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This chapter looks at the efforts to protect California's air quality. Public and business demands for automobile control in the United States originated in Los Angeles, and pollution controls for motor vehicles were essentially initiated by the state of California. Following a successful national political campaign that pitted the interests of California against the nation's automotive manufacturers, in 1967, Congress allowed California—and initially only California—to issue its own vehicle emissions standards. Thanks to the unique pollution problems of Los Angeles, the United States became and remains the only country to have two distinctive mobile-source pollution control standards. Many of the themes described throughout this book are illustrated in this chapter. These include the importance of both citizen mobilization and business support for stronger environmental regulations and the progressive development of the state's regulatory capacity, from the creation of the Smoke and Fumes Commission in Los Angeles in 1945 to the organization of air pollution control districts in 1947 and finally the establishment in 1968 of the California Air Resources Board.

This chapter highlights possible solutions to avoid global warming and its consequences for health. An energy policy firm, Energy Innovation, created a model on how current energy policies would impact future carbon emissions. Industry has the greatest potential for cutting back on global emissions through policies focused on more efficient energy production and stricter emissions standards. Power sector (electricity) emissions would decline with renewable energy incentives and improving the grid's capacity to accommodate multiple energy sources. Transportation sector emissions would drop with stricter fuel economy standards and more green urban transportation systems. The energy consumption of buildings could decrease with more efficient building codes and appliance standards. Meanwhile, carbon pricing is a cross-sector policy that would create carbon taxes and caps, while land use emissions could be reduced through policies aimed at reducing deforestation and forest degradation.

The first step, but by no means the last, in the process of improving the environmental performance of manufacturing plants, firms, and industries in East Asia requires the building and strengthening of traditional environmental regulatory systems. Without this, policy integration is not likely to work and without effective policy integration, governments in East Asia are not likely to be able to link environmental intensities reduction policies to the technological capabilities policies of economic and industrial development agencies. Because most governments in East Asia pursued ‘grow first, clean up later’ environmental strategies and because traditional economic and industrial development agencies are so closely linked to their counterparts in private industry, many (Lee and So 1999; Lohani 1998; Smil 1997; Eder 1996; Bello and Rosenfeld 1992) are skeptical of the ability of governments in this region to build and sustain traditional environmental regulatory agencies. But there is growing evidence that numerous governments in this region, including in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia in Southeast Asia and Taiwan Province of China, China, and Korea in Northeast Asia have made significant progress in building traditional command and control regulatory agencies (Rock 2002a; Aden et al. 1999). Everywhere in East Asia, this was and is a lengthy, costly, difficult, contentious, and time-consuming process. The speed and alacrity with which governments succeed depends on an intricate interplay of international pressures, the nature of domestic politics, the capacity and capabilities of the state, and the rapidity with which new ideas about the environment spread (Rock 2002a). Sometimes, as in Taiwan Province of China, international pressures associated with the loss of diplomatic recognition and citizen pressures associated with democratization have exerted powerful influences on the ruling party, the KMT, to build a strong and capable environmental regulatory agency as a way of demonstrating to the world and Taiwan’s citizens that the government was environmentally responsible (Rock 2002a). Other times, as in Singapore, a benevolent despot committed to creating a clean and green Singapore used the powers of government and a highly capable bureaucracy to create a credible environmental agency (Rock 2002a).

Indonesia has long had poor standards of environmental governance, with the Soeharto government making the environment largely subservient to the national development imperative. In this chapter we show that in the post-Soeharto era, Indonesia’s environmental law has been significantly reformed, imposing more stringent emissions and waste standards, and more comprehensive environmental impact assessment requirements. However, contradictory regulations issued by national and subnational institutions have complicated enforcement of environmental laws, which was already rarely successful. Worse, these institutions tend to deflect responsibility for monitoring and enforcement to others. This is possible because their relative jurisdictions are generally unclear and hence contested. Many of these impediments to an effective system are brought into sharp relief by the Sidoarjo Mudflow disaster, discussed as a case study in this chapter.