Action Plan

Did you hear me on the radio the other morning? KPCC assembled an expert panel for a roundtable discussion on the San Pedro Bay Clean Air Action Plan. The panel included attorneys and senior policy advisors and presidents of harbor commissions, all talking about this plan’s goal to reduce air emissions caused by the operation of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Over the course of the panel discussion, important and intimidating acronyms were offhandedly employed. Complicated technical reports were referenced in ways that made it clear that they had been both read and understood. Big words were used. I was not on this panel.
I was in a folding chair in the audience carefully observing a group of smart people talking smartly, trying to imagine what I would imagine these people to look like if I were listening to their voices on the radio. This was a difficult task, but I am pretty certain that S. David Freeman (Port of Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners President) and Peter Greenwald (Senior Policy Advisor for the Southern California Air Quality Management District) both looked the way I would have thought they should have. But the others, they were talking funny.
Unless you are naked right now (weirdo), chances are you are wearing something that arrived at the continent of North America in a great big corrugated shipping container that came through one of the San Pedro Bay ports before it caught your eye on that retail rack. But according to the smarties on the panel, running shoes and costume jewelry are not the only things being delivered to us by the ships and cranes and trains and trucks humming along down there at the Ports. We are also receiving dangerous and unhealthy doses of diesel particulate matter, and nitrous and sulfur oxides, among other chemicals. Not only do they have remarkable names, they also cause cancer and respiratory diseases in people living in the South Coast Air Basin. That’s where you live.
But never fear, for now we have a San Pedro Bay Clean Air Action Plan. It will require ships to turn off their engines when they are berthed (fun fact: this is called “cold ironing”), and use low sulfur content fuels, and will require other equipment to meet all kinds of EPA standards. These new control measures will reduce the number of horrible deaths caused by the import and distribution of all of our life necessities: twelve dollar plaid shirts, high bouncy balls, disposable razors with moisturizing strips, little gangsta Homies toys you can buy out of vending machines. Read the report at http://www.portoflosangeles.org/environment_studies.htm. If you care, send a comment to the Ports before the end of the month and tell them that you want more! Stricter standards! Fancier sounding control measures!
But back to what’s important; my radio appearance. The reason you heard my deep melodious voice coming from your speakers was that I got to ask a question, remember? I submitted it on an index card, which they gave back to me. Thank goodness, because it turns out that it’s really tough to talk into a microphone and think at the same time. My question was a good one. It was all about other ports in the world with similar action plans or something. I need you to tell me the truth, though. Did I sound fat?