And almost in every case, the federal government would follow two, three, four, five years later.”

Today, new cars emit 99 percent less smog than cars did in the 1960s. “It’s probably the most successful environmental program in the world,” says Cackette.

Now, California has a new goal: dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change. Transportation accounts for 40% of the state’s emissions. “The number one strategy to reduce greenhouse gases is these car standards,” he says.

The proposed standards would cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars in half by 2025. “We actually worked very closely under the federal government under the Obama Administration and we’ve jointly developed the standards. So they won’t just apply in California. But they’ll apply nationwide.”

Meeting these tougher standards will raise car prices by about $1900, but Cackette says those costs would be offset by fuel savings.

Jumpstarting Electric Car Sales

On top of that, California is taking an even bolder step, requiring automakers to sell increasing numbers of clean cars in the state. By 2025, they’d have to sell almost a million and half vehicles that run on electricity or hydrogen fuel cells.

The thing is – California has tried this before. And it didn’t work. “I guess I would call it a little too visionary perhaps,” says Cackette. In 1990, the Air Resources Board mandated that 10 percent of new car sales be “zero emission” cars by 2003.

“Obviously that didn’t happen. The price of gas was cheap in those times. The price of the technologies were high,” he says. The air board loosened the rules to include hybrid cars and cleaner gasoline engines, which he says drove carmakers to develop them faster.

Now, Cackette believes that technology has come of age. Nissan is selling the all-electric Leaf and Chevy is selling the Volt, a plug-in hybrid. And there’s another big difference.

Automakers Onboard

“The car manufacturers were adamantly opposed to the concept of government telling them they needed to build a new type of technology. That’s changed.”

“You are seeing more agreement between automakers and California and the federal government,” agrees Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington DC.

“Automakers have invested billions of dollars in these technologies. And so in some ways we have similar interests. Our interest in recouping our investment is now aligned with the societal imperative to get more of these vehicles on the road,” she says.

Bergquist says meeting the mandate calling for carmakers to sell a certain number of clean vehicles will ultimately depend on consumers. “There’s still a concern about what the consumer acceptance of these technologies is going to be and that can make a mandate very scary.”

Groups Push for Tougher Rules

“We think California could be bolder,” says Don Anair is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit group that supports even stronger clean car rules.

“We need that technology to advance for the technology cost to come down and make these vehicles accessible to more and more consumers. By having a more aggressive standard, that gives more certainty to investors that California is committed.” Anair wants to see tougher standards sooner rather than later, since it takes 15 years on average for the entire fleet of cars on the road to turn over.

If the new rules are successful, electric cars could be adopted at a much faster pace. Tom Cackette of the Air Resources Board says they’re doing all they can to encourage consumers to buy them, including funding a popular rebate program and working with companies to build an electric car charging infrastructure.

“Right now, you’ve got to sort of have a jumpstart to this whole process and in the absence of a jumpstart, there’s a chance that it will fail,” he says.

A projection of how zero emissions vehicles like electric cars will be 87% of all cars on the road in California by 2025. Source: California Air Resources Board.

The coal-fired San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico. (Photo: Matt Preusch)

"We currently have unit four offline, but units one, two and three are operating at full load," says Pat Themig, Vice President of Generation for PNM, the New Mexico utility that runs the plant.

"If you see the line where the stack is, everything going behind that is scrubber," he says, pointing past a towering smokestack.

Those scrubbers remove pollutants from the air emissions. But PNM has struggled to meet air quality standards and last month, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the plant to install new pollution control equipment. Those costs are generally passed on to the power plant owners, which, in this case, are utilities in Arizona, New Mexico and California. The San Juan Generating Station supplies power to several California cities and the Southern California Public Power Authority.

"People would be very surprised to know, particularly in Los Angeles, that historically, more of our electricity comes from coal fired power than from any other source," says Evan Gillespie of the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign.

"Several decades ago, Los Angeles made a number of bad bets on coal fired power plants – that that would be the way of the future. That has clearly turned out to not be the case," he says.

