How Scientific Is Climate Change Science?

I have been mulling this over for a couple of weeks now. I am not thoroughly confident that I have grasped the essential point, but I find Francis Menton’s analysis well worth a post. Those who are more savvy in science will perhaps want to correct one or both of us. 

As you no doubt know, Menton writes the Manhattan Contrarian blog. He often proposes analyses of climate science, and especially of climate change hysteria.

In his post two weeks ago, he offered the following analysis. If we want to establish that human beings are the proximate cause of whatever changes the climate has undergone over the past few thousand years-- but especially over the past few hundred years-- we would need a control condition. That is, we would need to know what the climate would have been like if there had been no human beings, or better, if the Industrial Revolution had never happened. 

Science uses control conditions all the time. If you want to establish whether a medicine works you need to conduct trials wherein you offer the pill to two groups of people, both of whom are suffering from the same illness. You offer one group the new miracle drug and you offer the other a placebo. Then you can discern scientifically whether the medicine cures the illness or whether some other factor has intervened. If you offer all participants the same medicine, you do not know to the same degree of certainty whether it’s the medicine or some other factor-- as in, the body’s ability to heal itself.

In the case of climate science, we cannot know what the earth’s climate would have been under those conditions-- call them a counterfactual-- so the analysis that blames human beings for the current condition of the climate is based on flawed science. After all, we know that the climate changes and that it has changed all by itself before humans befouled the planet. Remember the Ice Age?

So argues Menton, and I believe that his point is well taken.

In shorter form, the settled science is effectively more like religious dogma. If it cannot be questioned; if it cannot be tested against a control; if it cannot be disbelieved-- it is dogma. Given that climate change hysterics are so hellbent on blaming human beings for everything that is happening to the climate, theirs feels like a religious mania wherein the species, and especially the white male capitalist patriarchy, is being punished for defiling the Goddess of Nature.

Without further ado, here is Menton’s analysis:

“The climate is changing, and we are the cause.” That is a statement that is so often-repeated and affirmed that it goes way beyond mere conventional wisdom. Probably, you encounter some version or another of that statement multiple times per week; maybe dozens of times. 

Everybody knows that it is true! And to express disagreement with that statement, probably more so than with any other element of current progressive orthodoxy, is a sure way to get yourself labeled a “science denier,” fired from an academic job, or even banished from the internet.

The UN IPCC’s recent Sixth Assessment Report on the climate is chock full of one version after another of the iconic statement, in each instance of course emphasizing that the human-caused climate changes are deleterious and even catastrophic. Examples:

• Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence); fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence); and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence). (Page A.3.5)

• Event attribution studies and physical understanding indicate that human-induced climate change increases heavy precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (high confidence) but data limitations inhibit clear detection of past trends on the global scale. (Page A.3.4, Box TS.10)

• Some recent hot extreme events would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. (Page A.3.4, Box TX.10)

The interesting part, Menton concludes, is that none of the scientists declares it all to be a certainty. They have confidence. They are convinced. They believe that human influence must have caused it.

So, over and over, it’s that we have “high confidence” that human influence is the cause, or that events would have been “extremely unlikely” without human influence. But how, really, do we know that? What is the proof?

Obviously, it matters. If we do not know what the climate would be doing on an uninhabited earth or on an earth where everyone was living in mud huts and returned to enjoying a hunter/gatherer existence, we do not know to a scientific certainty that human beings are the guilty parties.

Menton continues. You will note that he wrote this on the eve of the Glasgow climate confab-- one that was not attended by major players in the fossil fuel world-- Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. So, was it about the climate or was is all about precipitating the decline and fall of Western civilization:

This seems to me to be rather an important question. After all, various world leaders are proposing to spend some tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars to undo what are viewed as the most important human influences on the climate (use of fossil fuels). Billions of people are to be kept in, or cast into, energy poverty to appease the climate change gods. Political leaders from every country in the world are about to convene in Scotland to agree to a set of mandates that will transform most everyone’s life. You would think that nobody would even start down this road without definitive proof that we know the cause of the problem and that the proposed solutions are sure to work.

Of course, if we do not know the cause, then we should have some doubt about whether the solutions are going to work.

Menton then adds some thoughts from the philosophy of science. As I understand it, the null hypothesis would be the condition where the earth was uninhabited by humans or where the Industrial Revolution had not taken place. Testing the hypothesis would require us to know to a certainty what would have happened under different conditions.

