Gray hairs sprout at the temples of Hector De La Torres, and his gait is slower than before.

But the longtime politician from southeastern Los Angeles County still looked like a bourgeois boy when I met him one recent morning in his hometown of South Gate.

The 56-year-old first attracted attention in the late 1990s as a council member who helped wash away the corruption that plagued the city as it moved from majority white to majority Latino. Voters then sent him to the State Assembly from 2004 to 2010.

That was the last elected position he held. But his influence has only grown, and not just in southeast LA. Since 2011, he has served on the California Air Resources Board, a powerful agency known as CARB that seeks to make the state a world leader in cutting emissions and fundamentally changing the way residents live.

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

I wrote in this

column

about how CARB’s actions all too often come across as a pipe dream, seemingly ignoring how working class people can afford to live in a sanitized paradise. That’s why I wanted to meet De La Torre, who is now the second-longest serving CARB member.

If anyone can convince

convince

me and my fellow fossil fuel reprobates to give up our gas lawn mowers, light up bumpers and a fleet of carbureted cars, it’s him.

He is the son of Mexican immigrants from Jalostotitln, Jalisco,

a town

whose Southern California diaspora is as libertarian as it gets. His grandfather was sprayed with DDT and entered the country to work as a bracero in the 1950s; A great-uncle was Santo Toribio Romo, a Catholic martyr murdered by anti-clerical government forces in Mexico.

during the day

the twenties.

When you have a saint in the family, De La Torre chuckled, it’s hard not to want to do the right thing.

We stood 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, and Maas Chemical—that created middle-class jobs, but turned Southeast LA into Southern California’s own Rust Belt with layoffs and closures in the 1970s and 1980s.

while you’re leaving

contaminated sites throughout the region.

“I tell people we’re in the middle of the next industrial revolution,” De La Torre said. Diesel trucks and buses rumbled past us. The stench of their fumes felt as thick as fog. We had to use our outside voices to speak over a concert of horns and engines. “And it is a clean revolution. There are products to be made. There is work to be done. And this time we must be purposeful.

De La Torre is an accidental environmentalist. Growing up, he thought everyone else also suffered from burning lungs 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 a legislative director for then-Rep. Congressman Richard Lehman of Fresno.

I had to deal with air pollution issues, he said. And when I got home again [as a South Gate councilmember], one of the first issues before me was that trucking companies wanted to build warehouses. Fresno had the same problem. And my position was always: no, 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 just pulled their hair out and they panicked and said, Who’s responsible for this? Who is killing these bills?”

He and others founded Green California, a coalition of environmentalists and nonprofits, to coordinate priorities. De La Torre served as their legislative man.

In the rest of my time in the

L

Legislature, I’d say the worst we ever did with those bills was 85% approval, he said, nodding vigorously. It completely changed the dynamic.”

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

It’s amazing to me that I’ve been there almost twice as long as when I was in the Legislature, De La Torre said of CARB. Then-Government. Jerry Brown originally appointed him to the board, and former

Edit

Speaker

of the Assembly

Anthony Rendon reappointed him in 2018 for a six-year term. It’s great to look back at everything we’ve done.

Early on, he realized that CARB and others in the California environmental movement wanted to implement dramatic solutions to combat climate change while anticipating resistance from the working class.

Arguments against climate change don’t really motivate those communities, he reasoned, but the pollution in your community? Absolute.

During his

employment

CARB has focused primarily on reducing air quality emissions, an emphasis that De La Torre says saves lives. He took out his smartphone and showed me a 2012 card from that year

Multiple Exposure to Air Toxic Substances (MATES)

Study a survey conducted every five years by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. It shows where air pollution is heaviest in Southern California, and the map included areas of deep purple around 710

F

reeway, which runs through southeast LA

This was where the carcinogenic effects of air pollution were at their worst, caused mainly by diesel emissions, which make up 8% of Southern California’s total emissions but contribute more than

about

70% of carcinogenic particles.

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

Southeast LA on the map is still fuchsia, he said. But [carcinogenic emissions have] demonstrably decreased. What happened during that time? Our regulations were developed during that time. That’s the only difference. People live in the same place. Same highways, same factories, same everything. That’s why I talk about killing diesel on CARB all the time.

Less cancer is great and all, I said, but I don’t live near the highway. Why should I embrace 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 accommodate him

Six feet tall, six feet five

frame.frame. But the market will get there. More than 25% of new car sales in California were zero-emission last time [quarter]. That’s not us. That is not our mandate. It is the consumers who make the choice.”

I responded that the clean air regulations implemented in 2008 at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles cost my father his job as an independent truck driver because he didn’t have the money to modify his old machine and was too old to to justify taking out a loan. to buy a new one.

We are now strongly encouraging truck drivers to switch to cleaner vehicles, De La Torre replied. He named

CalSTART

, a CARB-funded nonprofit that offers rebates to switch to greener engines. Every time they open a pot of money for truck drivers, they get oversubscribed. They receive more applications than they have money for. That’s what happened.”

We looked at the street, where a motorcycle had loudly backfired.

“We don’t just throw things away,” he says

continued

. “We’re not just bringing the hammer down. We like, okay

Okay

“How do these pieces fit together so that we can have this marketplace and everyone can be a part of it?”

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

It’s about habits. We grew up with this stuff. And so we think, Oh, that’s the only way to do that.’ But when people tell me how hard it is to charge cars or this or that, I tell them it hasn’t even been a hundred years since we have the convenience of gas stations. We act as if it has always been this way since the cavemen. No!

We’re just making another switch to another technology, and that will be a little difficult at first.

he concluded.

But eventually it will be the norm, and we’ll just adapt.

As if on cue, a Prius scraped a driveway as he sped down an alley. The driver was a tattooed man with a shaved head.

De La Torre grinned.

A little

vato

drives a hybrid. I mean come on!