In Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly provide a well-documented, highly engaging, and widely relevant account of southern California’s battle with “the beast,” as the authors lovingly refer to smog. Placed firmly in the tradition of good old muckraking journalism, Smogtown covers over sixty years of pollution making and pollution fighting in Los Angeles.

… Despite its clear intention of making a case for environmental awareness and action, Smogtown is not your typical “green’s” diatribe against big business and weak government. No, Jacobs and Kelly are much smarter–and fairer–than that in this book.

As you might expect, they pull no punches when detailing the ways that major corporations, particularly car companies and power producers, create the ingredients of smog. Since well before Los Angeles mushroomed into the megalopolis and mega-market that it is today, various producers have pushed development, consumption, and idyllic comfort to the masses…creating the desire for what those businesses are there to sell.

But along with this critical account of corporate influence, and government complicit weakness, Jacobs and Kelly train the spotlight on southern Californians themselves as key contributors to the very problem that has damaged so many aspects of life in the area.

Jacobs and Kelly give a convincing portrayal of how southern Californians loved and fed the beast even as they tried to kill it. For example, they describe “the image of the two-faced Angeleno” seen by outsiders. This perception, the authors explain, grew from “The community’s schizophrenic attitudes–banish the fumebank, not the mechanical contraption that prodigiously coughs it out”–i.e., the automobile. Similarly, despite tax breaks and other incentives, residents “showed little interest in driving electric vehicles, turning instead to the large sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks that clog state highways today.”

The death of the electric car is particularly ironic and indicative, since the majority of Californians in public and private and corporate life (like many folks today…) banked on some grand technological savior to deal with smog. Anything except change their lifestyles! But because the electric car did not fit the convenience bill, even that potential technological fix got kicked to the curb.

The effects of such selfish resistance to clearly beneficial measures are profound. Smog is still around, after all. But even beyond that localized problem, Jacobs and Kelly observe that nowadays, “the average Angeleno [is] responsible for ten times more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than the average person in the world.”