Lucianne.com links to a Conservative Treehouse article by the pseudonymous Sundance. That individual reports on what he claims is the real cause of the supply chain backup - California’s pollution regulations which make easily half the diesel trucks on the American road ineligible to pick up containers at CA ports.
It is further claimed that the huge shippers like Amazon and Walmart have known about this and shifted much cargo to non-CA ports on the gulf or east coasts. The extra distance plus Panama Canal fees has jacked up shipping costs as it ties up ships longer and burns more fuel to move the same amount of cargo from Asia to the U.S.
If this claim is accurate, waiving the pollution requirement would be what would unclog the ports of L.A. and Long Beach. Of course, President Biden hasn’t suggested doing that, and likely won’t, as the Greens in his coalition would go nuts.
Another solution would be to admit the problem, identify all the newish trucks eligible to operate in SoCal, do whatever is required to route them there, and move the goods off the docks where they’ve piled up. This would require wartime-like Herculean measures - effectively nationalizing the nation’s heavy trucks and violating the rights of many truck owners - which nobody wants to attempt in peacetime.
The Washington result is feel-good half measures, metaphorically a Band Aid applied where surgery is what’s indicated. “Let’s go, Brandon,” anyone?