Here’s the way I would put it: in real science, causation is established by disproof of a null hypothesis. It follows that the extent to which you may have proved some level of causation depends entirely on the significance of the particular null hypothesis that you have disproved, and the definiteness of your disproof; and it further follows that no proof of causation is ever completely definitive, and your claim of causation could require modification at any time if another null hypothesis emerges that cannot be excluded. The UN’s “attribution” studies universally deal with consideration of null hypotheses that are contrived and meaningless, and whose disproof (even if validly demonstrated) therefore establishes nothing.

Menton continues:

Here is how Briggs expresses the same concept I have just described:

All attribution studies work around the same basic theme. . . . A model of the climate as it does not exist, but which is claimed to represent what the climate would look like had mankind not ‘interfered’ with it, is run many times. The outputs from these runs is examined for some ‘bad’ or ‘extreme’ event, such as higher temperatures or increased numbers of hurricanes making landfall, or rainfall exceeding some amount. The frequency with which these bad events occur in the model is noted. Next, a model of the climate as it is said to now exist is run many times. This model represents global warming. The frequencies from the same bad events in the model are again noted. The frequencies between the models are then compared. If the model of the current climate has a greater frequency of the bad event than the imaginary (called ‘counterfactual’) climate, the event is said to be caused by global warming, in whole or in part.

In other words, the “attribution” study consists of invalidating a null hypothesis that is itself a counterfactual model with no demonstrated connection to the real world as it would have existed in the absence of human influences. The people who create these counterfactual models can of course build into them any characteristics they want in order that the result of their study will come out to be an “attribution” of the real world data to human influences. Why anyone would give any credence to any of this is beyond me.

Were last year’s hurricanes bad because we drove too much or because we exhaled too much:

Anyway, when you read, for example, that scientists have demonstrated that the severity of the past year’s hurricane season is due to human greenhouse gas emissions, you may find that you are asking yourself, how could they possibly know that? After all, there is no way they could possibly know how many and how severe the hurricanes would have been absent the GHG emissions. Well, now you know how it is done, They just make up the counterfactual world in order to create a straw man null hypothesis that will get the result they want from the AT99 “attribution” methodology. Hundreds upon hundreds of climate “scientists” follow this methodology with blinders on, and somehow no one ever notices that the whole exercise is meaningless, even as it provides the entire basis for a socialist takeover of the world economy.

And yet, considering the number of people who believe that carbon dioxide is fouling the atmosphere and causing the climate to change for the worse, the easy solution would be for all climate change believers to stop exhaling, thereby diminishing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and saving the climate.

Dog Whistles in Virginia?

As you no doubt know, people with barely functioning minds have been out in force denying that Critical Race Theory is being taught in Virginia public schools. Evidently, Virginia parents thought otherwise, because there is only so much lying you can get away with before the light of reason exposes it all to be a fraud.

Obviously, anyone who follows Christopher Rufo knows full well what is happening in public schools. And also knows that we are not dealing with dog whistles-- though I am puzzled to hear anyone traffic in such a lame metaphor.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the Virginia election, but especially on the charge that that state’s public schools do not teach CRT. He did the research so we didn’t have to:

And when the Democrats and the mainstream media insist that CRT is not being taught in high schools, they’re being way too cute. Of course K-12 kids in Virginia’s public schools are not explicitly reading the collected works of Derrick Bell or Richard Delgado — no more than Catholic school kids in third grade are studying critiques of Aquinas. But they are being taught in a school system now thoroughly committed to the ideology and worldview of CRT, by teachers who have been marinated in it, and whose unions have championed it.

Here is the evidence:

And in Virginia, this is very much the case. The state’s Department of Education embraced CRT in 2015, arguing for the need to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems” in education. In 2019, the department sent out a memo that explicitly endorsed critical race and queer theory as essential tools for teaching high school. Check out the VA DOE’s “Road Map to Equity,” where it argues that “courageous conversation” on “social justice, systemic inequity, disparate student outcomes and racism in our school communities is our responsibility and professional obligation. Now is the time to double down on equity strategies.” (My itals.) Check out the Youtube site for Virginia’s virtual 2020 summit on equity in education, where Governor Northam endorsed “antiracist school communities,” using Kendi’s language.

