California Fights Shipping Pollution As International Shippers Push Back

By Janet Wilson, DC Bureau

Part IV in the four-part series No Safe Harbor about the shipping industry's emissions problems

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Massive cargo ships have long motored into the nation’s busiest ports here and next door in Los Angeles, trailing plumes of sulfurous soot. They disgorge containers of toys, VCR’s and sneakers, then chug out again loaded with scrap tin and waste paper. They are literally the slow boats to and from China, Singapore, and Japan, mighty container ships that have managed to elude air pollution regulation for half a century.

After decades of belching bilious emissions skyward from aging engines and highly polluting fuel, these and other trans-oceanic ships may be forced to clean up their act a bit.

As of July 1, any large vessel within 24 nautical miles of California’s ports must switch to somewhat cleaner fuel. Federal and international regulators are slowly following in California’s wake, proposing measures to clean up fuel and engines that if approved, would take effect between 2016 and 2030. But powerful international shippers have sued to overturn the California regulation, and out at sea the freighters will spew the same pollution skyward for years. It will drift hundreds of miles inland as a dirty haze, contributing to cancer, heart and lung disease, asthma and other illness.

Public health experts in greater Los Angeles, which still endures the nation’s worst air pollution, say much more needs to be done, much faster.

“My concern is the timetable. … The emissions are significant here, they’re very large, and I think we need to move forward as quickly as possible. We have a generation of children growing up right now who are breathing air that we could do something about right now, that would change their future health for the better,” said Ed Avol, a professor at the Univ. of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine who researches children’s respiratory health.

“If we say okay, it’s acceptable to wait 10 or 15 years or longer to implement new laws, then basically we’re writing off the health of this generation of children.”

The stakes are high. Southern California is the epicenter of goods movement and its associated health costs in the U.S. Its ports handle 40% of all national consumer imports, and goods movement is a $200 billion to half trillion dollar piece of the economy, depending on the year. Shippers warn that if regulations are put in place too quickly, it could put the region and the U.S. at an economic disadvantage. They say there is also simply not enough clean fuel available to abruptly switch supply.

But the health impacts are enormous as well. State air regulators calculate that pollution from goods movement is linked to as many as 3,700 premature deaths, 62,000 cases of asthma, and more than one million school absences every year. More than 3,000 lives could be saved in the next six years if California’s fuel regulation survives legal challenges. A whopping 27 million Californians are exposed to diesel exhaust from ocean vessels annually, upping their risks of cancer considerably.

Residents near the ports have the highest cancer risks linked to diesel pollution in Los Angeles — an additional 2,900 cases per million people, according to regional regulators.

The big ships are a big piece of the air pollution that continues to blanket the region, experts say, and will play a greater role as other sources are forced to clean up. An estimated 800 deaths annually are tied specifically to ocean vessel emissions, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. The sulfur emitted from the ships’ smokestacks collides with oxygen to form gases linked to a host of respiratory diseases. Winds also blow long plumes of sulfur particulate inland across a broad swath of communities, said Avol of USC.