HANNELVIEW, Texas - Karla Land never knows what the air will smell like when she steps outside her motorcycle shop here on the edge of a highway near Houston. Will it be a dirty sock day? A rotten egg day? Or one of those days when the foulness in the air simply defies description?
For years, the grim joke has been that the noxious odor coming from the forest of oil and chemical industry smokestacks in this blue-collar area must be ''the smell of money.''
But now that the Houston metropolitan area has overtaken Los Angeles as the nation's smog capital, it is not so funny any more - particularly to supporters of Governor George W. Bush. Even admirers warn that Texas's pollution problems could harm his bid for president just as the filthy water in Boston Harbor hurt Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis's campaign in 1988.
''He wants to take care of a whole nation and he can't even take care of Texas,'' scoffed Land, 46, who frequently suffers sinus infections and coughing spells that she believes are triggered by pollution.
Today, environmentalists plan to launch the first of what will probably be a series of attacks on Bush's environmental record, charging that his industry-friendly policies since taking office in 1995 helped create an air pollution crisis. The 24 worst smog readings in the United States this year were in Texas, while federal regulators threaten and prod the state to take stronger action.
But Bush supporters, including top environmental officials from his father's presidential administration, say the mounting attacks unfairly hold Bush responsible for Texas's enormous environmental problems, while denying him credit for efforts to solve them. Bush recently signed a bill to clean up some of the state's dirtiest power plants, for example.
''Is the air cleaner since I became governor? The answer is yes,'' said Bush in an oft-quoted statement that environmentalists challenge.
The real George W. Bush, friends say, shares the core values of his father, President Bush, who wanted to be recalled as ''the environmental president.'' The elder Bush often clashed with environmentalists, deriding Vice President Al Gore as ''ozone man,'' but he also signed landmark clean-air legislation as well as the first treaty to combat global warming.
Though the younger Bush has not made the environment a significant part of either of his two campaigns for governor, friends say he, too, wants to leave a legacy of environmental improvement. A hunter, fisherman, and jogger on the trails of Austin, Governor Bush shares a zeal for the outdoors with his parachute-jumping, speed boat-driving father.
''I will be the next president of the United States, and when I leave office, the air will be cleaner, the water will be cleaner, and the environment will be better. Tell me how I'm going to make it happen,'' Bush reportedly told conservative environmental leaders at a meeting in Austin last spring.
But unlike his father, George W. Bush has had to prove his environmental credentials in the rough and tumble world of Texas politics, where the petrochemical industry is strong, the environmental movement is weak, and the Legislature is skeptical of government programs.
''There is no real environmental movement here, so it is not a significant part of our policy,'' conceded Andrew Sansom, executive director of Texas Parks and Wildlife, whose board members are appointed by Bush. Sansom, however, also served with Bush's predecessor as governor, Ann Richards, a Democrat.
Perhaps as a result of the lack of an environmental movement, Texas industries release more chemicals into the environment than any other state or Canadian province, though the total amount of emissions is declining. Meanwhile, with few checks on development and less than 3 percent of the state in public hands, cities such as Houston have become a tangle of highway construction designed to accommodate the growth.
Against that backdrop, Sansom regards Bush as an environmental pioneer, working cooperatively with industry to balance environmental and economic concerns. For instance, Bush recently announced a deal to protect almost 7,000 acres of important bird habitat in exchange for allowing Dow Chemical and the state highway department to fill wetlands elsewhere.
''What you have with him is a very unique sort of paradigm shift toward a more thoughtful and stewardship-oriented approach'' to the environment than past governors, said Sansom.
But critics say Bush, a former oil executive, mostly rides the political tides of Texas, seldom taking tough environmental stands unless the pressure is overwhelming. Bush, for example, reversed his position in favor of a nuclear waste repository along the Mexican border only after extensive protests by the Mexican government.
More commonly, say Texas activists, Bush's policies seem aimed at pleasing industry and property rights groups. For example, he opposed federal intervention to protect the rare Barton Springs salamander, an amphibian that lives in one of the most popular swimming areas in Austin, on the grounds that it could limit development. Bush said he was concerned about any action ''that has even the potential to impact the use of private property.''
And activists say Bush makes little effort to balance the political playing field with his appointments and choice of advisers on environmental issues.
Most controversially, he convened numerous private meetings with industry leaders, whose firms and representatives had given $260,648 to his 1998 gubernatorial campaign, to discuss ways to reduce pollution from their older facilities. The public joined the discussion only after the group had devised a ''voluntary'' cleanup plan that, so far, has produced few results.