Gillespie is talking about one particular utility: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP). It's the largest municipal utility in the country.

Challenges for Los Angeles Utility

"We get about 40 percent today from coal and that is all out of state coal," says General Manager Ron Nichols. It comes from two coal-fired power plants, the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.

Historically, coal has been attractive to utilities for two reasons: it's reliable and cheap. "Coal tends to come around 5 to 6 cents a kilowatt hour. Our renewable portfolio today is around about 11 cents," says Nichols.

But that's changing, according to Nichols and most of the energy industry. Renewable energy is getting cheaper, while coal is getting more expensive due to stricter air pollution rules.

Two years ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa set a goal for DWP. "I'm directing the CEO of the Department of Water and Power to take every action necessary to reach these goals and eliminate the use of coal by 2020."

Meeting that 2020 goal isn't something DWP managers have committed to. That's because DWP's contract with the Utah coal plant isn't up until 2027. Nichols says ending it early is difficult because they have to negotiate with the plant's many owners.

But perhaps the bigger challenge is: that coal power has to be replaced with something else.

"Within a decade and a half, we're going have replaced on the order of 70 percent of our total power supply. And for a utility that thinks in decades, that's rocket fast," says Nichols.

DWP must generate a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, according to state law. But the problem with solar and wind power is that it fluctuates. The sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind stops blowing. Utilities often use electricity from natural gas power plants to fill in power gaps. But DWP has a problem there too.

Billion-Dollar Revamp for Natural Gas Plants

DWP relies on three coastal natural gas power plants, including the Haynes Generating Station in Long Beach. The 1800-megawatt power plant was built more than 50 years ago.

"If we walk out here, I'll show you how we get the ocean water," says DWP projects manager Nazih Batarseh. "For these old power plants, we use ocean water for cooling. And then we return it back into the ocean."

The technique is known as once-through-cooling. Everyday, almost 700 million gallons of seawater is pumped through power plant. That water holds fish larvae and plankton that die in the process. So last year, the State Water Resources Control Board ruled that coastal power plants must switch to a new cooling method over the next decade.

"It's a huge project. It is something that requires us to take plants down, plant by plant, and completely rebuild them. And those are plants that are key to our reliability," says Nichols.

Ron Nichols says rebuilding three natural gas plants will cost DWP $2.2 billion dollars. The utility recently convinced the water board to give it an extension to 2029.

Add that to investing in more renewable energy and moving away from coal power and it's a challenging time for the utility.

"It is a transition that every utility in the country will make says," Evan Gillespie of the Sierra Club.

Gillespie says Los Angeles's challenges are a snapshot of what utilities around the country will be facing as the country gradually puts national global warming rules in place. And he says those that embrace renewable energy first will benefit the most.

"A lot of these investments, while they create a lot of jobs, jobs that we desperately need, these are also investments that are going to modernize the utility. And I think the opportunity here in Los Angeles is to help provide that roadmap to help these other utilities around the country manage that transition," says Gillespie.

^{Mount Diablo is seen with its foothills from Wildcat Canyon Road near Inspiration Point in the Berkeley Hills. Photo courtesy Seán O'Hara of Flickr under Creative commons license. Photos by Andrew Alden unless otherwise indicated.}

Mount Diablo, in the heart of the East Bay, is an interesting mountain in many ways. It has fossils. It has a lot of serpentinite in it, with the accompanying serpentine plant community. It's been mined for mercury and other metals. It's an exceptional structure even in a region of crazy-complicated tectonic structures. But I expect to get into the geological details some other time. Because first of all, Mount Diablo is just there.

Mount Diablo was always a landmark, so widely visible around the Bay and central California that in 1851 its peak was named the base line for land divisions. Around here and across the majority of California and all of Nevada, every township and section is numbered in relation to the north-south Mt. Diablo Meridian and the east-west Mt. Diablo Base Line. (Full details are given by the Mount Diablo Surveyors Historical Society.)

