Mary Nichols on Tackling Air Pollution in California

On her first trip to Los Angeles in 1969, while a student at Yale Law School, Mary Nichols remembers being astounded by the peculiar color of the air – “a flaming, chemical kind of orange.” At this time, air pollution in Los Angeles was famous for being the worst in the country, with stage one smog alerts declared every few days.

Following this firsthand experience of environmental crisis, Mary moved to California after graduating in 1971 and became a public interest lawyer specializing in air pollution. Today, Mary is an environmental regulator and former Attorney Chair of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), a post she has held twice (1979-1983; 2007-2020). She has also served as California’s Natural Resources Secretary; Senior Staff Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council; Assistant Administrator for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and head of the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.

Following this 50-year career, Mary came to the Bellagio Center in 2023 to work on a book about her experiences as one of California’s top air pollution and climate officials, Lessons from the Front Lines of the Battle Against Climate Change, which does not yet have a release date.

How is your work helping to address the climate crisis?

When I finished law school in the early 1970s, the basic environmental laws of our country were being introduced: the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act. I got a job with a new group called the Center for Law in the Public Interest (CLIPI), where we grappled with basic questions about how these new statutes could be enforced and who could sue on behalf of affected communities.

That’s when I began to specialize in air pollution law. Air pollution is in many ways, by its very nature, an environmental justice issue. Pollution disproportionately affects children, old people, and those without access to the best housing. Polluting sources tend to be concentrated in low-income communities and communities of color. Pollution is also a classic case of misusing resources, where, primarily as a result of burning fossil fuels, you end up impacting the health of people who didn’t cause the problem to begin with.

I set out to see how we could use the Clean Air Act to remedy pollution in Los Angeles. CLIPI had some successful cases. Keith v. Volpe, which we filed in 1972, intended to stop Century Freeway from being built – the new road would take out thousands of working class homes and cause even more pollution. It took 17 years, but after winning the first court order we ended up with replacement housing for displaced residents and a new light rail transit line down the center of the freeway.

My first solo case, representing the downwind cities of Riverside and San Bernardino, forced the EPA to reject California’s weak plan for reaching public health standards created under the new Clean Air Act, and to come up with a much more aggressive regulatory approach.

It’s been a natural progression from working on air pollution to working on climate, as it’s become obvious that many of the same sources have caused both sets of problems and that many of the solutions are the same. My new book analyzes past successes and failures in the public arena and provides practical advice on how young people who are depressed about the climate crisis can effectively take charge and prevent the worst impacts.

If we can’t find ways to shift more resources, more investments, and more concern into the parts of the world that have not had the opportunities that we’ve had for development and for improving our overall quality of life, we won’t succeed.
Mary Nichols

What breakthroughs need to happen for us to both avoid the worst impacts of climate change and prepare communities to adapt to the new challenges that will arise?

There’s no question that air in California is healthier than it was when I first started doing this work. But data from this summer [2023] has shown that we’ve experienced, on average, the highest temperatures ever recorded on our planet. And although there’s now widespread recognition that this problem is real, and that something has to be done about it, we have a similar lack of political and legal mechanisms to the early ’70s.

The Paris Agreement was the beginning, in a formal way, of recognizing that there’s no longer a bright line between mitigating emissions and adapting to find new ways to live with this warming planet. We can’t just impose more river levies or build more sea walls. We have to do both: stop the hemorrhaging and provide protection at the same time.

And we have to get over the notion that this is something that can be dealt with only at the local level. If we can’t find ways to shift more resources, more investments, and more concern into the parts of the world that have not had the opportunities that we’ve had for development and for improving our overall quality of life, we won’t succeed. The two halves of the globe have to come together.

Democratic societies move slowly. They’re not designed to make quick, autocratic decisions. And we also tend, as humans, not to react very quickly to problems until we’re really convinced that we have to change. So the hard question is how to make the kind of changes that we need desirable for people – not just because they’re scared, but because they’re things that people want.

Government regulations – and a great deal of entrepreneurial energy – have got us to a point where many people have come to the same realization that the switch to a greener economy has tremendous economic and quality of life advantages.
Mary Nichols

What keeps you up at night about achieving these goals? What makes you optimistic?

I am an optimist by nature, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a realist. If you look at history, there are plenty of times when we have delayed or failed to do everything we could to protect ourselves and our environment. And yet we have somehow also managed to make some amazing breakthroughs, such as how we generate electricity. It was only a few years ago that people were saying that renewable electricity was too expensive and unreliable. And that turned around in an incredibly short space of time.

That’s my fundamental basis for optimism: as human beings, as a society, we have tremendous ability when it comes to inventing our way out of terrible situations. Government regulations – and a great deal of entrepreneurial energy – have got us to a point where many people have come to the same realization that the switch to a greener economy has tremendous economic and quality of life advantages.

What keeps me up at night, though, is a question: do we have enough time? How can we make this all happen faster, on a much bigger scale, while avoiding the arrogance of thinking that one solution or technology will solve it all? When we hear experts say we’re not going to make the 2°C target, does that mean we just throw up our hands and despair? Or does it mean we grudgingly, and with great pain, work towards protecting our most vulnerable people and try to keep it from getting even worse?

Learn more: To find out more, visit CARB, the NRDC, the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia, and the Climate Group.

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Bellagio Perspectives: Climate Change

Climate change is the challenge of our lifetimes. The latest Bellagio Perspectives features 11 climate-leader alumni who are driving a range of breakthroughs to tackle the climate emergency, from financing and governance to advocacy and on-the-ground activism.