''I'd love for'' top Bush administration officials ''to talk to the people most affected by air pollution, the people who live next to those refineries, and get their input,'' said Jim Marston, director of the Environmental Defense Fund's Texas office.
Dallas Morning News columnist Timothy O'Leary, a fan of the governor who once worked for his father, warned Governor Bush this year that his environmental record in Texas could come back to haunt him.
He recalled the 1988 presidential election when Vice President Bush turned the pollution issue against Dukakis, charging that Dukakis was allowing 70 tons of sewage sludge to be dumped into the harbor each day.
''My opponent's solution to this pollution: delay, fight, anything but cleanup,'' the elder Bush fumed in a memorable TV ad.
Eleven years later, O'Leary wrote in a column addressed to Governor Bush, ''You are vulnerable in the same way that Mr. Dukakis was vulnerable,'' especially on the issue of air pollution.
Indeed, Bush's 4 1/2 years in office have seen Texas cities encountering increasing problems in meeting federal standards for ozone pollution. The US Environmental Protection Agency is about to downgrade its rating of air quality in San Antonio and Austin, and is threatening to withhold highway funds for Dallas-Fort Worth unless the state submits a comprehensive cleanup plan.
On Oct. 7, the state reached a new low when Houston had its 44th day of unhealthy ozone levels this year, surpassing Los Angeles, the national smog champion since the 1970s.
''Los Angeles has spent the last 15 to 20 years making serious inroads in addressing their problems,'' said Pamela Berger, Houston's environmental policy director. ''Houston has, by contrast, been able to avoid many of the hard decisions.''
Now, Houston's problems are so severe that industries face a mandate to cut nitrogen oxide emissions by 85 percent by 2007 or the eight-county metropolitan region will lose billions in highway funds. Even if all the cars stopped being driven tomorrow, the city would still violate federal ozone standards because the industrial pollution is so extreme.
EPA officials say that the Bush administration, along with the cities of Houston and Dallas, have worked much harder to end the smog problems over the past year or two, but there have been few concrete actions. In fact, the Legislature, with Bush's approval, scrapped a major air improvement program in 1995, canceling a $130 million vehicle emissions testing system because of driver protest.
Bush's major personal initiative on air pollution, the voluntary cleanup of old power plants, raised doubts about his commitment to improvements when notes from meetings of the industry group that drew up the plan made it clear that some firms wanted to use the program for good publicity without actually cutting pollution.
Still, Bush administration officials say their boss got a black eye when he deserves credit for tackling an issue that almost every other governor ducks. When the voluntary plan did not pan out, they add, Bush supported a mandatory power plant cleanup, which will remove the pollution equivalent of five million cars from the road.
Now, Bush aides urge the public to take a longer view of the pollution, blaming this year's increase in smog on the state's hot, dry weather.
''Progress has been made in Texas if you look at the longer time period, say 20 years,'' said Barry McBee, the former chairman of the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, which regulates air emissions. ''Is there work to be done yet? Yes.''
So far in the presidential campaign, Bush is taking positions to the right of Vice President Al Gore on environmental concerns, opposing a treaty to combat global warming that Gore negotiated. In a dust-up over Texas air pollution last week, Gore charged that Bush ''carries water - dirty water - for the chemical industry, while a Bush spokesman branded Gore an extremist with ''a long history of weird and extreme environmental ideas.''
But Bush allies say that their candidate's brand of ''compassionate conservatism'' extends to stewardship of the environment. Also, they say that his policies as president would be a far cry from the assault on the nation's major environmental laws that some members of the GOP launched when the party took over Congress in 1995.
Instead, Bush has assembled a group of influential environmental leaders - including the first EPA administrator, William Ruckleshaus, and John Turner, President Bush's former Fish and Wildlife Service director - to develop a conservative approach to the environment. Turner, who now heads the Conservation Fund, has led his group to new prominence, protecting 500,000 acres from development in private conservation this year.
''I am convinced that if he becomes president, he will be personally committed to a positive legacy of environmental stewardship. I think part of his core values is a love of the outdoors,'' said Turner, whose group has donated 70,000 acres to Texas under Bush.
Moreover, some Bush watchers expect him to have a more expansive environmental vision as he makes the switch from the somewhat cloistered world of Texas to the nation's capital.
''I think he is an enlightened enough person that he will be able to grasp the greater diversity of the country as opposed to the situation in Texas,'' said Sansom. ''But what should be instructive for him is there are some models in Texas that he can use.''
But such talk does not impress Karla Land as she leads a reporter on a tour of the contaminated areas of the Channelview region, which recently recorded the highest ozone levels in Texas in 10 years. As far as she can tell, Bush has done little to help.
''This is what hell looks like,'' she said.