Today few of us have any awareness of land division, and we can simply enjoy the peak's prominence as we drive Bay Area roads or hike the hills. Around the Bay proper, Mount Diablo peeks over the Berkeley Hills as seen from Corona Heights in San Francisco . . .

. . . or from the hills above Marin City, where the "devil's mountain" overlooks Angel Island.

To see the peak's full extent we need to cross the hills of the East Bay, or at least climb them. Here the mountain is seen from the Los Buellis Hills, east of San Jose, looking up the valley formed by the Calaveras fault.

Once over the hills, your every vista centers around Diablo whether it's the view from Oakland . . .

. . . or from the Tassajara Valley . . .

. . . or from the Delta:

_{Photo courtesy Mark Johnson of Flickr under Creative Commons license}

On Interstate 5, Mount Diablo can be spotted from the Dunnigan Hills in the north to near Patterson in the south. From state route 99 it's visible from a much longer stretch, but only if the conditions are right. In fact, instead of driving everywhere to determine Mount Diablo's viewshed, it's more efficient to visit the peak itself on a perfect day and look outward. There's a handy sign pointing out what's possible on a perfect day.

_{Photo courtesy George Kelly of Flickr under Creative Commons license}

I've been up there on a perfect day, and while it's not geometrically possible, atmospheric refraction has allowed me to spot Mount Shasta. An example of a typical excellent (not perfect) day shows Pyramid Peak in the central Sierra Nevada.

_{Photo courtesy advencap of Flickr under Creative Commons license}

Such days were once more common. A. J. McCall, standing at the Sierra's crest on September 7, 1849, recorded "a picture of wonderful grandeur and magnificence":

"Below were a succession of innumerable pine-covered mountain peaks, growing less and less until they disappeared in a broad, yellow valley sweeping north and south until lost to view, and beyond another range of mountains. This was the far-famed Sacramento Valley, nearly a hundred miles distant. The purity of the atmosphere rendered vision almost illimitable, showing every line and shadow distinctly." (source)

Today the activities of ten million modern Californians make such purity almost unattainable—especially around Labor Day.

There's a common belief that when pioneer scout Kit Carson guided the Fremont Expedition over the Sierra in the winter of 1844 (at today's Carson Pass), he recognized his position by spotting Mount Diablo: "There is the little mountain—it is 15 years since I saw it; but I am just as sure as if I had seen it yesterday." But Bob Graham and Peter Lathrop argue convincingly that it was not Diablo, but the whole Coast Range that Carson meant. That's too bad; it was a good story.

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Almond shells at the West Biofuels biomass test plant in Woodland, California.

When you think of where energy comes from, you might picture a power plant or maybe wind mills. You probably wouldn't think of a pile of 12 tons of almond shells.

California is hungry for renewable energy. Solar and wind power have taken off thanks to the state's ambitious clean energy goals. But there's another way to generate electricity — by using organic material like agricultural and tree waste. It's known as biomass power.

Matt Summers is an engineer with West Biofuels at their test power plant near Sacramento. California, by the way, is the world leader in growing almonds.

"So we've got more almond shells than anybody else. And you know, we know some companies that handle almond shells and they're always looking for somewhere to take them," says Summers.

Listen to the QUEST radio story How Green Is Biomass Energy?

But where some see a waste product, Summers sees an energy source.

"So this is the heart of the West Biofuels process," he says, pointing to a tower of industrial equipment that turns almond shells into electricity. First, the waste, or biomass, is fed into a reactor.

"We call it reforming, so we're re-forming what's biomass, what's almond shells into smaller particles that are gases," says Summers, describing their gasification technology.

The gas that's produced is a lot like natural gas, so it goes to an advanced generator where it's burned to produce electricity.

But this is where biomass is different from other renewables. The generator produces air pollution, unlike, say, a solar farm. So Summers and his team use pollution control technology to meet California's air quality standards.

