Decades ago, some unhappy Angeleno wondered why cars couldn’t just run on nice, clean … water? Not for want of trying – cleaner power has created lots of engine experiments, most dramatically Caltech versus MIT in the great electric car race of 1968, a story you’ll hear from the winner. Not all is fresh air and plug-ins: smog has been especially devastating on communities of color, and the Trump administration may pull the plug on that have let California clear its own air.

Whaddya know – the federal government sees the wisdom of working with California and its “queen of green” for cleaner air – up to a point. The Golden State gets its own “secret recipe” gas, but new partners mean new frictions over the smog check program familiar to every behind-the-wheel Californian. 

Well, it took long enough. We finally realized that smog didn’t stop at some city limits line … that burning the family trash in the backyard incinerator wasn’t a good idea … and California started putting muscle into getting the air clean. Governor Ronald Reagan made the Caltech “father of smog” the head of the new state air resources board, TV stations began reporting smog alerts along with weather forecasts, and one stubborn LA county supervisor started his ten-year letter-writing crusade scolding the Big Four automakers about cleaner-burning engines. And a Louisiana gal named Seraphine was tooling around smoggy LA in her Triumph convertible and gas mask. Spoiler: she still lives here.

Living with smog was like living with an obnoxious neighbor. Angelenos tried protesting at city hall. They kept their coughing kids inside. A couple of actors manufactured joke cans of “genuine smog” and sold them to tourists. A few came up with earnest but crackpot solutions, like drilling a smog tunnel in the mountains. But serious pollution cost us serious money. Hollywood shoots had to shut down or move farther out of town to avoid it. And Southern California’s billion-dollar agriculture industry was being literally killed off by smog. One story we tell – of the Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana – made it look like LA had to choose between good jobs and good air, between pink slips and pink lungs.

By the late 1940's, Los Angeles had experienced several extreme smog days -- or "gas attacks" as they were called back then. Everyone had their eyes on wartime factories that had sprung up and were shooting black plumes into the air, but someone had a feeling that the cause might be something else. Arie Haagen-Smit, a Dutch professor at Caltech who would later be deemed the "father of air pollution," was technically supposed to be studying the taste and smell of pineapples when he first began to conduct research into smog. Through letters and interviews with Caltech faculty and historians, we piece together how Haagen-Smit discovered the recipe to smog, and how after he published his results, people weren't exactly ready to hear that their beloved cars were at the root of the problem. 

Don’t blame us – blame our geography! Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes.”  At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos, 130 centuries ago, would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog. Fast forward thousands of years to the early 1940s, and the renowned artist Helen Pashgian, who grew up in Altadena back when the light around LA – once so radiant and cool – was slowly smothered by the blight from wartime industries that hurt her schoolgirl lungs and blotted out the once-glorious vistas.

For decades, the city’s air was so thick and gross with smog that it hid the mountains from view, shut down Hollywood film shoots and sent children home from school with burning lungs and stinging eyes. What was in the air and where was it coming from? No one knew for sure.

L.A. Times Studios presents a special season of Boiling Point: Smoglandia. Hosted by longtime Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison, Smoglandia is a narrative audio series tracing the rise, impact and eventual retreat of L.A.’s most insidious form of pollution: smog.
 

Through interviews with scientists, policymakers, filmmakers and artists who lived through the worst days, Smoglandia explores how Los Angeles became a testing ground for environmental regulation, and how science and innovation transformed public health.

At a moment when our hard-triumphs over smog face new setbacks, Smoglandia explores a landmark victory for the City of Angels, and, through clearer air, looks forward to the lessons we still have to learn — and the battles we have yet to fight.

Los Angeles Times journalist Susanne Rust shares her eye-opening experience documenting her daily interactions with plastic. Despite being an expert on the topic, she was stunned by the sheer volume of plastic in her life, from single-use items to everyday essentials. Susanne and Sammy also discuss the current state of plastic regulation in California, including a much-criticized decision by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Bill McKibben is an acclaimed environmental activist and journalist, and the co-founder of 350.org. As spring training gets underway, Sammy and Bill discuss fossil fuel advertising at Dodger Stadium, and how oil and gas industry “sportswashing” is taking advantage of America’s national pastime.

Sammy Roth talks with Jason Rondou, an assistant general manager at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, about the city’s shift from coal to clean energy. Believe it or not, L.A. still operates a giant coal-fired power plant, more than 500 miles away in rural Utah. In November, DWP is finally closing it — and replacing it with a combination of gas and green hydrogen.