Air pollution in the United States, and especially in Los Angeles, has been widely covered in academic studies throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and the new century has already produced several new publications on the topic. Some of this abundance has to be explained by the tenacity of the problem, especially of urban air pollution and the continuing inability of state agencies and business to deal with it. In an era of Kyoto and in the face of an American federal government that is dragging its feet on the larger questions of climate control, air pollution has been recast from a nuisance to a public health problem to a global environmental threat, precisely at a time when so little real action towards its solution seems to be taking place. Yet, the continued interest in air pollution also can be explained by the blossoming of new political theories on the making of policy, which allow for reinterpretations of the data at hand (discourse theory, ecological modernization, and so on). Gonzalez's book is predominantly motivated by that second set of reasons. This long essay—it is a short book which reads more like an extended journal article—makes a distinctive argument which attempts to challenge some of the traditional stories told about air pollution regulation as well as the constructs of political thought that undergird them.

Gonzalez challenges “the view that technological controls on air pollution result form a compromise between competing interest groups, or that this approach to air pollution abatement results from public officials seeking to reconcile the rather conflicting desires of the public” (8). This challenge entails both a theoretical attack on pluralism and an empirical critique of how the control of air pollution in American cities is to be imagined. Both sides of the challenge meet in the hypothesis that it is urban growth coalitions, place entrepreneurs interested in the growth of urban areas, which have been at the core of the anti-air pollution struggle in the US. Following Gonzalez, the agenda for air pollution control was already set “by local growth coalitions, industry, and the energy sector” (106), before the emergence of any environmental groups in the picture. Gonzalez carefully re-reads some of the major works on urban air pollution in the twentieth century, with a particular eye on the Los Angeles case, where smog appeared during World War II and where it was subsequently fought by a host of public and private policies, institutional innovations, technological advances and behavioural change. Gonzalez regurgitates much material that has iconic (and rather well-documented) status, such as the famous myth of the disappearance of public transport in Los Angeles due to the conspiracy of auto and tire corporations.

While not adding anything really new to the state of research, Gonzalez's essay could be interesting if it delivered on its promise to demonstrate a) that “the economic elite model offers more explanatory power than the state autonomy/issue networks model (or than pluralism) in analyzing the content and trajectory of government responses to air pollution” (33); and b) that local growth coalitions are behind the historical move towards cleaning up the air in urban areas (a particularly counterintuitive claim given their historical collusion with big corporate interests in the United States). Unfortunately, the book does neither. While the double argument is formulated in clear terms, there is little that convinces me to throw out all other possible explanations and stories on air pollution control in the US for the new perspective presented here. I sympathize with Gonzalez's critique of traditional pluralist approaches. But the countermodel is not presented with sufficient power to persuade. This has to do with the fact that the book tends to caricaturize some of the newer models that engage with both pluralist and elite theories such as ecological modernization theory. The treatment of ecological modernization is rather simplistic and historically unspecific, not linked to a particular form of neoliberal capitalism but rather serving as a general instrument that capitalists and politicians can avail themselves of when they need it. And while it makes for an interesting argument to claim that the specific interests of local place-based elites led them to manipulate the air pollution control process from the bottom of their regional regimes upward towards states and the federal government, Gonzalez does not sufficiently delve into the literature on growth coalitions in Los Angeles and elsewhere in order to justify this claim.

Gonzalez, for example, fails to engage with those who have actually used critical political economy approaches to explain power in Los Angeles. There is no mention, for instance, of Mike Davis, who has written a seminal historical analysis of the ruling elites in LA in his City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). The analysis in this book floats above the real political history of Los Angeles without ever really touching down and understanding the machinations that drive it.

I must now disclose a certain bias in reading this book, as the last point I would like to make about the work is related to research I have done in Los Angeles myself over the years and political discussions on air pollution I was part of when I lived there some years ago. Our own findings in a book that partly deals with the issue of air pollution in Los Angeles (Gene Desfor and Roger Keil, Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2004), squarely contradict one of Gonzalez's main points: that the environmental movement has had little to do with the trajectory of air pollution control in that city. This is just not borne out by the facts. More precisely, environmental groups have been quite influential in shaping the environmental policy-making process in Southern California through a complex net of actor coalitions that aligned along lines of class, gender and “race” and reflected the complex landscape of environmental unsustainability and environmental racism in Los Angeles. Groups such as the Labor/Community Strategy Center or Communities for a Better Environment played a central role in shaping the discourse on air pollution struggles in LA in the late 1980s and early 1990s but they get short shrift in Gonzalez's book.

What recommends the book to the reader in the end? Despite the flaws in its argument, it is a good brief summary of decades of discussions and struggles around the issue of air pollution control in the United States. It can serve as a primer on that subject and perhaps whet the reader's appetite for more and different perspectives. It should not be read as the final word on the subject.