Still, despite the emissions from biomass plants, many say there are big benefits to using waste as an energy source.

"Waste is pretty green," says Jim Boyd, a member of the California Energy Commission. "There's enough material out there to make thousands of megawatts of electricity."

Matt Summers of West Biofuels stands next to their fuel source.

There are a lot of unused energy sources out there, Boyd says, like construction debris and orchard cuttings. Biomass energy also has one big advantage over other renewables – reliability. Wind and solar power are variable since the sun and wind aren't available all the time.

"And instead of just thinking about building more natural gas plants to fill the void, we could utilize biomass plants because they are seven by 24 once you get them up and running," says Boyd.

But while other renewables are booming, biomass is on the decline in California. After dozens of plants were built in the 1980s, today, only a handful of new plants are being proposed. In 2009, biomass provided about two percent of the state's electricity.

"There's a great infatuation with wind and solar and very rare references to biomass and some of us are trying to turn that around a little bit," Boyd says.

One problem is simply cost. Biomass facilities need tons and tons of material and trucking it in from around the state isn't very economical.

The other issue gets back to the concern of whether biomass energy is really as green as supporters say. There's the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from biomass plants. Another controversy is over one particular fuel source: trees.

All those years of Smokey Bear and fire suppression in California have created very dense forests – which are at high risk for fires. Both private and public land managers have been trying to reduce that fuel load.

"In a lot of cases you'd do thinning operation where you take out some of the trees, usually the smaller trees, the less valuable trees," says Bill Stewart, a forestry specialist at the University of California – Berkeley.

Stewart says most of the material removed from forests is either burned or left to decay. So there's a lot of interest in using forestry waste in biomass plants.

But Debbie Hammel of the Natural Resources Defense Council says, "I think if you're talking about waste, it's important to define what you mean."

"If you take too much of that residue out of the forest, you're going to have an impact on the forest floor, the fertility of the soil, erosion and potentially wildlife habitat."

Hammel says there's a major debate over how much thinning is good for a forest. So, she worries that a larger biomass industry would create incentives to over-harvest forests. That's why Hammel says not all biomass is equal – and why waste like almond shells should be used before forest cuttings.

"There is a role for biomass done right, but it's a smaller role I think than some people imagine," says Hammel.

Looking ahead, Hammel says the next thorny issue is calculating the greenhouse gas emissions from biomass plants, which can be tricky since the fuels come from a number of sources. That's something the federal Environmental Protection Agency is reviewing now.

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A tree branch covered in nitrogen-loving lichen. (Credit: Martin Hutton)

Pollution from cars and trucks blows into the Sierra Nevada mountains, where it can have a dramatic impact on the ecosystem. In Yosemite National Park, researchers are trying to gauge that impact by using an unexpected tool: a fungus called lichen.

Yosemite Valley is known for its granite landmarks: Half Dome, El Capitan and the sheer walls that surround the valley. But according to botanist Martin Hutton, the granite isn't really visible.

"Basically what we’re looking at is lichens. We barely even see this rock. It’s all lichens."

Listen to the QUEST radio story Lichen Point to Pollution.

The southern walls of Yosemite Valley are covered in black crust. Last year, Hutton repelled hundreds of feet down the cliffs to survey the species living here. "All sorts of different colors. All sorts of different shapes. They're really special. There are no trees up there. There's no shade." Hutton says there are more than 500 species of lichen in Yosemite and many grow where few other plants can.

Lichens Connected to the Air

Despite looking tough, lichens are some of the most sensitive organisms in the ecosystem. Hutton uses a fallen tree branch to point out the species living there. "I see really deep saturated orange and that is Caloplaca. And there's just this beautiful just deep saturated yellow and that is the yellow of the Candelaira."

The yellow lichen, Candelaira, is warning sign for Hutton. "If you were to go to place with very little air pollution, then you would not be seeing this many of these Candelaria species," said Hutton.

