In the ESG reporting world, air pollution often takes a back seat to climate pollution. This environmental justice veteran says that needs to change.

Through our “Ask An Advocate Anything” blog series, we chat with influential activists and campaigners, seeking to better understand their theories of change and explore how NGOs are challenging and collaborating with companies to advance business as a force for good.

The views and statements shared in the following interview are those of the interviewee alone and do not represent the perspective of Future 500. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. To learn more about how we approach these conversations, check out our Editorial Policy.

California’s Coalition for Clean Air works to protect public health, improve air quality, and prevent climate change. The organization created the idea that would become the state’s original Smog Check program in 1981, drove the first national ban on the dry cleaning chemical “perc,” and helped pass legislation that will put one million electric vehicles on California’s roads by 2025.

Joseph Lyou is the coalition’s president and CEO. He’s spent 30 years helping community groups and concerned individuals with environmental protection issues, including air and water pollution, the clean-up of contaminated sites, and environmental justice. He previously held management positions with the California League of Conservation Voters Education Fund and Committee to Bridge the Gap.

This year marks your 50th anniversary. Well done.

Thank you. We’re celebrating, but we’re also planning to put ourselves out of business, because we shouldn’t have had to take this on for 50 years, and we certainly don’t want to go on for another 50!

What is your modus operandi? 

We are a small organization; we have nine employees, and they’re not even all full-time. We focus on California, because this is where enormous opportunities are—in public health and air quality, and in climate prevention. California can, and does, establish policies and set precedents that can encourage the world to do more and do better. The foundation of the organization is policy advocacy work, mostly in Sacramento, and in regional air quality management districts. We prioritize those largest sources of air pollution, the ones that are having disproportionate impacts.

Isn’t California already leading the nation on policies like the Low Carbon Fuel Standard and carbon pricing?

Sure, the low hanging fruit was picked long ago, but we still find things that need to be done. Just within the last year or two we’ve sponsored SB-210, legislation that requires a Smog Check for heavy-duty vehicles. That’s going to reduce an enormous amount of air pollution. Toxic diesel exhaust kills a lot of people in California. 

How many is a lot?

We don't spend a day without thinking about the fact that about 7,500 people die prematurely every year from breathing polluted air in California. If what we do here in California can be expanded nationwide, or worldwide, then that’s a lot of lives saved.

You work to improve conditions in what you call “freight impacted communities”. What is a freight impacted community and what impacts are you concerned about?

Here in Southern California, we have both the benefits and the costs of hosting the largest port complex in the United States. Along every part of this—the freeways and heavily traveled roadways that host all these trucks, the rail yards where the locomotives are running, the warehouses—communities are all suffering disproportionate exposure to diesel exhaust. There are a lot of impacts along this logistics chain, and real health impacts associated with that.

Does that underpin your environmental justice focus?

Yes. The worst problems unfortunately tend to be in low-income communities of color. I have a long background as an environmental justice advocate, trying to ensure that these disproportionately impacted communities have a voice and a say in decisions that are made that impact the health and quality of life in their communities. We’re not a door-to-door organizing type organization, but we work closely with a lot of community-based organizations that are. We have a long history of working with those groups and prioritizing the impacts that they're suffering from.

You focus on policy and regulations. Do you use the courts, or lobby regulators, or pressure companies?

All of the above. We tend not to get involved in a lot of litigation. However, we do sue when there’s no other means. And there are a couple of cases that we are involved in—big, giant, huge cases that have real important impacts on both our policy advocacy and public health. But, mainly, we do policy advocacy. Most of the work that really ends up saving the most lives—reducing the most pollution—tends to be getting in regulations, and doing the hard work of making sure that they’re implemented properly and enforced properly. 

What ends up happening is, you spend a lot of work getting something adopted, and then everyone sort of scatters, and they don’t focus on the really important and hard work of implementation. It’s not glorious. It doesn’t bring in a lot of donations. But making sure that those promises are kept, and those policies are implemented—that is a key thing that we do.

But you can’t influence regulation without power. How do you build it? How do you maintain it?

It starts by building a really great staff, protecting the reputation of the organization, and by being honest and speaking truth to power. We build a lot of important relationships with decision makers. We also approach this from a “big tent” perspective. We’re always looking for relationships with people in groups and businesses, and people who we normally wouldn’t agree with, who will actually agree with us on issues and help move our agenda forward. 

It’s a little different from some [groups] that do things through all-out opposition, all the time. We’d rather try to do it cooperatively, where there are opportunities for win-win alliances and partnerships. But you know, the most important thing, I think, is to be informed, be creative, be reliable. Policymakers need to know that they can trust you, and they can rely on you to provide them with information they need to make good decisions.

The Coalition has been active for 50 years, and yet there’s been a real lack of progress on some key metrics. Southern California’s ground-level ozone pollution levels still don’t meet the standards that were established back in the Carter Administration.

It makes our messaging difficult. On the one hand, you know, for those of us who grew up in Southern California and lived through stage-three smog alerts, the amount of progress is absolutely unbelievable. In fact, cleaning up passenger vehicles is one of the major environmental achievements that the world has ever seen. Passenger vehicles used to be the problem, and quite honestly, they’re not the biggest problem anymore. The freight industry is. There have been huge victories, but it’s a complicated issue and it takes patience to really understand what’s going on.

Are companies paying the same attention to the material risks of criteria air contaminants as they are to the risks of greenhouse gas emissions?

