The Overhead Wire Daily | February 6th, 2024 | Climate Seriousness

The EPA is preparing to reject an air quality plan for the Los Angeles region put together by the South Coast Air Quality Management District because it won’t do enough to reduce smog. The District plan calls for the Federal Government to reduce 67 tons of emissions a day through the things it can control such as shipping, trains, and aircraft. The EPA then says states can’t tell the Federal Government what to do under the Clean Air Act or the Constitution, and it seems to have degraded into a Spider-Man meme where everyone is pointing at each other as if to find the imposter.

None of these agencies or the state of California seems to really want to deal with the true cause of the problem which is transportation emissions that we continue to make worse with highway expansion after highway expansion while we also slow walk solutions that can reduce the federally regulated airport emissions such as high speed rail. The port of Long Beach is already spending $1.5B to reduce truck trips with trains, why not electrify them? Even CARB, the California agency responsible for reductions in pollutants has said reducing VMT is important, but has punted to other agencies to enforce their mandates that ignore climate impacts of driving expansion.

Punting doesn’t seem to be going well. So maybe this is what the EPA is working towards since the region won’t get federal highway funding if this ends up at an impasse. And the Clean Air Act says that federally funded projects shouldn’t be increasing pollution in already polluted areas. Any other request to reduce driving is politically charged as a recent California Transportation Commission meeting showed. So this might just be the only way to get California to stop expanding highways since no one else will.

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