Suzanne Paulson<\/a>, director of the Center for Clean Air and a professor at UCLA.<\/p>\n“\u200aIt varies obviously from day to day, but it can be easily half the sunlight that is actually not reaching the ground because of the pollution,” Paulson said.<\/p>\n
The drastic difference on a non-polluted day \u2014 with its full direct sun casting hard shadows \u2014 can be seen on clear days, like during the Santa Anas.<\/p>\n
Those winds can be \u201cso strong that they come and basically scour out the whole basin and push all the smog off the coast,” Paulson said. “And sometimes you can see this smog layer out over the ocean.”<\/p>\n
Even as the L.A. light continues its glow, both Wennberg and Paulson said the bad air we experience here in 2026 is nothing like what it was in decades past \u2014 thanks to the pioneering work done by the state and the city.<\/p>\n
‘L.A. smog’<\/p>\n
The first major Los Angeles smog event happened July 26, 1943, and caused panic among the populace who feared the ominous dark haze was a Japanese chemical attack.<\/p>\n
In essence, that was the birth of photochemical smog, often known as L.A. smog, distinct from other serious episodes that had happened in the winter elsewhere.<\/p>\n
But how it was different chemically wasn’t known until the early 1950s, when Caltech professor Arie Haagen-Smit discovered that certain tailpipe pollutants along with industrial emissions get baked by intense sunlight \u2014 and result in L.A. smog.<\/p>\n
By then, the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District was formed, the first in the nation. It was merged with similar entities in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties to create the South Coast Air Quality Management District in 1977.<\/p>\n
“The air quality was horrendous,” Paulson said.<\/p>\n
But through hundreds of laws, from those regulating consumer products like lighter fluid or oil paint, to requiring reformulated gasoline and catalytic converters for cars, the air has become dramatically healthier.<\/p>\n
“Over the years in California, we have really led the world and made what has been a crowning achievement,” she said. “\u200aThe air is 70, 80% cleaner than it was.”<\/p>\n
So much has been done, she said, that regulations have just about reached their limits.<\/p>\n
“We’ve done all the easy things, and it’s just really hard to find additional things that we can regulate to improve the air quality,” she said.<\/p>\n
Bigger changes \u2014 for example, electrifying more vehicles and appliances, and burning less fossil fuel \u2014 will be needed to curb pollution further. Because even at reduced levels, pollutants are still harmful, leading to not just respiratory illnesses but cardiovascular issues and environmental degradation.<\/p>\n
Are we special?<\/p>\n
So is the L.A. light unique?<\/p>\n
Los Angeles’s geological features \u2014 our mountains that trap heat, deserts that produce hot winds and coasts that create cool sea breezes \u2014 all contribute to pollution being held close to ground in a process known as inversion, Paulson and Wennberg noted.<\/p>\n
And the stuff just sits there, stubbornly shrouding the city until the winds come to chase it away.<\/p>\n
But no, the glow in L.A. isn’t special, said Wennberg at Caltech, but our romanticization of it is. And if you are ever curious if pollution is around, he said just look at the ground.<\/p>\n
“\u200aYou’ll see a shadow, but it’ll be much less sharp,” he said. \u200a”When I see the really bad pollution here, it still makes me very sad. I think we need to, you know, make shadows great again.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sorry to break it to ya. That beautiful LA light we love? It’s pollution Happy Daylight Saving. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-512516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}