While most plants get nutrients from the ground, lichens get much of what they need from the air. "They are basically directly connected to the atmosphere. They're connected to all of it. They see all of it. It’s one of the reasons they’re so sensitive," said Hutton.

Lichen are sensitive to changes in the air, especially from air pollution. That makes them an indicator of bigger ecosystem changes. Hutton and his team are taking lichen samples at 300 sites around the park and analyzing them to see what story they tell.

Measuring Pollution in the Ecosystem

Further into a nearby pine forest, Hutton and his team have set up funnels that collect air pollution samples. But it's clear something else has gotten there first. Hutton's equipment is strewn across the ground, the victim of a curious black bear.

"Yeah, basically a bear grabbed this funnel and plucked it off the stake. They just want to make sure that there's no food associated with this plastic funnel," said Hutton.

This is one of 12 sites where researchers are measuring a key ingredient of air pollution: nitrogen. Nitrogen oxides are produced by car and truck exhaust. In Yosemite, nitrogen pollution isn’t only from nearby cars. It also arrives from elsewhere in the state.

"We all have experienced the westerly winds that happen that blow stuff essentially from over the ocean, across the Central Valley and up into the mountains," said Lee Tarnay, Air Resource Specialist at Yosemite National Park.

Air pollution from urban areas is blown into the Sierra Nevada mountains by those westerly winds. And the problem is: nitrogen pollution is sticky. "That gas likes to stick to pine needles and just about anything else. And these trees act as a giant collector for the gases that stream through the air," said Tarnay.

When it rains, the nitrogen pollution is washed off the pine needles and deposited on the ground. As any backyard gardener knows: nitrogen is a fertilizer.

"All plants need nitrogen to grow. And some plants need a lot of nitrogen and some need only very little. And so in Yosemite, we already had enough nitrogen to begin with," said Hutton. Sierra Nevada forests are adapted to low levels of nitrogen.

Impact of Nitrogen Pollution in the Ecosystem

"We're worried that additional fertilizer in Yosemite could have effects that we might not anticipate. We think that the Yosemite is system as is it should be now. So we want to make sure that if there's something harming or changing that balance, then we want to know that," said Hutton.

Hutton says that balance is already under threat by invasive plants and many respond to higher nitrogen levels. Nitrogen can also encourage more ground plants to grow, a major concern in fire country. "If you increase the amount of nitrogen, you have plants that basically fill up the space in between these natural patches. And so that means that fires can spread a lot better."

Reducing car traffic in Yosemite could help cut air pollution. It will also depend on regional air districts across California, several of which, like the San Joaquin Valley, exceed federal air pollution limits. Hutton says he's hopeful that research in Yosemite will help them identify pollution hotspots and manage the changes in the field.

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Bay Area smog, 1968

Reported for KQEDnews.org

For those too young to remember the Bay Area 40 years ago, it’s hard to imagine the mostly clear skies that Bay Area residents enjoy today filled with choking smog from factories, cars and garbage fires.

“Air pollution back in the ‘50s and ‘60s was considerably higher than it is today. What you had back then were very elevated levels of ozone, and of particulate matter from heavy industry and automobiles,” said Jack Broadbent, CEO of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, in San Francisco. ”They used to contribute to levels on the order of three or four times what you see today.“

The Bay Area’s population has nearly doubled since then, to more than 7 million people. But the region’s air has become steadily cleaner. In 1969, there were 65 days when Bay Area air quality exceeded federal health standards. Under those same standards, last year, there wasn’t a single day over the limit.

The reason? The Clean Air Act.

One of the nation’s cornerstone environmental laws, the Clean Air Act turns 40 this week. Sort of.

Although Richard Nixon signed the law in December, 1970, the landmark legislation will be commemorated a bit early at an EPA conference Tuesday in Washington D.C. with a day of celebrations, speeches and public events around the country designed to highlight the public health and environmental benefits from the law.

