In Los Angeles in the '50s, "pollution was so bad, you'd blow your nose and it would be black," says Ed Camarena, an engineer who's served on the board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which now enforces air quality regulations in the area. The San Francisco Bay Area had cleaner air, but as recently as the '60s, elementary schools were known to close down because smog made it hard for children to breathe.

That smog inspired a legacy of emissions regulations in California that spread nationally and forced major changes in how the automotive industry did its business. The 1990 so-called Zero Emissions Vehicle Mandate was merely the latest in a long string of measures aimed at improving the air.

The ZEV mandate requires automakers to market cars powered by electricity or alternative fuels, like hydrogen. But while California has the right to set emissions standards, it cannot require automakers to produce cars that get better mileage than that required by the feds. So automakers filed suit, arguing that the mandate conflicts with the federal government's sole right to regulate fuel economy. (On Dec. 12, the Bush administration slightly increased those standards, for the first time in six years. But environmentalists charged that the change was a token one.)

The Bush administration filed a brief siding with the automakers, and a federal court agreed, preventing the California Air Resources Board from enforcing the mandate in 2003. In early December, the board held workshops soliciting public comment for rewriting the regulation.

"Federal regulations govern fuel economy. You cannot have states passing their own fuel economy laws," says Eron Shosteck, a spokesperson for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

The implications of the decision go beyond how many zero-emissions vehicles California will see on its roads next year. California has long been ahead of the rest of the nation when it comes to pollution controls. Its historic smog problems mean that the state is allowed to have more-stringent pollution controls than are federally required. That's because the state leapt into the air-quality regulation game before the federal government stepped in.

As early as 1959, California passed legislation ordering the state Department of Public Health to develop air quality standards and set emissions controls on motor vehicles. By the mid-'60s, when the federal government was developing air quality legislation for the nation, culminating in the Clean Air Act of 1970, California's rules were already in place.

The feds let California keep its own, tougher standards, which other states are permitted to adopt as well, effectively creating two sets of requirements.

In 1990, California gave automakers a regulatory push toward promising new clean-fuel technologies by demanding that 2 percent of all vehicles offered for sale in the state be zero-emission by 1998, 5 percent by 2000 and 10 percent in 2003. The Zero Emissions Vehicle Mandate has been in dispute ever since.

As the electric-car experiment fizzled, and carmakers litigated against the regulation, the requirement was scaled back, with the current mandate requiring that by 2003, 2 percent of all new vehicles offered for sale in the state be zero-emission, and another 2 percent be "advanced technology partial ZEVs," such as "hybrid" electric/gas vehicles.

Ironically, it was this concession, designed to help the automakers meet zero-emissions vehicle requirements, that led to the court problems for those regulations.

The auto industry argued that mandating hybrids -- since they burn traditional fuel -- amounted to a regulation of fuel economy, and the Bush administration felt so strongly about the issue that it filed a brief agreeing.

Despite the injunction preventing the state from enforcing the mandate in 2003, California isn't backing down.

"We haven't just surrendered and said OK," says Richard Varenchik, a spokesman for the state's Air Resources Board, noting that the state is working on revising the regulation to bring it back to the board early next year.

But automakers also plan to use the same argument to challenge California's groundbreaking greenhouse gas regulation, which hasn't even been codified yet.

In July of 2002 California passed the nation's first greenhouse gas legislation, A.B. 1493, which will require automakers to meet carbon pollution standards for new cars in 2009. The auto industry says that it plans to use that same federal vs. states' rights argument to fight California's legislation, although the rules have yet to be written. The regulations are to be finalized by the Air Resources Board in 2005 and would apply to consumer vehicles by 2009.

"Again, this legislation concerns fuel economy, which is under the purview of the federal government," says Steve Douglas of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

Even where California is explicitly permitted under the Clean Air Act to have stricter standards than the rest of the nation, regulators fear that the Bush administration is out to thwart them, if only with endless red tape.

On Nov. 22, the Bush administration announced that it was easing clean air controls, allowing utilities, refineries and manufacturers to avoid expensive antipollution controls when they modernize old, dirty plants. In doing so, the Environmental Protection Agency decreed that states will now have to prove their rules are "as effective" as the new EPA rules.

"It was a strong signal from the administration that they were going to circumscribe the ability of states to decline to adopt these new rules," says John Walke, an attorney for the National Resources Defense Council.

For regulators, this means getting caught up in an administrative morass of trying to prove that every single one of their regulations is in fact more stringent than the federal counterpart.

Varenchik of the Air Resources Board says that's already happening: "Recently, we've found that the EPA tends to be really picky when we're doing those separate rules. You may look at the whole rule and say: 'It's a no-brainer. The California rule is much tougher than the EPA rule.' They'll get down to an almost sentence-by-sentence comparison, and say: 'Hey, this one paragraph doesn't seem as tough.' They can throw it out, hold it up, ask you to rewrite the whole thing, and go through it again."

Bush vs. California is more than just a reprisal for the state's not going his way in 2002 -- it's a showdown to determine which direction the nation goes for the foreseeable future in regard to environmental policy. For decades, conventional wisdom has held that California is a kind of "early adopter" state -- trends that start here spread to the rest of the country and even further. Enacting strong laws to protect the environment is one of the examples of California's leadership that many Californians hold most dear.

Now those laws are under attack. And with control of both the House and the Senate, the Bush administration is well positioned to make its assault do lasting damage, not just to California's air and water, but to the very idea that ordinary people, instead of well-heeled campaign contributors, have the right to decide what their environment looks like.

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