As the retail economy transitions from big-box stores to big-box warehouses supporting home delivery, the U. S. has experienced something of a warehouse building boom. And the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) in Southern California is going to make sure that those warehouses don't pollute the air.
How does a warehouse pollute the air? Good question. A warehouse itself is just a big room full of stuff. But getting the stuff in and out of the warehouse requires trucks and forklifts. Never mind that those trucks are going to be going somewhere else and emitting pollution anyway if that particular warehouse isn't built. The brilliant minds of the California regulators have determined that warehouse owners and operators are liable for the air pollution caused by any truck that delivers or picks up stuff at the warehouse.
In order to be absolved of these sins, warehouses must either pay a fee that allegedly goes toward the air district's anti-pollution initiatives, or must install electric vehicle chargers or rooftop solar panels. If the warehouse doesn't comply by the deadline (which varies from now till 2025, depending on the warehouse's size), the SCAQMD can assess fines of $11,700 a day. And according to an LA Times article, only about half of the warehouses included in current regulations have complied so far. In order to shame the noncompliant ones, the paper published a 109-line table of the warehouses that haven't complied. The article noted that the regulators made warehouses in disadvantaged communities a special priority for enforcement.
Nobody in their right mind is in favor of air pollution, other things being equal. But other things are hardly ever equal, and this attempt on the part of California regulators to reduce pollution that is loosely associated with warehouses shows that the regulatory process has reached the outer limits of feasibility in this case.
Let's see if we can analyze the logic of the regulations, such as it is. Californians need stuff that is typically shipped by truck. Currently, that stuff is moving less through retail stores and more through warehouses owned by retailers, shippers, and manufacturers, and a lot of truck traffic is going to and from the warehouses.
So far, electric trucks are not much of a thing, although in other regulations California is threatening to ban diesel trucks from the state altogether. (That would certainly fix the truck-pollution problem, but would deprive most Californians of their stuff.) The people building warehouses clearly have money to spend on building them, so they can certainly afford to pay either fees the regulators assess—so many dollars per truck coming and going—or they can afford to install lots of charging stations for the electric trucks which will surely materialize ("If you build it, they will come"), or force the warehouses to install solar panels on those nice flat roofs of theirs.
Now suppose you're a poor person living in one of those disadvantaged neighborhoods near which a big new warehouse has been built, and you open your door to diesel fumes emitted by the many trucks that drive past your house on the way to the warehouse. How is any aspect of these new regulations going to make your life better?
If the warehouse is paying a fee per truck and that goes to the SCAQMD, that isn't going to help you directly unless you get a job at the SCAQMD.
If the warehouse installs hordes of electric-truck charging stations, that isn't going to help you until the electric trucks come along, which may be many years from now, if ever.
If the warehouse installs solar panels on their roof, there's just as many trucks going by your house as there were before.
Unless you have the particular mindset that rejoices when any polluter is made to pay a penalty for their crime, and derive enough satisfaction from knowing that the warehouse operator is doing daily penance for attracting all those trucks that drive by your door, and that warm glow of vengeance or whatever it is outweighs the problem of all those trucks passing your house, you are no better off with these regulations than without them, at least for the foreseeable future.
Yes, perhaps the regulations move us incrementally closer to the fossil-fuel-free utopia envisioned by many in our elite classes, in which the roar of diesel engines is replaced by the almost imperceptible hum of electric motors—except for the occasional boom of exploding transformers overloaded by too much demand on an outmoded power grid.
I put the regulations in terms of sin and penance rather than in more objective or scientific terms, because that is what they amount to: a secular version of the religious concepts of sin and salvation. As I have shown, the warehouse anti-pollution regulations are not going to reduce the diesel emissions from trucks going to and from the warehouse, at least not until most of the California truck fleet becomes electric. But they punish people who have had the economic initiative to build warehouses in order to meet California's insatiable desire for stuff.
It would make more sense to assess fines on the trucks each time they make a delivery. But the regulators know they have pushed truckers about as far as they can stand, and so instead they go for large warehouse-owning corporations, which are richer and easier to shake down than individual truckers. I use the term "shakedown" intentionally, because in some ways, these environmental regulations are taking on the look of the Mafia henchman who comes into a dime store and says to the owner, "Nice little place you got here—a shame if anything happened to it." Because air quality has become such a sacred cow in California, almost anything can be done in its name, including the slapping of ineffective regulations that don't get at the root of the problem, but appease the gods of air quality.
Perhaps these regulations are just rough spots on the road to a diesel-free future, but in the meantime, I'm glad I don't run a warehouse in California.
Sources: The article "Crackdown on warehouse pollution results in more than 100 violation notices" appeared on the LA Times website at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-12-22/warehouse-crackdown-results-in-over-100-pollution-violations.
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