A Smart California Port Policy for the Green-Growth Future, Spearheaded by Progressives - Part II

Even leading economists at the Boston Consulting Group and Beacon Economics, who are often on the opposite side of organized labor (which has in the past been at odds with environmentalists), concluded the LA Clean Trucks Program is a sophisticated business model designed to make port trucking more efficient and operating green profitable over the long term.

Despite this, trucking companies and their rich shipper clients -- Wal-Mart, Target, Nike and the like -- want to maintain the broken economics that favor a fossil-fuel mindset over that of an alternative energy future. They may scream they’re green through light-bulbs-that-pay-for-themselves press releases, but these multibillion dollar corporations show their true colors when their hired guns get quoted in the industry rags with “see you in court.”

The Big-Box bullying did turn one Democrat away from a comprehensive program that environmentalists and local community backed. Former Edison CEO and Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster allowed his harbor commissioners to break a partnership with the Port of Los Angeles to pass an unsustainable financing system in which individual workers who average $29,000 a year will be forced to secure loans and maintain the expensive clean-technology trucks instead of the companies that hire them.

Mayor Foster’s primary rationale for getting Long Beach into the sub-prime loan business was to stave off industry litigation threats. However, just days after environmentalists decried the watered-down scheme, the nation’s largest trucking lobby petitioned the FMC in the hopes a self-serving interpretation of the law would allow companies to skirt the most minimal clean-air regulations.

The Port of Long Beach, of course, functions as a conjoined twin to the Port of LA and will have to reverse its action to keep drivers hauling cargo; all the more impressive that Speaker Pelosi took her leadership and support for LA’s sustainable and comprehensive program straight to the DC agency: “Since port trucking costs are a relatively small component of overall transportation costs, the increased operational costs required by this program will not be unreasonable or burdensome….as our country grapples with new environmental, public health, and homeland security challenges, it is important for the FMC to consider the broader effects on public health and safety of port operations.”

It’s also important for businesses stuck in the 20th century to consider the broader effects on their profits. Private equity sees the huge potential in an evolved port trucking system, and financing groups salivating over a less fragmented sector have not been passive players in the Clean Trucks debate.

Influential Democrats have helped Los Angeles solve the problem of the “inconvenient truck” and are paving the way to get thousands of clean-burning vehicles on the road, driven by a professional workforce. Now it’s up to a polluting industry too accustomed to saying no to take a deep, clean breath and realize how to capitalize on innovation, efficiency and quality that a level playing field offers in the new green market.

Patricia Castellanos of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy is chair of the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports. Doug Bloch directs the Oakland CCSP..