I. slash of his pen
Last week CA Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have placed a $20 per container fee on shipping containers at California ports, raising $300 million annually to mitigate the health effects of pollution from goods movement.
The Coalition for Clean Air called this the most important environmental bill this year in California. Even the normally cautious Los Angeles Times editorialized that:
"With a slash of his pen, the governor simultaneously damaged the region’s economy, choked its roadways and ensured that thousands more people will die annually because of the pollution associated with moving goods to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach."
(more inside)
For a visual (and point/clickable) representation of the plume of cancer that trails inland from the ports of LA and Long Beach and the rails and freeways that serve them, see the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s model of estimated carcinogenic risk from air toxins.
It’s frustrating that an unpopular governor can do such damage. I thought it would be interesting to analyze who opposed the bill- that is, who Schwarzenneger listened to. Also, it’s worth seeing how the governor framed his veto message because it contains a dangerous assumption that environmental improvements of the goods movement sector must be shackled to infrastructure to increase trade flows.
II. The kind of people we’re dealing with
$20 per container - remember these are the big 40 foot long standardized containers one sees trucks hauling everywhere - is a small, marginal cost compared to the value of the merchandise stacked inside. But the bill still stirred up a wave of opposition from industries that ship lots of stuff in and out of California. Here’s Long Beach mayor Bob Foster speaking at a rally on September 12. He’s referencing Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin having sent a letter to her fellow GOP governor urging him to veto the bill. The source of the quote is the LBReport.com ; I can’t find the exact article online to link to.
"Let me tell you. We’re tired [boos rising], yeah, boo is right, yeah. [boos subside] We are tired of having our kids contract asthma at record rates so someone else, either Nebraska or Alaska, can get a cheaper TV. [applause] We’re done. And what’s really amazing is she doesn’t even know or doesn’t understand that the environmental effects of the Ports statewide produce 3,500 premature deaths in California a year. So what she wants to do in order to get a little economic benefit is in effect have enough Californians in two years to pass away that would equal the population of Wasilla, Alaska, in two years. (applause) Makes no sense to me but that’s the kind of people that we’re dealing with."
So, besides governors Palin and Schwarzenegger, who are the rest of these ‘kind of people we’re dealing with,’ those to whom a barely perceivable bump in the cost of shipping, possibly passed along to the price of products, is worth poisoning lots of people? The list of bill opponents is almost 4 pages long. Looking through the list, I noticed a lot of the groups could be clumped into five categories.
A. Agricultural interests. Every ag commodity one can think of, from walnuts to turkeys to cotton, joins the no side. This opposition comes primarily from exporters that grow products in state then ship them out to sell abroad. But a few importers, especially of alcohol - wine, sake, etc - join the club, as do some retailers of food that sell lots of imported items.
B. Big box retail and grocery chains. Big box stores and grocery and drug store chains with business models that revolve around cheap, imported goods - the Walmarts, Safeways, Walgreens, Rite-Aids, Ralphs, Lowes and Best Buys of the world - flocked to oppose this bill.
C. Clothes and shoe manufacturers and retailers. With few exceptions, the U.S. apparel industry has moved production abroad so it can pay workers far less than prevailing wages here at home. Companies that one might call ‘the shopping mall crowd,’ like Nike, Abercrombie & Fitch, the Limited, Levi Strauss, Macy’s etc, are paranoid about giving back even a tiny fraction of these low-road savings.
D. Hawaii. Palin’s letter may have gotten the attention, but a suprising number of bill opponents are hawaiian businesses, everything from the airlines to banks to chambers of commerce. The lesson I take from this is that Hawaii, because of its geographic isolation, is a cautionary tale of what can happen to regions that rely on long distance transportation in an era of expensive energy. Without local econonic activity to sustain and feed themselves, they get paranoid about shipping policy. Anyway, thanks for nothing that you want us to choke on fumes while your tropical tradewinds keep you breathing easy in the midst of the pacific.
E. Chamber of commerce types. The most influential figures in this debate were probably the ideological business associations like the chamber of commerce that exist to fight regulation. The CA chamber of commerce labelled this bill as one of its "top ten job killers"- Schwarzennegger dutifully vetoed it as part of blocking 9 of the ten on their hit list. In his veto message to the legislature, he wrote that:
"Given the current economic downturn, it is vitally important that the state does not worsen the situation by mandating added costs on business that do not provide any public benefit." Reducing cancer and asthma apparently not being a public benefit...
III. No greening without growth
The other problematic point in the governor’s veto message is his assertion that:
"this bill would not provide any mechanism for the coordination and integration of infrastructure projects. As such, this bill would fail to provide long-term, strategic planning for the state’s goods movement infrastructure."
Reading between the lingo, what he means is that the bill is primarily an environmental measure designed to reduce harm rather than primarily a trade and goods movement expansion plan with some environmental mitigation tacked on. As the debate over the health and environmental impacts of goods movement has intensified, proponents of more shipping, more rail, more trucks, more warehouses have reacted by trying to tie greening to growth. In other words, trying to hold environmental and community demands for less pollution hostage to megadeals to expand, improve, and clean up the infrastructure and transportation grid the products move along. This bill, while it would have funded efforts to reduce traffic congestion that increases idling and emissions from trucks, wasn’t explicitly tied into a framework of tripling imports into California’s ports.
I think that this heresy in breaking away from the ‘infinite expansion’ model of goods movement, as much as the modest fee itself, was what doomed the bill. It’s a sad commentary on the blinders of part of the state’s business and political community that they find a life saving regulation to be more ideologically ‘toxic’ than the pollution that’s actually killing people every day.