California has been ahead of the rest of the country in reducing smog. Because of the state’s large population and hot weather, state lawmakers approved the first air pollution regulations in 1946. Since then, California was first to require smog checks for cars, first to ban leaded gasoline, first to require catalytic converters on cars.

“Much of what we’ve done here in the Bay Area is duplicated elsewhere,” said Broadbent. “You can go back east and find our rules just with a different title and different number.”

The Clean Air Act tied all the state rules together. It required the federal government for the first time to set standards for six major types of air pollution: soot, carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and ground level ozone, a major source of smog.

Bay Area factory, 1962

The law ushered in a wave of state and federal standards, from scrubbers on smokestacks to the phase-out of leaded gasoline. Some of the results are dramatic. New cars sold today, with computerized emission systems and other high-tech devices, emit 99 percent less tailpipe pollution than cars sold in 1970.

But the job isn’t done, say health experts and air regulators.

Federal standards have become more stringent, resulting in 13 days last year when the Bay Area exceeded the new national standard for ground-level ozone.

Meanwhile, the pollution from trucks and other diesel-powered equipment, called particulate matter (PM), has until recently largely flown under the radar.

Tiny diesel soot particles are inhaled deep into the lungs and have been shown to cause life-shortening health problems ranging from respiratory illness to heart problems, asthma, and cancer. The California Air Resources Board estimates that diesel soot from ships, trains and trucks causes as many as 2,400 premature deaths statewide each year.

In fact, a recent Air District study concluded that exposure to particulate matter of 2.5 microns in width and smaller (PM 2.5) is by far the leading public health risk from air pollution in the Bay Area, accounting for more than 90 percent of premature mortality related to air pollution.

“We have done a great job of reducing smog levels here in the Bay Area. But there are these communities in and around the Bay Area that still of course, we believe, experience elevated levels of toxic air contaminants,” said Broadbent.

The Air District has identified several “hot spots” or communities at much higher risk of exposure to dangerous levels of diesel particulate and other types of air pollution including Richmond, the West Oakland/ Berkeley corridor and Bayview Hunter’s Point.

The Port of Oakland, a major source of particulate matter pollution in West Oakland

Local, state and federal rules have begun to address particulate pollution. In 2006, the EPA mandated the use of ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel. California has also required that all ships within 24 miles of California ports to burn low-sulfur fuel.

“Increasingly we recognize the health impacts of ozone and of particulate matter,” said Dr. Tom Dailey, chief of pulmonary medicine at Santa Clara Kaiser Permanente Medical Center. “That’s why the diesel engine regulations have been so important. None of us can escape the air that we breathe and the idea of getting these pollutants out of our air has been shown to decrease the incidence of heart attacks, stroke, and asthma exacerbations.”

But Denny Larson of the environmental justice organization, Global Community Monitor, says that while these regulations are a move in the right direction, thousands of toxic air contaminants remain unmonitored and under-regulated in the Bay Area.

“Toxic, cancer-causing volatile organic compounds such as benzene and hydrogen sulfide are extremely dangerous to public health and quite present in the Bay Area particularly around oil refineries and other fossil fuel industries,” Larson said. “Right now, we don’t have federal standards like we do for those smog-forming pollutants for those. And there aren’t a lot of requirements to monitor for them either.”

“We have made significant progress in the 40 years of the Clean Air Act,” he added. “But that’s been limited to a very narrow spectrum of air pollutants and has left out almost entirely the air quality concerns and health of millions of Americans who live near industrial facilities.”

The latest frontier in air regulation is in greenhouse gases.

Both the state Air Resources Board and the Bay Area air district are in the process of writing new regulations to control and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

“We’ve got a fairly aggressive program,” said Broadbent. “We’ve been looking at cities and counties putting grants out to inventory greenhouse gas emissions as well as to put in strategies that are energy conservation type measures. And we were one of the first in the state, possibly the nation, to put a greenhouse gas fee on businesses emitting greenhouse gases.”

