California Greening /

When Fran Pavley started her first term in the California Legislature in 2001, she didn’t attract much attention. She was just another freshman, a former middle-school teacher who had earned environmental credentials on the state Coastal Commission and the Air Resources Board. She represented car country, a district straddling Los Angeles and Ventura counties in Southern California, a land of beaches, good weather, and traffic.

During her first month, she had a visit from Russell Long of Bluewater Network, a small San Francisco nonprofit founded under the wing of conservationist David Brower’s Earth Island Institute. President George W. Bush had just reneged on a campaign promise to reduce greenhouse gases after withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol. Long had a request: Would she back a bill to cut carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks?

Pavley accepted. “I had not appreciated the politics of the bill, which was probably good,” she told me in Sacramento, where she is now in her fourth term. “I didn’t know Russell had gone to two dozen others first. I had no clue that it would raise the red flag to all the oil companies, let alone the car manufacturers and the car dealers.”

After nearly two years of a classic David and Goliath battle pitting wily environmental strategists against corporate money and power, Pavley pushed through the first-of-its-kind measure. Carmakers proclaimed the end of the open road. But Hollywood celebrities and respected scientists trekked to Sacramento, and rabbis and priests ran ads pleading for public support.

The U.S. Senate may have failed to ratify the Kyoto treaty and Bush may have taken the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter out of global accords. But the American state with more cars than all but six countries passed the world’s first mandatory controls on carbon dioxide from tailpipes.

Known as the Pavley law, the Clean Car Regulations, or Assembly Bill 1493, stood as a model across the world. If national governments fail to act, regional legislatures can take action on their own. Fourteen other U.S. states adopted identical regulations requiring a 30 percent reduction in emissions by 2016. Along with California, these account for 40 percent of all new car sales.

In May 2009, President Barack Obama proposed national emission and mileage requirements based on California’s. By 2016, every new vehicle sold in America would be required to meet the standards of the Pavley law. Automakers, financially on their knees, agreed to end five years of litigation.

Endgame / Essays / Jane Kay