If you need more convincing, here goes:

Matt Taibbi found Virginia voters miffed by “the existence of a closed Facebook group — the ‘Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County’ — that contains six school board members and apparently compiled a list of parents deemed insufficiently supportive of ‘racial equity efforts.’” He found Indian and South Asian parents worried about the abolition of testing standards, as well they might be. And at school board meetings, in a fraught Covid era of kids-at-home, parents have been treated with, at best, condescension; and at worst, contempt. Remember how the National School Boards Association wanted the feds to designate some protests from these angry parents as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” — and then withdrew that request?

We also remember how quickly this nonsense was embraced by Attorney General Merrick Garland. And we even remember how Garland, when confronted with the NSBA withdrawal-- not to mention his son-in-law’s vested interest in teaching the garbage-- refused to renounce his call to the FBI to attack suburban mothers. This makes his actions intentionally hostile and expressly political, not inadvertent.

Among the biggest losers on Tuesday were the teachers’ unions. A more worthy loser we cannot imagine:

And during Covid, with nerves frayed by zoom-schooling, many parents have had their eyes opened about teachers’ unions. No surprise that one of the last campaigners for McAuliffe was Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. At the AFT 2021 Conference, guess who was the keynote speaker? Ibram X Kendi! The other big teachers’ union, the National Education Association, has explicitly called for teaching children CRT, pledging to publicize “an already-created, in-depth study that critiques white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy … capitalism … and other forms of power and oppression.” 

They back The 1619 Project as a teaching tool. So all the unions, the governor, the Virginia education department, the paper of record, and the federal government think CRT is obligatory for teaching children. But absolutely none of that ever, ever reaches into the classroom. Please.

Sullivan concludes:

In Virginia, the goal is not to make obscure CRT texts mandatory in a course curriculum; it is to filter all education first and foremost through the CRT lens of race and identity; to “interrogate” mathematics, literature, philosophy, and science not as fields of study, but as suspect products of “white supremacy”; to remember “positionality” before you even speak; to grade and discipline so as to remove any group differences; to abolish standardized tests, because there are different group outcomes; to end gifted education, because it’s allegedly racist; to hire and fire on identity grounds; to teach children that sex is not binary and can be chosen; to open restrooms and locker rooms to both sexes; and, most of all, to keep parents at bay and in the dark about all of it.

What has happened this past week, I suspect, is that the woke revolution has finally met its match: educated parents. People can tolerate sitting through compulsory “social justice” seminars, struggle sessions, pronoun rituals, and the rest as adults, if they have to as a condition of employment. But when they see this ideology being foisted on their children as young as six, they draw a line.

Thanks to Sullivan for laying out the issue clearly, so that we can all understand it.

Climate Change Hysteria, circa 2004

If this were not pathetic, it would be laughable. It’s about climate change hysteria. It was not minted yesterday. Serious scientists have been trying to enhance their own importance by pretending to be prophets of climatedoom. And they have been doing so for years.

Among their absurd predictions is this one, presumably fed to President George W. Bush in 2004-- that is, seventeen years ago. It promised, on the authority of no less than the Pentagon, that Europe would be plunged into chaos by 2020.

If you were wondering what the great minds of the Pentagon were doing when they were not winning wars, now you know.

The Guardian reported dutifully in 2004:

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change ‘should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern’, say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is ‘plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately’, they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

I will not burden you with the entirety of the story. It’s available on the Guardian site. The most amazing part is how familiar it seems. The panel of eminent scientists who all agreed that climate catastrophe was looming will never admit that it was wrong. Now we have new panels of eminent scientists who assure us, on the basis of their dogmatic belief, that the end is nigh. Now, however, they are accompanied by hysterical schoolgirls and assorted radicals who want to disrupt everything from British traffic to Sen. Joe Manchin..

Some people never learn. And they certainly do not admit to any fault or flaw in their reasoning. 

Aaron Beck, R. I. P.

Aaron Beck died last week. Founder of what is now called cognitive behavioral therapy, Beck had trained in Freudian psychoanalysis. Then, upon discovering that it was not working to help his patients, he tried something radical and new. It became CBT-- now considered one of the most effective forms of therapy.

Beck lived in Philadelphia, and the best obituary comes to us from the Philadelphia Enquirer. It opens with the story about how he broke with Freud.

Aaron Beck liked to tell a story about how he came to reject psychoanalysis and revolutionize how talk therapy for mental disorders was conducted in the United States and much of the world.

