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.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), with headquarters in Washington, DC and an office in Los Angeles, has filed a “motion to intervene” in opposition to ATA’s lawsuit. Other groups, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, are part of a coalition with NRDC to support the new environmental regulations at the Southern California ports.
NRDC spokesperson Jessica Lass makes the case this way: “We support the plan because more management oversight is needed at the ports, to improve efficiency. Trucks need to be fully loaded, to minimize the number of trips in and out. And we need to be sure they are fuel-efficient and well maintained.”
Controlling pollution from oceangoing ships will be even more difficult than regulating trucks. Ninety percent of the bunker-fuel-burning, fume-belching vessels coming into the LA and Long Beach ports are foreign-owned and –flagged. “Ships are under international control, and that’s the hardest problem to solve,” laments John Husing.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a voluntary program under which some ships will use better grades of fuel in their auxiliary engines (which they switch to when they’re in and around ports), reduce their speed near ports, and plug into shore-based power sources when at dock. NRDC hails the program as a step forward, but Husing doesn’t see it going very far: “We regard EPA as useless. What they are doing is lame at best.”
The purchase-driven life
The sheer volume of imports, growing by the day, threatens to overwhelm all attempts to clean up the environment along trade routes. The value of goods being imported nationwide has risen 68 percent just in the past decade; that’s after adjustments for inflation, and it excludes oil imports.
Halting that growth or even making deep cuts in imports would not only help clear the air; it would make it easier to clean up the toxic water pollution that accumulates in sea lanes and ports; it would curb the noise pollution that can do serious damage to human health and interfere with communications among marine mammals; and it would stop the headlong rush to pave more land for logistics parks.
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