Editorial written by Los Angeles Times Editorial Board.
Southern California air quality regulators are reneging on their promise to enact long-delayed rules to curb health-damaging and planet-warming pollution from the ports of L.A. and Long Beach by the end of this year.
In doing nothing once again, the South Coast Air Quality Management District has failed to do its only job, cowering in the face of opposition from organized labor and powerful business interests that have worked together on a campaign to kill the proposal meant to clean up the region’s biggest single source of smog-forming pollution.
It is clear the opposition has succeeded. The air-quality agency and its 13-member governing board has backed down, breaking the pledge of its chair, Vanessa Delgado, who in May committed to adopting a rule by the end of the year.
Instead, the district is now floating a far weaker alternative: Requiring the ports to plan for zero-emission infrastructure, a toothless approach that includes no emissions reductions and isn’t expected to be considered until later next year.
This is no way for regulators to respond to the serious and ongoing health threat from port pollution. A heavy concentration of soot-spewing diesel trucks, ships, trains and cargo-handling equipment worsens smog across the region and contributes to elevated cancer risk in harbor-area communities. Southern California cannot clean its air to federal health standards without drastic pollution cuts at the ports, and the failure to meet those standards is responsible for at least 1,500 early deaths a year, according to the air district, as well as thousands of excess hospital and emergency room visits for asthma, heart attacks and other health crises.
There is no question air quality officials are up against formidable adversaries, including the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and other labor and business interests that have been working together to kill the clean-air rules on the nation’s busiest port complex. Union workers have joined freight industry lobbyists, showing up at public meetings as part of a coordinated opposition campaign to stoke fears of “devastating impacts” to California’s supply chain and economy.
There was “strong sentiment,” Air Quality Management District spokesperson Nahal Mogharabi said, “some in support and much in opposition to any effort to regulate the ports.”
While some opponents have valid concerns about new regulations (effects on jobs would be analyzed and addressed in the rulemaking process), others clearly have a profit motive to obstruct and delay.
The terminal operators, shipping companies and other industries dependent on the movement of cargo argue, spuriously, that these port pollution rules are actually just limits on economic activity. They claim there is no way to accelerate emissions reductions at the ports without reducing the movement of cargo and diverting shipments to other less environmentally friendly ports, despite reams of evidence to the contrary.
We don’t buy it. California has for decades relied on tough air quality standards to force and accelerate technological change across many industries. We have cleaned the air and grown the economy at the same time, as demonstrated by the ports’ own data showing decreasing emissions over time, even as cargo volumes rise.
