Given the rate at which shiploads, trainloads, truckloads, and planeloads of goods have been arriving from abroad in the past eight months, 2008 is on track to set an all-time record for imports, topping $2 trillion for the first time. (Not counting oil, imports will amount to more than $1.8 trillion, also a record). Clearly, recent economic pain and soaring diesel-fuel prices have not diminished Americans’ appetite for imported merchandise.
That merchandise never sits in one place for long. It’s moved out of the ports, sorted at sophisticated warehouse complexes known as “logistics facilities”, and distributed throughout the country as quickly as possible. In recent years, California’s Inland Empire, lying east of LA in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, has already seen construction of logistics warehouses covering 330 million square feet.
To get a mental picture of the massive extent of roofing and concrete that requires, imagine 7,300 football fields paved and enclosed (or have a look at these images.) Similarly vast acreages surrounding the warehouses are paved as well. And remember, goods traffic in the area could triple in coming decades.
In a 2006 commentary, Andrea Hricko, associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, cited an example of a doll, made in an Asian sweatshop and destined to sell for $9.97 at one of Chicago’s big-box discount stores. By the time the doll reaches Chicago, notes Hricko, “she has traveled more than 8,000 miles—on diesel-burning conveyances the whole way.” And she will have left a dark trail of pollution in the ports and communities she passed through.
Dr. Hricko’s doll, more than likely, arrives at the LA or Long beach port and rides the Burlington Northern railway to the Elwood, Illinois intermodal terminal outside Chicago, where it is transferred to a truck. Once the intermodal facility in Gardner, Kansas goes into operation, the doll may end its train journey there and, after a quick rest in a warehouse, take a truck ride past Claud Hobby’s house on its way to Wal-Mart somewhere in the nation’s midsection. From there, it will land in a child’s bedroom for a while before going to the basement or garage and, eventually, a landfill.
Hobby visited Elwood last year to get a glimpse of his own future, and it wasn’t pleasant: “With so many trucks in the area, they had three police officers on the roads directing traffic, and it still took me 30 minutes to drive one mile.”
With a rising tide of imports from China and other countries choking the ports of Southern California and the roads around Chicago, the goods-transport system is looking for alternate routes, and Mexico stands ready to help. In contrast to the mythical “NAFTA superhighway”, the rail lines from Mexico are very real, and they’re humming. Month by month, more Asian goods are making landfall at the port of Lazaro Cardenas on southern Mexico’s Pacific coast and riding the Kansas City Southern railway northeast for 2200 miles.
To unload merchandise at the other end, the railway and its corporate partners will be developing yet another intermodal hub, south of Kansas City and east of Gardner. It will have the potential for 23 million square feet of warehouse space on its 970 acres of land.
The Kansas City Star reported in March that the developments at the intermodal hub are “all part of the railroad's strategy to encourage companies and ocean carriers to ship goods from Asia to Lazaro Cardenas and on into the United States.” According to a transportation analyst quoted by the paper, “More than two-thirds of intermodal shipments are consumer goods. They [Kansas City Southern] have to convince the Wal-Marts, the J.C. Penneys and Home Depots to use the Mexico-U.S. corridor … The longer the haul, the better the margins and the greater the revenues [for the railway].'
Constitutional chicanery
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have announced a “Clean Air Action Plan”, characterized as “the most comprehensive strategy to cut air pollution and reduce health risks ever produced for a global seaport complex.” The goal is to reduce emissions of diesel pollutants by almost 50 percent in five years.
As part of the program, starting October 1, trucks entering either of two big Southern California ports will have to comply with new rules on emissions and safety, and older trucks with poorer pollution controls will be banned. On top of that, the LA port has decreed that only drivers who are employees of trucking firms, not independent contractors, will be allowed to enter the port. The American Trucking Associations (ATA), which represents most of the nation’s trucking companies, has sued to block the new rules.
The lever the ATA is employing in its effort to overturn the Action Plan is the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution. That clause, it is claimed, prohibits states and localities from interfering with interstate trade. Economist John Husing of Redlands, Calif., who has done analyses of the region’s goods-transport industry under contracts with the ports and the Southern California Association of Governments, believes that the industry’s Constitutional argument will succeed.
Says Husing, “The trucking companies don’t want every Podunk city in America to be able to say, ‘You can’t drive through our town!’, and the courts will agree.”
The commerce clause is having an impact in Gardner, Kansas as well, where a city clean-air ordinance prohibits truck drivers from letting their engines idle for more than 10 minutes. “But that’s just window dressing,” says Claud Hobby. “We can’t do anything about trucks on railroad property [in the intermodal park].” There, the commerce clause rules, and Gardner residents will just have to live with the drifting smog.
Nevertheless, says Jane Anne Morris, author of “Gaveling Down the Rabble: How Free Trade is Stealing Our Democracy”, it is important to challenge all attempts by corporations and the federal courts to use the clause as a weapon against environmentally essential laws. “We would not have the problems we have now if thousands of good, promising, strong laws had not been declared unconstitutional under the commerce clause since 1879,” she says.
