Unintended Consequences: The California Electric Truck Mandate

 

If you own a trucking company that picks up shipments from California ports, you now have to deal with the consequences of a new law designed to reduce your carbon footprint.

 

Trucking is one of the vital ingredients in our infrastructure that virtually all parts of the economy rely on.  About two-fifths of all containerized imports to the U. S. come through one of California's twelve commercial ports.  According to a recent report in National Review, beginning January 1, any trucker doing "drayage" (the technical term for transporting stuff to or from a seaport) in California can only buy zero-emission vehicles, although they can hang on to their existing diesel fleet for a while.

 

Trucks don't last forever, however, and evidently the court of wisdom otherwise known as the California legislature decided this was the best way to get truckers used to the additional coming mandate that in 2035, all trucks entering California seaports and intermodal rail yards (where the containers are loaded onto trains) must be zero-emission types. 

 

The ostensible motivation for these laws is to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, of course.  And careful analyses do show that over the lifetime of an electric vehicle, even if you include the fossil fuels used in the different types of manufacturing (electric versus internal-combustion) and in producing the electricity for the vehicle, less carbon dioxide results from using electric vehicles.  That's the intended consequence, and unless the law is later modified, it will be achieved.

 

But the devil is in the details, and some truckers interviewed about the mandate pointed out several unintended consequences that may follow from these laws.  For one thing, the number of electric trucks in California will have to go from about 300, where it is today, to around 500,000, and some way will have to be found to charge all those trucks, and to keep them running farther than the alleged 60 miles that the California regulators said was the typical drayage daily mileage.  A lot of truckers drive a lot farther than that every day, and if you add several hours a day to charge the trucks, it turns a normal workday into a 20-hour day. 

 

And then there's the cost.  Even if you can find a zero-emission truck that will do the job, it will cost three or four times what a diesel vehicle costs.  And one trucker asked what bank will finance such a purchase if you can't show where you're going to charge it and how you will work out a schedule that will let you stay in business. 

 

So if California doubles down on enforcement, we can anticipate something like a gradual strangling of commerce flowing through its ports as the few truckers who manage to jump through the hoops of regulation are all that's left.  And maybe that was what the lawmakers really wanted anyway.  If the idealist dream of a zero-emission society were to come to pass in the next couple of years, millions would die of starvation and cold, and those few who are left would be reduced to living a life that would be familiar to a denizen of 1880. 

 

At the very least, essentially shutting down 40% of containerized imports to the U. S. would cause massive supply-chain disruptions that would make what happened during COVID look like a hiccup.  If you say no one would let things get that bad, well, we did let things get that bad during COVID, and it can happen again.

 

I recently came across a true story that should become the paradigm cautionary tale for those who close their eyes to the unintended consequences of legislation. 

 

In England in the mid-1800s, dogs were quite commonly used for transportation.  Poor people who couldn't afford a horse and wagon to carry their goods to market could nevertheless use a dog and a "dog-cart" (not to be confused with the horse-drawn carriage referred to in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales).  But in 1841, the recently founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) successfully lobbied to pass a law prohibiting the use of dogs for transportation.  In urging this measure, the SPCA cited a few highly publicized instances of cruelty to transport dogs, although it appears that many if not most of the dogs were well-treated.  For good measure, a dog tax was also passed around the same time, further discouraging the use of dogs for business purposes.

 

I can't be positive, but I suspect that the SPCA members were largely upper-class types who, if they thought ahead at all, imagined all the dogs formerly used for transport would revert to being beloved pets.  Think again.  According to Stanley Coren, a dog psychologist and historian, when the law took effect it led to something close to a dog holocaust:  

 

"Dreadful massacres of dogs took place all over England when they could no longer legally be used for cartage but were now taxable.  In Birmingham, more than a thousand were slaughtered, and similar carnage took place in Liverpool.  In Cambridge, the streets were littered with dead dogs.  Because these bodies were becoming a health hazard, the high constable of Cambridge arranged a mass burial of four hundred dogs."

 

So much for good intentions.  The SPCA survived this debacle somehow, and so did the use of dogs for transportation in other parts of the world, but no longer in England.

 

No one can be certain of exactly what will happen if California enforces their zero-emission truck mandate.  But they are meddling with a piece of infrastructure that is crucial to the entire U. S. economy, and if the law has the unintended consequence of disrupting commerce in ways that harm millions of U. S. citizens, those harms should be weighed against whatever essentially unmeasurable good that may eventually come a century or so after California's greenhouse-gas emissions go down by a few percent as a result of this law.  In my view, the law will do a lot more harm than good, and most of the California truckers think so too.

 

Sources:  National Review's website carried the article "California EV Rules 'Totally Impractical,' Truckers Say; Might as Well 'Build a Spaceship and Go to Mars'" at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-ev-rules-totally-impractical-truckers-say-may-as-well-build-a-spaceship-and-go-to-mars/.  I also referred to https://historum.com/t/dog-carts-as-a-form-of-transport.196441/, https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change/, and Stanley Coren's The Intelligence of Dogs:  Canine Consciousness and Capabilities (Macmillan, 1994), pp. 155-156. 