Because transportation is still California's largest source of carbon dioxide, with passenger vehicles and light duty trucks creating more than 30 percent of total climate change emissions, state lawmakers in 2002 passed a new law requiring all new cars sold in California to reduce greenhouse emissions 30 percent by 2016.

And nationally, the EPA plans to significantly expand the scope of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from factories, power plants and other industrial source starting next year.

But the new approach is controversial. Some business groups have argued that clean air laws already are costly for industry, and that a new layer of climate change regulation, particularly in a bad economy, will cost jobs. Proposition 23, on California’s November ballot, would suspend AB 32, the state’s landmark greenhouse gas law, until unemployment falls to 5.5 percent for a year.

“I’m glad we’re celebrating this but in some ways, it’s bittersweet,” said Dailey.  "We still have a long way to go.”

MORE VIDEO & AUDIO:

Watch QUEST TV's Earth Day Special:  Where We've Been, Where We're Headed

Listen to QUEST Radio's Earth Day Radio Special: The History of Environmental Justice

Watch QUEST TV's Perilous Diesel

Listen to QUEST Radio's Truckers Clean Up Their Act

Watch QUEST TV's Asthma: What Brought on the Epidemic?

LISTEN TO KQED NEWS INTERVIEW WITH REPORTER AMY MILLER

Marking a Milestone for Clean Air in the Bay Area and Beyond

Federal officials today are marking a milestone in the fight to clean up the nation's environment. Forty years ago, Congress passed the Clean Air Act. The law aimed to tackle the impact of air pollution from cars, industry, and other sources by setting the first nationwide limits on pollutants. Since then, levels of toxic pollutants like lead, ozone and carbon monoxide have dropped dramatically. But the victory hasn't been complete. Particulate pollution from diesel fuel still represents a widespread health risk and battles are still ahead as regulators take on the task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Host Kelly Wilkinson talks about the impact of the Clean Air Act and the pollution challenges ahead with Amy Miller, reporter and producer for KQED's Quest science and environment program.

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• Clean Air Act Turns 40 (green.blogs.nytimes.com)

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Cows at Fiscalini Farms in Modesto, California.

Three years ago, we visited a Central Valley dairy that was taking an innovative approach to its waste problem. Instead of collecting thousands of pounds of cow manure in open holding ponds, Joseph Gallo Farms uses it in a renewable energy technology known as a methane digester.

Methane gas is a natural byproduct of cow digestion. It's produced as bacteria inside their stomach break down food.  That process continues on the back end (so to speak) as cow manure decomposes.

Methane is also a powerful contributor to climate change – about 21 times stronger than carbon dioxide. The UN has estimated that 18 percent of greenhouse gases worldwide come from livestock. (Check out this story from KQED's Climate Watch for more on the sources of methane.)

By capturing methane, dairy digesters keep it out of the atmosphere. But they also create a source of renewable energy. Methane is a natural gas — it can be burned just like propane. So, Gallo Farms pipes the methane over to a generator, which produces enough electricity to run the farm and their cheese plant.

Since our visit, the story has taken an interesting turn. Both Gallo Farms and another dairy with a digester, Fiscalini Farms, are located in the San Joaquin Valley – an area with some of the worst air quality the country. The air district is consistently considered in "non-attainment" – which means they aren't meeting the federal limits on air pollution.

While both dairies' digesters are reducing one kind of pollution, greenhouse gases, they're actually adding to another kind.  Generators, like any other combustion engine, produce nitrous oxide pollution – or NOx – which is a component of smog. Given the smog problem in the valley, the local air district decided to put a pollution limit on the dairy digester generators.

Since then, both dairies have struggled to meet to the limits. Unlike pipeline-quality natural gas, the methane (or biogas) that comes from a digester varies in quality, which affects how much pollution is produced in the generator's exhaust. John Fiscalini of Fiscalini Farms has spent $200,000 on a pollution control device that reduces NOx pollution. But he says it's been a challenging process and he's concerned that other dairies have been discouraged by his experience with regulators.

