Hector De La Torre Makes His Mark on California Air Resources Board

Gray hair seems close to Hector De La Torre’s temples and his gait is slower than earlier than.

But after I met him not too long ago, one morning in his hometown of South Gate, the veteran politician from southeastern Los Angeles County nonetheless appeared like a civic marvel boy.

The 56-year-old first got here to prominence within the late Nineteen Nineties as a metropolis councilman who helped root out corruption that had plagued the town because it transitioned from a white majority to a Latino majority. Voters then despatched him to the state Assembly from 2004 to 2010.

That was his final elected workplace. But his affect has solely grown, and never simply in Southeast Los Angeles. Since 2011, he has served on the California Air Resources Board, a strong company higher often known as CARB that’s making an attempt to make the state a world chief in lowering emissions, and basically change the best way residents dwell.

No extra new combustion-engine automobiles after 2035? CARB in charge. Ban ornamental chrome plating? CARB. Mandatory zero-emission engines for short-haul ferries, locomotives, and an formidable push to make California carbon impartial by 2045? CARB, CARB, CARB: This is only a small sampling of what De La Torre and his fellow council members have enacted over the previous two years, to a lot controversy.

I wrote on this column about how CARB’s actions too usually come throughout because the chimeras of fanatics who don’t appear to think about how working-class individuals may afford to dwell in a purified paradise. That’s why I needed to fulfill De La Torre, who’s now CARB’s second-longest serving member.

If anybody can persuade me and my fellow fossil gas advocates to surrender our gas-powered lawnmowers, vibrant bumpers, and fleets of carbureted automobiles, it is him.

He is the son of Mexican immigrants from Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, a city whose Southern California diaspora is as rancho libertarian because it will get. His grandfather was sprayed with DDT whereas getting into the nation to work as a bracero within the Nineteen Fifties; a great-uncle was San Toribio Romo, a Catholic martyr killed by anticlerical authorities forces in Mexico within the Twenties.

“When you may have a saint within the household,” De La Torre chuckled, “it’s onerous to not wish to do the suitable factor.”

We have been standing on the nook of Tweedy Boulevard and California Avenue, the place two murals celebrating South Gate’s industrial heyday coated two electrical containers. These have been the businesses of De La Torre’s youth (Firestone, Bell Foundry, GM, Maas Chemical) that created middle-class jobs however remodeled Southeast Los Angeles into Southern California’s Rust Belt with layoffs and closures within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s, leaving contaminated websites all through the area.

“I inform individuals we’re in the course of the subsequent industrial revolution,” De La Torre mentioned. Diesel vans and buses roared previous. The stench of their fumes was thick as fog. We had to make use of our outdoors voices to talk over a live performance of horns and engines. “And it’s a clear revolution. There are merchandise to be made. There’s work to be performed. And this time, now we have to have a objective.”

De La Torre is an environmentalist by chance. Growing up, he thought everybody else suffered from burning lungs from taking part in outdoors an excessive amount of, and he imagined that bronchial asthma and respiratory issues have been only a lifestyle in Southern California. His perspective modified within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, when he labored as a legislative director for then-Congressman Richard Lehman of Fresno.

“I needed to take care of air air pollution points,” he mentioned. “And after I got here dwelling (as a councilman for South Gate), one of many first points that got here up was trucking corporations wanting to construct warehouses. Fresno had the identical downside. And my place was at all times, ‘No, hell no, we don’t need warehouses. We don’t need all of the vans.’ It’s unhealthy sufficient as it’s.”

In his first yr in Sacramento, De La Torre launched clear air laws, however “it was a killing subject for environmental laws. And everybody was tearing their hair out and going loopy and saying, ‘Who is chargeable for this? Who is killing these legal guidelines?'”

He and others created Green California, a coalition of environmental activists and nonprofits, to coordinate priorities. De La Torre served as their legislative level man.

“In the remainder of my time within the Legislature, I’d say the worst we ever did on these payments was 85 p.c approval,” he mentioned, nodding vigorously. “It utterly modified the dynamic.”

