Héctor De La Torre leaves his mark on the California Air Resources Board

Gray hair is sprouting near Héctor De La Torre's temples and his walk is slower than before.

But the veteran politician from southeastern Los Angeles County still seemed like the civic wonder boy when I met him one recent morning in his hometown of South Gate.

The 56-year-old first gained attention in the late 1990s as a councilman who helped root out the corruption that had plagued the city as it transitioned from a white majority to a Latino majority. Voters then sent him to the state Assembly from 2004 to 2010.

That was the last elected office he held. But his influence has only grown, and not just in Southeast Los Angeles. Since 2011, he has served on the California Air Resources Board, a powerful agency better known as CARB that is trying to make the state a world leader in reducing emissions and fundamentally changing the way residents live.

No more new cars with fuel engines after 2035? Blame CARB. Ban chrome plating for decorative purposes? CARBURETOR. Mandatory zero-emission engines for ferries and short-haul locomotives and an ambitious push to make California carbon neutral by 2045? CARB, CARB, CARB – and this is just a small sample of what De La Torre and his fellow board members have enacted over the past two years, generating much controversy.

I have written on this column about how CARB's actions too often turn out to be a fantasy that doesn't seem to consider how working-class people could afford to live in a purified paradise. That's why he wanted to meet De La Torre, who is now CARB's second-longest serving member.

If anyone can persuade me and my fellow fossil fuel reprobates to abandon our gas lawnmowers, glowing bumpers, and fleets of carbureted cars, it's him.

He is the son of Mexican immigrants from Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, a town whose diaspora in Southern California is as libertarian ranchero as they come. His grandfather was sprayed with DDT entering the country to work as a bracero in the 1950s; a great-great-uncle was Saint Toribio Romo, a Catholic martyr killed by anticlerical government forces in Mexico in the 1920s.

“When you have a saint in the family,” De La Torre laughed, “it's hard not to want to do the right thing.”

We were at the corner of Tweedy Boulevard and California Avenue, where two murals celebrating South Gate's industrial heyday covered two electrical boxes. It was the companies of De La Torre's youth – Firestone, Bell Foundry, GM, Maas Chemical – that created middle-class jobs but turned Southeast Los Angeles into the Rust Belt of Southern California with layoffs and closures in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving people contaminated. sites throughout the region.

“I tell people we are in the middle of the next industrial revolution,” De La Torre said. Trucks and diesel buses rumbled past us. The stench of its vapors felt as thick as fog. We had to use our voices outdoors to talk over a concert of horns and engines. “And it is a clean revolution. There are products to be created. There is work to do. And this time, we must have a purpose.”

De La Torre is an accidental environmentalist. Growing up, he thought everyone else also suffered from lung burns after playing outside for too long, and he thought asthma and breathing problems were just a way of life in Southern California. His perspective changed in the mid-1990s, when he worked as legislative director for then-Rep. Richard Lehman of Fresno.

“I had to address air pollution issues,” he said. “And when I came home [as a South Gate councilmember], one of the first problems that I had before me was that of transport companies that wanted to build warehouses. Fresno had the same problem. And my position was always, 'No, hell no, we don't want warehouses.' “We don't want all the trucks. It's bad enough as it is.”

In his first year in Sacramento, De La Torre introduced clean air bills, but “it was a killing field for environmental legislation. And everyone was tearing their hair out and freaking out and saying, 'Who's responsible for this?' 'Who's killing these bills?'”

He and others created Green California, a coalition of environmental activists and nonprofits, to coordinate priorities. De La Torre served as his legislative point of reference.

“In the rest of my time in the Legislature, I would say the worst we've done with those bills was like 85% approval,” he said, nodding vigorously. “It completely changed the dynamic.”

The sun was beating down hard on us, so we moved away from the murals and stood under the shade of a nearby tree.

“It's amazing to me that I've been there almost twice as long as I've been in the Legislature at this point,” De La Torre said of CARB. The then governor. Jerry Brown originally appointed him to the board, and former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon reappointed him in 2018 to a six-year term. “It's amazing to remember everything we've done.”

From the beginning, he realized that CARB and other members of the California environmental movement wanted to implement dramatic solutions to combat climate change, while anticipating resistance from working-class voters.

“Arguments about climate change don't really motivate” those communities, he reasoned, “but pollution in your community? “It absolutely is.”

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

(Ringo Chiu / For The Times)

During his tenure, CARB has particularly focused on reducing air quality emissions, an emphasis that De La Torre believes saves lives. He pulled out his smartphone to show me a 2012 map from that year's Multiple Exposure to Air Toxics Study (MATES), a survey conducted every five years by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. He tracks where air pollution is most intense in Southern California, and the map features dark purple stripes surrounding the 710 Freeway, which runs through southeast Los Angeles.

This was where the carcinogenic effects of air pollution were worst, driven primarily by diesel emissions, which account for 8% of Southern California's total emissions but contribute more than 70% of cancer-causing particles. .

De La Torre then showed me the same map, this time from the 2021 MATES study. The dark purple stripes had almost completely disappeared.

Southeast Los Angeles on the map “is still fuchsia,” he said. “But [carcinogenic emissions have] fell demonstrably. What happened during that time? Our regulations have happened in that time. That is the only difference. People live in the same place. The same highways, the same factories, everything the same. That’s why I talk about ending diesel with CARB all the time.”

Less cancer is wonderful and all, I said, but I don't live near the highway. Why should I adopt regulations that affect the type of car I drive?

He laughed and admitted that car culture has a stranglehold on California. He doesn't drive an electric vehicle himself, because no current model can fit his 6-foot-5 frame. “But the market is getting to that point. More than 25% of new car sales in California were zero-emission last year [quarter]. That's not us. That is not our mandate. It is the consumers who make the decision.”

I responded that clean air regulations enacted in 2008 at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles cost my father his job as an independent trucker because he didn't have the money to modify his old rig and was too old to justify a loan. to buy a new one.

“Now we are strongly incentivizing” truck drivers to switch to cleaner vehicles, De La Torre responded. He mentioned CalSTART, a CARB-funded nonprofit that offers rebates for switching to greener engines. “They are oversubscribed every time they open a money fund for truckers. They receive more requests than they have money. “This is what is happening.”

We looked down the street, where an engine had backfired loudly.

“We're not just throwing things away,” he said. “We're not just putting down the hammer. We thought, 'Okay, how do these pieces come together so that we can have this market and everyone can be a part of it?'”

De La Torre was never judgmental during our hour-long talk, and his final response about Luddites like me was perfectly rational, even empathetic.

“It's about habits. We have grown up with these things. And then we thought, 'Oh, that's the only way to go.' But when people tell me how hard it is to charge cars or this or that, I tell them that we've had the convenience of gas stations for less than a hundred years. We act like it's always been this way since the cavemen. No!

“We are just making another transition to another technology and at first it will be a little uncomfortable. But eventually it will be the norm and we will just adapt.”

As if on cue, a Prius passed through a driveway while speeding down an alley. Their driver was a tattooed man with a shaved head.

De La Torre smiled.

“A bit vato He is driving a hybrid. “Well then!”