hrm.

[psocoptera]

So I read this article about a Supreme Court ruling confirming that under NAFTA Mexican trucks can work in the US, which ought to lower shipping costs, which is good, but many of these trucks may be older and more polluting, which is bad. And, I don't know, when I read this line:

Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California said that the nation's pollution laws required U.S. officials to study the impact on the environment before opening the border to older trucks from Mexico.

I couldn't help but think, hrm, you know, studying what the result of this would be before doing it doesn't sound like *such* a bad plan...

Agh! Creeping liberalism! Get it off me! ::grin::

Seriously, though, the studying of things, and corresponding having of increased information, does not seem like such a bad thing, really. Although one has to wonder, it's apparently been a "decade-long dispute", how is that not long enough for someone to have *already* studied it? Bush has been trying to lift the ban (on Mexican trucks) since 2001, that seems like enough time for a well-funded federal agency to get its act together and do some math. Which does make me wonder if "let's study it first" is just a less-than-honest delaying tactic.

In other clean-air news, from the same article,

The ruling marked the second time in six weeks that the high court dealt a setback to air-quality regulators in California. On April 28, the court struck down rules that required buyers of new buses, garbage trucks, airport shuttles and other fleet vehicles in the Los Angeles area to choose clean-burning engines.

How is that a federal issue? How is that not a states-rights issue, or even, from the look of it, a *city* issue? Does Los Angeles not actually have the right to try to address its own air quality issues? I'm not necessarily saying I would vote for that law myself, I don't know anything about it, but *how* is this a matter of "interstate commerce"? (TSOR suggests that in fact the Clean Air Act specifically bars local governments from setting their own standards - because the entire country is so obviously uniform in relevant weather patterns, industrial development, etc. Yeesh. Now that I think about it, I think I had read about this before, but it still pisses me off.)

(And back on the Mexican trucks, the obvious solution is to let American factories facing regulatory difficulties buy, scrap, and replace some of those old Mexican trucks to hit their pollution-reduction quotas... I'm sure there are some Mexican truckers who'd be happy to sign up for a program that helped them get a newer, better truck.)

Comments

[ursula]

Is there a well-funded federal agency to study that sort of thing? Emphasis on the well-funded-under-Bush part? (I'm guessing there have been private studies with opposite conclusions . . .)

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Eh, well, the thing about air pollution is that it doesn't just have a local effect. If Detroit decides that it's going to let people pollute as much as they want, then that has an effect on people in Philadelphia, who shouldn't have to put up with more pollution because someone somewhere else decided they didn't care. It's not interstate commerce, per se, but it's interstate something, so I feel like it's something that should be regulated by the federal government (which should not, of course, prevent any smaller government from having stricter laws if they would like). I actually feel like environmental matters have the strongest argument for being regulated by the feds, since they're the general area where something that someone does somewhere else can most affect my quality of life here.