Like other psychiatrists in the mid-20th century, Dr. Beck was trained in Freudian concepts, including the idea that depression was the result of anger turned inward. In what would become a lifelong pattern, he decided in the late 1950s to test that idea more scientifically. He found little evidence that his patients were angry inside, but they did suffer from negative, irrational thinking about themselves.

He told of a psychoanalysis patient who was worried that her stories about her sexual experiences were boring him. They definitely were not. He began asking other patients what they were thinking and found that they, too, were feeding themselves a diet of negative thoughts. They saw themselves as failures in love and life.

Beck did not try to help them to discover why they were thinking what they were thinking. He offered a technique to correct their thinking, to learn new mental habits. The basic theory comes originally from Aristotle; it suggests that the best way to overcome a bad habit is, not to try to understand or control it, but to replace it with a good habit. It sounds simple; it is not as easy as it sounds.

Dr. Beck, who died Monday at his Rittenhouse Square condominium at the age of 100, wondered if it wouldn’t be better for patients to learn to think more logically and accurately in the present than to spend countless billable hours analyzing childhood slights. Cognitive therapy — now known as cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) — was born.

Aaron Beck, R. I. P. 

A Destination District High School

Here’s a glimpse into what is happening in American high schools, especially those that are dedicated to improving the education of minority children. Educator Shane Trotter was not prepared to discover how bad things were when he started teaching at one of these schools. (via Maggie’s Farm)

One can see that the children attending his school were lost beyond repair. You can mutter on all you want about more training; it is not going to happen.

One will not, in this post, recall the work being done in charter schools like New York’s Success Academies, but clearly, the work being done there so far exceeds the work in destination district schools that it is absurd even to compare the two. 

Trotter begins:

Ten years ago, I showed up for my first day as a high school teacher. I had landed a job in the best school of what is often called a “destination district.”

What did he find? 

Still, I couldn’t have predicted how unprepared my students would be. They had never taken notes. They were shocked that my test reviews weren’t a list of the questions on the test. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t allow 20 minutes of review before the test, or why a history exam would have sections requiring written responses. In fact, many would just skip the entire short answer and essay sections, despite being given these topics in advance. Those who did respond often wrote single words or incoherent run-ons.

How bad was it?

After their years of schooling in which writing never extended beyond filling in a blank, my expectations were analogous to asking high schoolers to solve algebraic equations when they had not yet learned to multiply and divide. They were capable, but it was going to take a lot of effort to fill in the gaps. Which raises the question, why would a student be willing to put in that much work?

Of course, no one is capable of facing the reality of the situation. So, teachers are required to pass children who can barely read, write or count. Grade inflation is corruption; these schools are wallowing in it:

I compromised more times than I would have ever thought possible. I eliminated homework, allowed test retakes, gave fill-in-the-blank notes, graded essays at a 5th grade level, gave test reviews that were basically the test, and intentionally made tests easy. When there were still too many students failing at the end of a grading period, I went above and beyond to manufacture easy routes to a passing grade so that only a handful of incomprehensibly effort-averse students failed.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers in their quest to give good grades is that test grades tend to be very low. To offset this, teachers give assignments that will raise everyone’s grade (presuming students do them). This usually takes the form of elementary task work where teachers award full credit to everyone who turns the assignment in. Such grades are known as “warranty work.” Like the warranty on your car, they guarantee anything broken is fixed for you. They mitigate bombed tests and ensure that in most on-level classes, any student can get a B without the inconvenience of learning anything.

This is the same educational system that was roundly rejected by voters in Virginia and across America last Tuesday.

Notes on the Political Scene

Niall Ferguson, of the Hoover Institution, counts as one of our more savvy political commentators. And this is the case even though he is British by birth, American by choice.

Anyway, Ferguson has some thoughts about the recent Democratic election wipeout. Since his views are strangely consonant with my own, I am happy to share.

On the first question, the manifest failure of the Biden presidency, Ferguson coins a nice phrase. Joe Biden has “delivered vacancy.” Presumably the reference is to Biden’s mental deficiency, clearly noted by those who think clearly; ignored by everyone else:

Far from reuniting the country, Biden turns out to be no less polarising a President than Trump. And far from delivering normalcy, he has delivered vacancy.

If Biden had secured the Democratic nomination in 2016, I think he could possibly have beaten Trump and made a passable if ineffectual President. But the melancholy realisation for millions of Americans and for the rest of the world is that the top job came to Biden too late.

I have met him several times over the years, and the decline that has set in since his election victory has been painful to watch.