When Scientists Aren't Scientists

I recently attended a scientific conference in the Northeast U. S. (I will be purposely vague about the exact venue for reasons that will shortly become clear), and on the plane I read an article by the Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield that pointed out an ironic fact about science:  in order to do good science, scientists must act at least some of the time like non-scientists.  Right after that, I got to see a good example of what he was talking about.

One of the main things that attract certain personalities to science and engineering is the supposed objectivity and emotion-free quality of science.  Mr. Spock, the famously non-emotional Vulcan of the Star Trek TV series, supposedly had a temperament ideally suited for science, because emotion was never supposed to influence his judgment.  Many scientific journals insist that papers submitted to them be written in the passive voice (not "We found that. . . " but "It was found that. . . "), thus removing any trace of the author's personality from the paper and making it sound more objective.  But Mansfield pointed out that thumos (a Greek word meaning "spiritedness" or "passion") often takes over when scientists perceive a threat to something they hold dear, even if the threat comes with scientific credentials.  And many scientists who discover something that goes against the current consensus of scientific opinion have to defend their new ideas passionately against equally vigorous and emotional opposition.  In getting emotional, scientists end up acting like ordinary non-scientists, but most good scientists tend to have a certain amount of thumos that motivates them to do the hard work and defending of their ideas that are needed to get a hearing in the competitive world of research.

The night after I arrived at the conference, the sponsoring organization held a banquet which included a buffet dinner, awards, and a three-piece classical music group that could barely be heard above the conversational din in the large hall.  During dessert, the chairman got up at the raised podium and announced the name of the after-dinner speaker:  William Happer, a well-known physicist.  I had heard his name before, and as he began his talk, I remembered where:  as author of an article entitled "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases."

By now, the most famous (but by no means the only) greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, CO₂.  The conventional wisdom among most scientists, policymakers in many countries, and the general public is that (a) humanity is playing Russian roulette with the world's climate by burning so much fossil fuel, which (b) invariably makes CO₂, which (c) traps heat and raises average global temperatures, which will (d) lead to all kinds of disasters, from dying polar bears to flooded South Sea islands and perhaps even an epidemic of kidney stones.  Therefore, all right-thinking citizens should be aware of their carbon footprints and do everything humanly possible to minimize them, or else go around feeling guilty for not doing so.

Prof. Happer's specialty is the way atoms and molecules absorb and emit radiation, and in the technically sophisticated and convincing talk he gave, he showed that the correlation between rising CO₂ levels and global average temperature is more alleged than real.  He also showed that the role of CO­₂ in the global heat balance has been greatly exaggerated, and that there are serious flaws in the way current models treat the details of how the gas absorbs radiation to affect climate.  He closed with a quotation from playwright Henrik Ibsen: "I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right."

The audience reaction was interesting.  They were quiet at first, but when it became clear that Happer was arguing against the main claims of global warming, most people except for a small circle near the speaker resumed talking as though nothing special was going on.  There was scattered applause at the end, and then Happer asked for questions. 

The first two or three were queries about technical details.  Then a tall, rather formidable-looking man rose and mounted the podium.  I can't recall all his words, but I know he began by saying his father was one of the founders of the field of cloud physics.  He charged Happer with at least two faults: cowardice, for not being willing to attend mainstream climate-change meetings to present his arguments; and ill will, for insulting the intelligence of the climate-change community.  In response, Happer pointed at one of the charts in his presentation and said, "The facts are there."  His accuser said something else in a tone of voice that I would characterize as non-scientific, and for a moment there I wondered if the after-dinner entertainment was going to be an amateur prizefight.  Then the chairman hastily grabbed the microphone and asked the musical trio to start playing.  The audience laughed that nervous kind of laugh that means people are relieved that something really awful isn't going to happen after all, and that was the end of that.

Only it wasn't, really.  What if Happer is right, and the vast majority of climate scientists, government leaders, and the public (which is not qualified to judge) has turned a molehill of a problem into a mountain that threatens whole economies and spreads fear and misplaced priorities worldwide?  A lot of people will end up looking pretty foolish, for one thing, which is why Son of Cloud Physicist got up and said what he said.  Of course, one should not make the opposite error of thinking that every crank and holder of a fringe opinion who comes along must be right and the mainstream is always wrong.  But Happer's evidence is not the only reason to suspect that the conventional climate-change picture at least has serious flaws.  Others such as David Rutledge at Caltech have questioned the conventional wisdom as well, but for different reasons. 

Climate change happens so slowly compared to the potential progress of science that I suspect the story will be gradually rewritten as time goes on to prove the dominant powers right whatever actually happens, and it will take a clever historian to tell the real story a century or two hence.  In the meantime, those of us who have more important things to worry about than how many centimeters per year the ocean is rising can take some comfort in the chance that William Happer's voice may be heard, and scientists will act a little more like scientists in the matter of examining the technical evidence for global warming.

Sources:  Prof. Happer's excellent article "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases," written for a non-technical audience, appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the journal First Things, pp. 33-38.  On Jan. 3, 2010, I blogged on Prof. David Rutledge's contention that we are not going ever going to burn enough fossil fuels to make much of a difference in the climate one way or another. 

Harvey Mansfield's article "Science and Non-Science in Liberal Education" appeared in the Summer 2013 edition of The New Atlantis, pp. 22-37.