The solar was beating down onerous, so we walked away from the murals and stopped within the shade of a close-by tree.

“It’s superb to me that I’ve been there virtually twice so long as I’ve been within the Legislature at this level,” De La Torre mentioned of CARB. Then-Governor Jerry Brown initially appointed him to the board, and former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon reappointed him in 2018 to a six-year time period. “It’s superb to look again at the whole lot we’ve completed.”

He quickly realized that CARB and others within the California environmental motion needed to implement radical options to fight local weather change, whereas additionally anticipating working-class resistance.

“Climate change points don’t actually encourage” these communities, he reasoned, “however air pollution in your neighborhood? Absolutely.”

Hector De La Torre is pictured at South Gate. He is the second longest-serving member of the California Air Resources Board, the company charged with regulating emissions.

(Ringo Chiu / For the Times)

During his tenure, CARB has centered closely on lowering air high quality emissions, an emphasis De La Torre mentioned saves lives. He pulled out his smartphone to point out me a 2012 map from that yr’s Multiple Air Toxics Exposure Study (MATES), a survey performed each 5 years by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. It tracks the place air air pollution is heaviest in Southern California, and the map featured swathes of deep purple surrounding the 710 Freeway, which runs by southeast Los Angeles.

This is the place the carcinogenic results of air air pollution are most extreme, fueled primarily by diesel emissions, which account for 8 p.c of Southern California’s complete emissions however contribute greater than 70 p.c of cancer-causing particles.

De La Torre then confirmed me the identical map, this time from the 2021 MATES research. The darkish purple bands had virtually utterly disappeared.

Southeast Los Angeles on the map “remains to be fuchsia,” he mentioned. “But (carcinogenic emissions) have demonstrably decreased. What occurred in that point? Our rules have modified in that point. That’s the one distinction. People dwell in the identical place. Same freeways, identical factories, identical the whole lot. That’s why I’m at all times speaking about killing diesel on CARB.”

Less most cancers is nice and all, I mentioned, however I do not dwell close to a freeway. Why ought to I settle for rules that intrude with the sort of automotive I drive?

He laughed and admitted that automotive tradition has a stranglehold on California. He doesn’t drive an electrical automobile himself, as a result of no present mannequin can accommodate his 6-foot-5 stature. “But the market is catching up. More than 25 p.c of new-car gross sales in California have been zero-emissions final (quarter). That’s not us. That’s not our mandate. That’s the selection that’s being made by shoppers.”

I responded that air high quality rules enacted in 2008 on the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles price my father his job as an impartial truck driver as a result of he didn’t have the cash to switch his outdated truck and it was too outdated to justify a mortgage to purchase a brand new one.

“We’re incentivizing the hell out of” truckers to modify to cleaner automobiles, De La Torre mentioned. He talked about CalSTART, a CARB-funded nonprofit that provides rebates for switching to greener engines. “Every time they open up a pot of cash for truckers, they get extra requests than they’ll pay. So it’s taking place.”

We appeared towards the highway, the place an engine had made a loud bang.

“We’re not simply throwing stuff away,” he mentioned. “We’re not simply going all out. We’re like, ‘OK, how do these items come collectively so we will have this market and everybody may be part of it?'”

De La Torre by no means expressed judgment throughout our hour-long dialog, and his remaining response about Luddites like me was completely rational, even empathetic.

“It’s about habits. We’ve grown up with these items. And so we predict, ‘Oh, that is the one method to go.’ But when individuals inform me how onerous it’s to cost automobiles or this or that, I say we have had the comfort of fuel stations for lower than 100 years. We act as if it has been this fashion for the reason that cavemen. No!

“We’re simply making one other transition to a different expertise, and it is going to be somewhat uncomfortable at first. But finally, it is going to develop into the norm, and we’ll simply adapt.”

As if on cue, a Prius slid up a driveway whereas accelerating down an alley. Its driver was a tattooed man with a shaved head.

De La Torre smiled.

“A bit calculation drive a hybrid. I imply, come on!”