Turning 79 in two weeks, 'Sleepy Joe' (Trump's epithets rarely miss the target) should be golfing and dozing in a deck chair in the Florida sun, not trying to run the most powerful government on the planet.

Readers of this blog were alerted to this eventuality long before it became flagrantly obvious, so I do not feel derelict on this score.

Ferguson next notes, as we all have, that education became a major issue during the campaigns, to the chagrin of the Democratic Party:

Just as in the UK, dissatisfaction with what is going on in America's schools has been building throughout the pandemic. Protracted lockdowns and school closures had one positive consequence: For the first time, many parents started paying attention to what their children were being taught. And much of what they overheard on Zoom appalled them.

Now, it would be an exaggeration to say that every American teacher is a woke activist sporting a Black Lives Matter T-shirt. But it would be a downright lie to claim that Critical Race Theory (CRT) — which holds that 'systemic racism' is inherent in Western society — is not being widely taught in schools.

The real issue was less about CRT, and more about the deficient education provided by America’s schoolteachers. CRT is a symptom, less than a cause. Still, the Democratic Party decided to make race the only real issue. For that they paid a price:

In fact, so influential are such ideas that more or less every school, college and corporation in the land is currently working on its so-called 'Diversity, Equity and Inclusion' strategy.

To many, it seems that America's once meritocratic society is seeing a perverse restoration of racial divisions, as if disparaging today's white kids for their 'privilege' will somehow right past wrongs.

And then there is the question that torments your sleep. Can Joe Biden make a comeback? If we recall that Barack Obama started his 2010 comeback by admitting that Democrats took a shellacking in the midterm elections of that year, we note that nothing resembling such a frank and honest admission has issued from Biden or his spokespeople. Beside, Biden does not have the presence of mind to stay awake during meetings. He is, as they say, toast.

And, Ferguson adds, the American public understands viscerally inflation, homicide and the border chaos:

Can Joe Biden's administration turn it around? Or is the old man already a lame duck?

Unfortunately for Democrats, it's not just education that's alienating voters. Inflation looks anything but transitory to most consumers and businesses.

Homicide has surged in most big cities since last year's Black Lives Matter protests triggered by the killing of George Floyd.

There is chaos on the country's southern border, a direct consequence of the Biden administration's early repudiation of Trump's tough stance on immigration.

Finally, Biden's personal approval rating has been in the red ever since the shocking debacle of the sudden and botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August.

For all these reasons, Joe Biden's manifest personal decline is not the principal reason for his administration's rapid descent from 'transformational' to, well, transitory. On every issue from education to the economy, from fighting crime to foreign policy, Team Biden has lost the confidence of the electorate.

Are Democrats going to run next year as the Anti-Trump party. It’s thin gruel indeed, and it failed in Virginia. As noted here and elsewhere, Trump’s banishment from social media worked in favor of Republicans. Who knew?

One other thing seems clear. The Democrats stand no chance in the midterms if they are planning once again on painting the Republican party as 'Trumpian'. One key reason that strategy no longer works, ironically, is Trump's near invisibility on social media, thanks to his 'cancellation' by the big tech companies back in January. Absence makes the heart grow fonder — and Trump is no exception.

Ferguson thinks that Trump will run. I do not. But, if he does he will probably face Kamala Harris, among the worst politicians and most incompetent executives around.

And so the really big question now hanging over U.S. politics is this: Does Trump run for re-election in 2024?

If he does, I think he wins — especially if his opponent is Vice President Kamala Harris, who seems to have all but cancelled herself.

Indeed, future historians will ask whether this was Team Biden's biggest blunder — handing the number two job to a woman who checked all the diversity boxes (Jamaican father, Indian mother, speaks fluent 'Wokeish'), but unfortunately leaves most voters completely cold.

The phrase “hoist on his own petard” comes to mind, but it simply means that the party of diversity, equity and inclusion will be hard put to reject a candidate who, in her very being, embodies all three. 

What Is Causing the Supply Chain Problem?

We all suspected as much, but we did not have enough information. We all suspected that the supply chain bottleneck at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles had something to do with labor unions and environmental regulations. 

We knew that the port of Shanghai, to take an easy example, is five times more efficient than the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. The reason, we have been led to believe, is simply that the port of Shanghai is automated. It is run by robots. In California, ports are run by longshoremen. As for why they do not automate, the unions and the bureaucrats would never allow it.