Multinational companies tend to focus only on the climate, and that’s because their shareholders and customers have told them to do that. I think that there’s less of an appreciation for what happens in environmental justice communities and other impacted communities in terms of health impacts and air quality impacts. Both are very important. I do feel there should be more of a focus on air pollution and public health than we currently see.

We scanned the leadership of several top logistics companies operating in California and noted that they were disproportionately white, which may impact those companies’ ability to understand systemic racism. Where do you start when you think about bringing environmental justice onto their agenda?

When I started working on environmental justice issues 30 years ago, no one even knew what the term was. Now, at least here in California, everyone understands it. So, it takes a while. You just have to be persistent. Again, you have to ground what you’re saying in the facts, and there’s plenty of studies showing what the problems are with regard to environmental justice. It takes a bit of education, and then it takes a few people recognizing and wanting to do the right things. I think it’s wrong to characterize all businesses as being blind to [systemic racism]. Not all are.

What do you consider to be an example of a company doing it right? 

The Long Beach Container Terminal Pier E project has resulted in what I believe to be the cleanest such terminal in the world. They went way beyond the minimal requirements, and specifically went out and tried to find every source of combustion at their terminal, and eliminate it. It’s almost a complete zero-emission terminal. It’s really incredible what they’ve done, and they should be the standard to which every other terminal should be held. 

They know they’re operating in an area that has disproportionate impacts on low-income communities of color, and they just made a big difference. They also recognize that everyone else needs to be held to that standard so they can compete on a level playing field. Even companies like Amazon, which is the 500-pound gorilla in the room, are actively going out and buying zero-emission delivery vehicles.

Do activists give credit where it’s due in those cases? Because companies often say they just hear a relentless drumbeat of “not good enough.”

When you’re facing the size of the problem that you are, it’s really hard to point to the leaders and to focus on the good things that they’re doing, and not to focus on the problems that need to be solved. So, yes, the leaders are underappreciated. But the laggards need to come along, and focusing on the laggards is probably an important thing to do.

Over the decades you’ve been at this, have you seen activist and advocacy organizations shift tactics? Is the activist playbook changing?

Well, we’re all individuals who approach [changemaking] in different ways. There are some people who are comfortable with building huge coalitions, and they’ve done that very effectively. I see other groups that just pick a facility that they hate, and they focus on it until they shut it down, and they’ve been very effective, too.

One of the things I'm most proud of is, probably 20 years ago, we started informal monthly meetings among environmental justice advocates in Los Angeles. And those relationships stay strong to this day. People started to get to know each other and work more efficiently together. They started to make introductions to people they needed to know and tell stories and show them how to get things done. Working together in that way really moves things along, even though different people still approach their work in different ways. 

If a company got into trouble with its stakeholders—for example, you—what should it do?

It should start by reaching out and being genuine, being honest. And you know, admitting that there’ve been problems in the past is always important, being completely honest about how they’re approaching things and what they want to do about it. 

I had a company call me about 10 years ago, a terminal operator that had a fleet of trucks. And the [CEO] just said, “Look, we got caught by the Air Resources Board for having our fleet out of compliance with regulations. We didn’t really have any idea that we had this problem. And now that we do, we want to go to zero emissions as quickly as possible.” And I had to tell the poor guy that those trucks weren’t actually for sale yet, but there were other things that he could do in the meantime. That started a really interesting relationship with a terminal operator that had a bad track record, but they were genuine about their commitment to clean up their operations after that.

So it’s about transparency and trust?

Yeah. And it takes a long time, and you have to accept and understand that. And understand that when you bring impacted community members [into the conversation] there’s going to be a lot of venting, and the need to get things said. You have to let people establish their positions, and defend their positions. And then, once they get past that “getting it off their chest” phase, then you can start talking about real solutions.

And what if you conclude that a company just isn’t being genuine?

I think I have a reputation for being pretty straightforward; I don’t hesitate. But also, just as a general rule, I try to be as respectful as possible to everyone I deal with. No matter who they are.

Where does your funding come from?

We have fairly diverse revenue streams; it’s all charitable giving. We get some foundation support. We get government grants, we get supplemental environmental project money. We get money from major donors, from individuals. But we try to build the partnerships that’ll give us that support; there’s a lot of corporate support in terms of sponsoring events and sponsoring Clean Air Day.

What’s in your strategic plan for the next couple of years? What are the big buckets you will focus on?

On the policy side, we’re looking at how and where we invest our cap and trade incentive money and how we will generate the money necessary to get huge turnover in the heavy-duty fleet. That’s important for implementing the Smog Check for heavy-duty vehicles. There’s a series of regulations that the Air Resources Board is going to adopt that target the largest sources of air pollution in California. Those are all in our policy agenda. Certainly, in local regions and Southern California, the South Coast Air Quality Management District has a lot of work it needs to do. And we’re going to make sure that they’re adopting the regulations that they need to and making the investments that they need to make. 

And what about beyond the policy agenda?

We have a fairly large air pollution monitoring network that we will continue to expand. We’re going to continue to work with schools and with others on education. And we’ll work with our most impacted communities on programs that are now supported through AB-617, which includes funding for working with community-based organizations in our most highly polluted communities. We’ve received funding through this program and hope to identify new projects too. And we are going to continue to build California Clean Air Day, which has gone on for three years and been a tremendous success and builds the number of people we’re in touch with.

Thank you for speaking with us, Joe.

Which campaigner or organization should we profile for our next Ask An Advocate Anything blog? Send us your suggestions at info@future500.org. To get this series and other stakeholder insights delivered regularly to your inbox, subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

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