Chapter 6

Clean Environment Initiative’s Lessons

Excerpted from around page 13.

By 1972 a Los Angeles Air Pollution Control District insider smuggled documents to then LA Supervisor and newscaster Baxter Ward that verified what Ed's nose knew all along. The documents, in graphic form here, depict how the oil industry was also a key conspirator in mugging the lungs of Angelenos, and probably killing billions of offshore oxygen producing phytoplankton.

If cars were the major source of pollution, why then on Christmas Eve and the dark hours surrounding it, when almost everyone has their 4-wheel polluter holstered in the garage, was air pollution so high? The answer was blowing in the wind around the oil stacks in Los Angeles.

   While people were in their homes

            Waiting to play with   Santa’s handiwork ---

Pollution, not the clean, smooth jet stream of reindeers --              

                                    Filled the Christmas air...

By 1974 one of Ed's ride takers was Tom Quinn, who ran Jerry Brown's first gubernatorial campaign and was appointed director of the California Air Resources Board. Quinn was duly impressed, or depressed. As Air Resource Board Director, he went about instituting some of the increased fines and technological improvements that the defeated Clean Environment Initiative had called for in 1972.