Anyway, Alyssia Finley lays out the facts about the situation in California ports. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, she explains how the Golden State got itself into such a mess. Given that hers is the first cogent analysis of the problem, she deserves special credit.

Some 20 business groups recently asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and suspend labor and environmental laws that are interfering with the movement of goods. Opening the Port of Los Angeles 24 hours a day “alone will do little without immediate action from the state to address other barriers that have created bottlenecks at the ports, warehouses, trucking, rail, and the entire supply chain,” they wrote.

As for the details, try these facts about how a labor union made it far more difficult to find truck drivers:

One barrier is a law known as AB5. Before its enactment in 2019, tens of thousands of truck drivers worked as independent contractors, which gave them more autonomy and flexibility than if they were employees. As contractors, truck drivers can work for multiple companies, which allows them to nimbly respond to surges in demand.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, however, has long wanted to organize truck drivers, including those serving California’s ports. Since the National Labor Relations Act prevents unions from organizing independent contractors, Democrats passed AB5, sponsored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a Teamsters member.

Trucking companies warned that the law could put small carriers out of business and cause drivers to leave the state. They want the U.S. Supreme Court to review a legal challenge to AB5, but many are complying after defeats in lower courts. It’s hard to quantify how much AB5 has contributed to the shortage of truck drivers. But there’s little doubt the law hinders efficiency and productivity.

Fair enough, we cannot be certain of the extent to which the law has reduced the number of truck drivers, but clearly it has had a nefarious influence. 

Finley then moves on the the problem with not enough storage space and insufficient warehouse facilities:

Another problem: a shortage of storage space. “There is absolutely no available capacity in the warehousing sector due to the difficulty in developing any new capacity,” the businesses noted in their letter. The vacancy rate for warehouses near the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports was a mere 1%, compared with 3.6% nationwide.

If warehouses don’t have space in their facilities or parking lots to unload goods, drivers can’t make deliveries. Some truck drivers are leaving container boxes along with the chassis outside storage facilities and are picking them up later, but that results in a shortage of chassis at the ports. (About half of chassis are leased to truckers from a common pool supplied by private companies.)

Inland California cities, where land is abundant, flat and relatively inexpensive, have had enormous warehouse growth over the past decade amid the boom in e-commerce. The number of inland “big box” distribution centers increased 54% between 2009 and 2020 to 711, according to Statista. Some cities encouraged development because warehouses provide relatively high-paying jobs for less-educated workers, including immigrants.

What is inhibiting warehouse growth? Why, it’s the environmental lobby:

But in California warehouse growth ignited opposition from environmental groups, which complain of pollution and noise. Many cities have limited new logistics facilities. Colton, in San Bernardino County, has imposed a moratorium on new warehouses and truck facilities through early May 2022.

One trucking company this year withdrew a plan for a 54,000-square-foot warehouse and parking facility for 475 trucks and containers atop a former landfill in Carson amid political opposition.

Some cities have limited the hours when trucks can unload containers at stores, which makes it harder to free up warehouse space—another reason Mr. Biden’s 24/7 call has had little effect.

And, of course, new warehouses need to be green friendly:

State officials have also pressed localities to attach green mandates to permits for new warehouses, which can be poison pills. Former Attorney General Xavier Becerra issued guidance with a long list of “best practices and mitigation measures” for warehouses to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act. Among them: “prohibiting off-road diesel-powered equipment from being in the ‘on’ position for more than 10 hours per day,” “forbidding idling of heavy equipment for more than two minutes,” “requiring on-site equipment, such as forklifts and yard trucks, to be electric with the necessary electrical charging stations provided,” and “constructing electric truck charging stations proportional to the number of dock doors at the project.”

This July Mr. Becerra’s successor, Rob Bonta, sued the city of Fontana for approving a 205,000-square-foot warehouse with 22 truck docks. Mr. Bonta complained the city didn’t adequately consider strategies to mitigate air pollution, such as requiring low-emission construction equipment and green building standards.

Finley concludes:

This boatload of regulations is making it more expensive and difficult to store goods arriving at California ports. As the business letter to Mr. Newsom notes: “We have floating warehouses idling off the coast, wasting fuel. Inaction has—and will continue to have—far more of an environmental impact than the requests contained in this letter.”

Mr. Biden last month threatened to call out companies if they didn’t “step up” to ease supply-chain bottlenecks. He should instead call out California Democrats.

As if that is going to happen….