State Senator Dean Florez represents a large swath of California’s Central Valley and chairs the Senate Select Committee on Air Quality. This week he brought his Committee to the Port of Los Angeles to get an update on how the state’s major ports, Long Beach included, are progressing in their efforts to reduce emissions. Our local Assemblymember Bonnie Lowenthal was also in attendance.

During the relatively brief hearing – three hours is not a great deal of time to devote to such complex issues, and it’s positively the blink of an eye compared to many a meeting I’ve been to on this subject – the Committee heard from local and state air quality regulators; community and environmental groups; technology providers; and the ports themselves. Whether speakers felt that air quality progress was more on the slow side or the steady side depended, I think, on which group they represented.

The question framing the hearing was “What Are Ports Doing to Protect the Health of the Surrounding Communities?” Environmental and community groups readily answered the Senator’s questions about the impact of so much goods movement, describing a “slow-acting disaster” that has resulted in untold cases of asthma, cancer, and heart disease in local neighborhoods and schools. While agreeing that some progress has been made, these speakers called for more extensive surveys of actual public health impacts. They asked that the goods movement industry contribute to the cost of reducing emissions and observed that cleanup efforts can create much-needed jobs.

Technology providers were also impatient with the pace of change. A representative of ACTI, which makes the “bonnet” that controls emissions from ships’ engines while idling, observed that there is “general trepidation” about adopting any new technology. There was some discussion of the relative merits of the bonnet and its leading competitor, shoreside plug-in power for docked vessels (though no one was there to represent that technological option). Everyone agreed that international regulation of vessel emissions is not moving quickly enough. A provider of magnetic levitation (maglev) trains that could be used to carry freight reiterated his readiness to mount a demonstration of the technology. For several months the San Pedro Bay ports and Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority have been going through a detailed evaluation of several similar advanced-technology proposals, and more information is expected soon.

The Port of Los Angeles recapped the many aspects of the Clean Air Action Plan that it is jointly implementing with the Port of Long Beach. Replacement of the privately owned port trucking fleet, usually estimated at 16,000 trucks, is ahead of schedule thanks to the ports’ Clean Trucks Programs. In fact, the Port of Los Angeles reported that more than half of port cargo is now moved by trucks that are model year 2007 or newer. Los Angeles just put out its updated 2008 emissions inventory, whose headline is that overall emissions are down 27% since 2005 and diesel particulates are down 31% over the same period (Long Beach’s 2008 inventory isn’t out yet, but results are likely to be similar). Some of this decrease could be attributable to a drop-off in container volumes since the 2006/7 peak, but per-container emission rates are also generally down for most pollutants, pointing to the success of a wide range of emission control efforts.

The sobering reality, though, is that the air quality goal line is very far away. The South Coast Air Quality Management District reminded the Senator and all those in attendance that the amount of pollution we must still reduce in Southern California is far larger than the amount we have reduced so far; far larger than the amount that comes from all goods movement sources; and far larger than we have known technologies for. None of this means we should give up hope, but it does mean we should continue to deploy cleaner technologies, encourage the search for new technology breakthroughs, and, as much as we can, speed up our steady progress towards cleaner air.

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