For more on Fiscalini's story and more about the challenges facing dairy digesters, check out this week's radio story.

Listen to Cow Power Not Cutting It radio report online and check out the slideshow below for more on how dairy digesters work.

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Have you heard about the 1-800-Exhaust program?

One interesting little sidetrack I got stuck on while I was reporting this story was the 1-800-Exhaust program. Maybe you've seen the billboards along I-80 near the Bay Bridge? If not, you will soon. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (the same people who bring you Spare the Air days) has kicked off a new campaign to promote the program. In a nutshell, it allows you to call in (or go online) and report the license plate numbers of cars that seem to be spewing more smoke than they should be.

Then what happens?

Well, some people might be disappointed to hear that there are no punitive consequences for these drivers. No fines, no demand that they report to the nearest smog check station, stat. Instead, the car's registered owner gets a letter in the mail – one BAAQMD spokesman I talked to called it an "informal survey" — asking, among other things, whether the car has been repaired. The response, so far, has been pretty underwhelming.

Last year, just over 10,000 cars were reported, and 10,000 letters sent out. Less than a hundred came back. Twelve people said that their cars had been repaired (it's not clear how many of them had already repaired the cars, and how many did so after receiving the letters).

Air District officials stress that reply rates aren't really the point here. The goal, they say, is to get people to realize that their cars don't operate in a vacuum. How well you maintain your car has real and measurable effects on people's health (including anyone sitting in the back seat).

The letters also let people know about a program that doesn't get a lot of coverage elsewhere, although it should. It's called the Vehicle Buy Back Program, and it's worth $1,000 to anyone who owns a registered car 1989 or older. It's kind of like a local version of Cash for Clunkers. Not hard to see why these programs make so much sense: some of those old cars pollute ten or even a hundred times as much as a new one. That 1966 Volvo I had when I was 17 seems a little less wonderful, in hindsight.

Listen to Smog Checks Made Easy radio report online.

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The House version comes from Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. If it passes, a consumer would get a $3,500 voucher for trading in a truck with 15 miles per gallon in exchange for buying a new truck that gets 16 miles per gallon – a one MPG difference. (If the new truck got 17 miles a gallon, the consumer would earn $4,500). That's why environmentalists complain that the legislation is more about stimulating car sales than it is about getting gas guzzlers off the road.

The Senate version proposed by U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), puts the bar a bit higher. In order to qualify for the $3,500 voucher, that same replacement truck would have to get 20 MPG – five miles per gallon more than the old truck. (An improvement of seven miles per gallon would earn the consumer a $4,500 voucher.)

Interestingly, this is a compromise even for Senator Feinstein herself. Check out her original, more stringent, Cash for Clunkers bill here. Proposed in January, it required stricter efficiency from the replacement vehicle, and would have allowed consumers to use their vouchers for used cars, or for public transit. Those conditions were junked, presumably, because they don't stimulate new car sales.

This article from the Christian Science Monitor, takes the number crunching even farther. Among the details worth considering is the "carbon cost" of making all these new vehicles that consumers will be enouraged to buy, should C4C pass: between 3.5 to 12.4 tons of CO2 per vehicle, according to a Duke economist.

Listen to the Cash for Clunkers radio report online.

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The rate of asthma in children younger than five increased 160
percent between 1980 and 1994.

But asthma researchers are still very much working to figure out what, besides changes in the way asthma is diagnosed, might account for the 160 percent rise in the rate of asthma in children younger than 5 that took place between 1980 and 1994. Our QUEST TV story looks at one interesting hypothesis, called the "hygiene hypothesis." The hypothesis proposes that as certain types of bacteria have become less and less present in our lives, we have developed allergic diseases in response.

I also asked researchers if their findings allowed them to make recommendations to parents on what they might be able to do to help reduce the risk of their children developing asthma. Although our two interviewees were careful to caution how little scientists know with certainty at this point, they were willing to venture some advice, which you'll see in our Web-only video.

Watch the Asthma television story online.

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