Ground level ozone is created primarily by cars and local industry and can cause or exacerbate a range of respiratory conditions. The fascinating aspect of these ozone reduction efforts is that the impact on air quality and respiratory health is almost immediate.  According to Business Week:

The 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta allowed researchers at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention a rare opportunity to observe the impact of ozone on respiratory health. During the Olympics, Atlanta implemented a number of measures to reduce traffic, including providing 24-hour public transportation, adding an additional 1,000 city buses to its existing fleet, and closing downtown streets to all but public transportation vehicles. In the two-week period, the study found that peak ozone levels dropped by more than 25% and Medicaid expenses for asthma were cut by 40% as hospitalizations for asthma attacks decreased.

The same phenomenon was reported during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, when drivers were urged to stay off the roads to allow for congestion-free movement between venues.  As a result of the Clean Air Act, some of the most notorious smog-filled areas, including Orange County, San Diego, Houston and Northern New Jersey, have experienced drops of ground level ozone ranging from 31 – 50% of 1990 levels.

Local courage to pursue untested solutions is critical to the evolution of policy in the U.S., because cities and states are our “laboratories of democracy,” as David Osborne described almost 20 years ago.  Radical policies that would be unthinkable at the national level are often tested at the local level and, once their merit is proven on a small scale, are copied elsewhere.  Local sustainability efforts are a classic example of this dynamic at work, with much of what we consider standard environment policy having been pioneered quietly by a few concerned cities.  This interview with Dean Kubani, the longtime sustainability director of Santa Monica, CA, describes the incremental process of innovation that can occur at the local level.  As the prelude to the interview describes, such policies are now the norm in cities throughout the world.

Let’s cross our fingers that local action can work in China as well.  The Chinese government hopes to recreate the experience of Atlanta and Los Angeles in reducing the smog that currently chokes Beijing, host city for the 2008 Olympics.  The task is especially difficult for the Chinese, who, according to The Economist, just began to refer to visible smog as “haze”:

[Until recently officials went on referring to this soul-sapping grey pall as wu, or “fog”, a word that sounded more benign in weather reports. Residents have tended to follow suit, even though their semi-desert climate is too dry much of the year for fog, produced by water vapour near the ground.  When the city finally steeled itself last month to introduce warnings specifically for “haze”, produced by pollutant particles suspended in the air, the word mai was so unfamiliar that some newspapers added explanations of how it should be pronounced and how its meaning differed from that of wu. Some of your correspondent’s Chinese acquaintances expressed surprise that this greyness was mai (or sometimes wumai—smog) after all.

The list of obstacles to improving Beijing area quality is long, including intransigent bureaucracies and an obsession with economic growth.  However, as we have learned in the U.S., the benefits can be real and immediate.  If the Chinese government can add new words to the lexicon overnight, it can certainly get some cars off the road in time for the Olympics.