California's clean-air efforts, after years of hard-won progress, are faltering. It had been six years since ozone — an invisible gas and the main ingredient in smog — blanketed the Greater Los Angeles area as insidiously as it did this summer.

As you read this, however, President Bush's Environmental Protection Agency is aggressively trying to undermine California standards that might restore progress against those clouds of damaging smog. The EPA has called, for example, for eliminating California's unique ability under the federal Clean Air Act to set emissions standards higher than those of other states. Late last month, Justice Department officials sided with oil companies and engine manufacturers in a Supreme Court case challenging Southern California smog rules that require cleaner-running school buses, trash trucks, airport shuttles and taxis, street sweepers and utility trucks.

That's why the seemingly dry and political struggle going on in the Senate over whether to confirm former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt as the EPA's next administrator should matter to all Californians. Like former EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, who resigned four months ago, Leavitt is considered a moderate. So far, senators have unfortunately let Leavitt dodge questions about the administration's decisions to relax air pollution standards for aging coal-fired power plants, its orders to slow down Superfund toxic site cleanups and reversal of the president's campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.