The U.S. is suffering through one of the worst transportation crises in the country's history, with hundreds of container ships anchored off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts waiting days on end to get into port to be offloaded.
The Biden regime is particularly concerned with getting ports in California back on track because the bulk of the nation's imports come into facilities in the Golden State. As such, the claimed president, Joe Biden, announced last week a few measures that he thinks will help, like Port of Los Angeles moving to a 24/7 work schedule.
Only, none of these measures are going to work and it's thanks to the left-wing environmental and regulatory insanity imposed over years by the Democrats who run the place.
"The conventional wisdom from the left is that COVID is the reason that shipping containers are in the waters off California with no stevedores or truckers available to take care of them. The implication is that if people would stop being selfish and take the vaccines, the whole problem would magically vanish. That's nonsense," Andrea Widburg writes at the American Thinker.
In fact, the problem is directly related to a pair of laws the Democrat supermajority in the state passed, both having to do with favored issues and constituencies: Climate change hacks and the unions.
Widburg notes further that when you add in additional components -- COVID-related benefits payments that discourage work as well as other issues that are simply unique to the seafaring cargo industry, and poof: "Empty Christmas stockings."
And speaking of the 'climate change' issue, The Conservative Treehouse has more:
The trucking issue with California LA ports, ie the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) and the Port of Long Beach (POLB), is that all semi tractors have to be current with new California emissions standards. As a consequence, that [means] trucks cannot be older than 3 years if they are to pick up or deliver containers at those ports. This issue wipes out approximately half of the fleet trucks used to move containers in/out of the port. Operating the port 24/7 will not cure the issue, because all it does is pile up more containers that sit idle as they await a limited number of trucks to pick them up. THIS is the central issue. [Their emphasis]
The EPA reached a settlement with the California Air Resource Board to shut down rigs that were not compliant with the state's new air quality standards in October 2020:
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced settlements with three interstate trucking companies imposing $417,000 in penalties for violating the California Air Resources Board’s federally enforceable Truck and Bus Regulation, Drayage Truck Regulation and Transport Refrigeration Unit Regulation.
"In effect, what this 2020 determination and settlement created was an inability of half the nation’s truckers from picking up anything from the Port of LA or Port of Long Beach," the outlet continued.
And it gets worse: The Biden regime doesn't have anyone in the 'president's' Cabinet who knows much of anything about how to solve the supply chain bottleneck. In a column for top shipping industry website gCaptain, Captain John Konrad wrote that many of Biden's agencies are led by experts in their field, but not the person in charge of maritime shipping.
“The FAA is headed by a pilot, NASA is headed by an astronaut, the US Marine Corps is headed by a Marine but for the fourth time in a row, and during the worst shipping crisis of the century, the US Department of Transportation has appointed someone to the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) who is not a captain and has no commercial shipping experience,” Konrad wrote.
“Phillips is a highly decorated Navy leader with a long list of accomplishments and is highly respected by everyone gCaptain has interviewed. She was head of the Navy’s Climate Change Task Force and is a highly sought after consultant on climate security issues. She holds an MBA. She was chairman of a local government Sea Level Rise Preparedness and Resilience project. She once captained a Navy warship,” Konrad continued.
“The appointment looks great on paper except for one kinda big problem. This is not a warship position. It’s a commercial shipping appointment and she has zero experience aboard any commercial ships. She does not even have experience leading navy military sealift ship,” he added.
The shipping and supply chain crisis worsened under Biden isn't going to get better anytime soon. That's just a fact.
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