California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

We recently concluded a productive and informative week in Las Vegas at the Construction Expo, or ConExpo, March 22-26. We met with a lot of interesting people from all over the world. I would like to thank Tom Pistacchio, owner of America’s Trailer Company, the parent company of Cozad, newly acquired Reliance Trailers, ACE and a host of other branded construction trailers. They are now I believe, one of only two construction trailer manufacturers left in California! Tom and his staff welcomed us to their booth. We were all able to meet with others in our industry, construction and manufacturing. We promoted CDTOA, AADT, and the California Concrete Pumpers Alliance to the construction world.

CDTOA v. CARB

With our CARB lawsuit on the cover of last month’s magazine, we are seeing a lot of interest about our quest to kill CARB, or at least limit its draconian regulations that will affect all of our members. It’s all positive in my opinion; the world is now starting to understand that California does not rule the world; it is only a leader in job and private wealth destruction. We are only 1 of 50 states in the U.S. with the second highest unemployment - 12.2%, if you even believe this number. Yes, the over-regulation of businesses that have been pretty much complacent for years, their owners are mad and many are welcoming the efforts and results of our association suing CARB.

I sense that the enviro crowd has been producing a disproportionate amount of GHG (Greenhouse Gas) of their own these days, as they are now venting furiously about our CDTOA lawsuit against CARB. UCLA-UC Berkley law school blog has recently commented on the merits of our lawsuit. If we were to believe anything they say we have no chance at all. But they just do not get it; our lawsuit is not about AB 32. It’s not about CO2. It’s not really even about junk science PM2.5. It’s all about a rogue public agency of unelected officials (CARB) passing state-based regulations that conflict with federal commerce regulations of the United States. At issue are Federal regulations which Congress passed into law in 1994. There is a clear violation of the Supremacy Clause. The ideologues at CARB would have us believe they have the right to rule the world from their ivory-green tower in Sacramento. Mary Nichols and CARB have usurped and disregarded Congress’s well-intentioned goals to eliminate a hodgepodge of local and state regulations, and this has an unreasonable effect on the price, routes, and services of truckers here and throughout the U.S. that haul to, from, and in this state.

An Agency Just Out of Control

I’m all for Congress defunding EPA, I say blow it up, and restructure it once again as a science-based organization. This despicable form of tyranny by CARB using EPA’s Clean Air Act authority has resulted in an assault on every small business, not only in California, but also throughout the nation.

On March 18, KQED, a Bay Area public broadcasting channel posted a blog called “What would you ask Mary Nichols?” The blog comments went wild with questions about Ms. Nichols motives and about CARB rules and their effects on the economy and California businesses. Hundreds of comments were posted, all against CARB. I do not think she had one supporter. There were so many negative responses to her interview, the station director appeared to sound intimidated and requested the reporter only asked her how Japan’s fallout would affect California. Public broadcasting, or bias, at its best – again! Another waste of public funds.

Contrived, junk science-based regulations by unelected bureaucrats in the name of some “endangered” owl, bug, fish, tortoise, or worse yet, based on a variety of junk science schemes have cost Californians unimaginable amounts of wasted tax funds and most importantly JOBS.

Finally, there is one intelligent, daring man committed to turning this disaster called California around: Assemblyman Tim Donnelly from Southern California. He introduced a bill to abolish the CARB and move its work to CalEPA. He notes in his bill that “CARB is a regulatory agency that is an unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy that kills jobs.”
Over-regulation in just our industry has killed what was once a good place for families to earn a living, give back to society (pay taxes), create wealth, and leave a legacy (owner’s equity) for other family generations to hopefully follow. Would any of you out there consciously recommend to your children to get into the trucking business today with what is going on in government? Hell, no!

Just the mention by CARB four years ago that most of our trucks and equipment would not comply with their regulations in the coming years led to the wholesale destruction of our trucks’ equity overnight. Mary Nichols comment at the time was, “All the other states would welcome buying our trucks, especially Oregon. I get calls like that all the time”.
Yes, Ms. Nichols, at 10 cents on the dollar, everyone around the world was in line to buy our perfectly good and clean-running (compliant when purchased) equipment and trucks. But the likelihood of any of these other states or countries around us or west of us following California’s draconian regulatory path is very unlikely. The irony now is that the trucks and equipment we were forced and coerced to sell for 10 cents on the dollar are all running in places around this state, blowing all those supposedly high levels of PM, NOx, and CO2 right back at us.

These regulatory fools have to be dealt with. I have a hard time understanding: If the air is so clean here now – I read it has improved by 90% since the 1970’s – shouldn’t these agencies’ staff and budgets be cut by 90%? They have succeeded in reaching their goals; time to say thanks and goodbye!

In the construction industry, or for that matter in any goal-specific private industry, you build or reach a goal, celebrate, and move on. You just don’t keep adding to the project every year. But, no, that’s not how it works in the “environmental regulatory industry.” They just keep moving the bar lower and lower and come up with hundreds of tax-funded studies from our illustrious UC schools and others on the environmental payola grant system, with the goal of making some claim that there “may” be some health effect. They survive on fear!

Public Fear Drives Their Agenda

The most recent “fear factor” study came from good old USC. Incidentally, this is the university that employs Dr. Samet, Chair of the EPA’s CASAC committee, the SRP for EPA. The latest study released from this school on April 7 suggested that residents along freeways “may be” subject to brain function problems associated vehicle emissions. Todd Morgan, a research professor in gerontology, said, “It’s not like what you see in smog and the days when you don’t get to see the mountains,” referring to the type of pollution investigated in the study. His work looked at the smallest of particles that are not visible to the naked eye. Air samples were taken from the 110 Freeway near USC and exposed to mice over a 10-week exposure period, over about 150 hours. The results showed brain damage – keeping neurons from developing – which “could or may” eventually lead to memory loss, even developmental disorders in children. In an LA Times interview, Morgan said, “Our data would suggest that freeway pollution could have a profound effect on the development of neurons and brain health in children and young kids, especially those who attend schools built alongside freeways.” According to these researchers, there is suggestive evidence that it could even happen to us old people too.

I guess the people that grew up in the 60’s and 70’s never reached their intellectual potential because of all the air pollution, or was that the pot? It is a fact that in the air samples he took for around the freeway, they have no way of determining if the fine particle matter in the samples came from forest fires, industrial pollution, ambient desert dust, tire or road wear dust, diesel or gas emissions or even radio active particles from Japan. So to draw this conclusion about just vehicle emissions and brain dysfunction doesn’t seem very scientific to me, but I’m just a trucker. One thing I know is that we are all living longer, the air is very clean and yet our kids are being effected in some way “maybe” that will cause them to become either stupid or succumb to EDD or a list of 10 other childhood behavior maladies – this is all nothing more than fear mongering, and it was on the front page of every liberal newspaper in the state.

I’m now convinced that this study and all the ones like it are all just propaganda that is rolled out every week or two to justify this huge fraud. Every week there is some health-effects study related to vehicle emissions that “may” affect us. We are living longer, 78.3 years on average. Californians have the third lowest mortality rate in the U.S. Deaths from lung dieses and cancer is dropping. The only thing I can believe from this study is that the researchers’ truth neurons are not working, like all those who use this research propaganda profile to suck from the public tit.

Who believes anything that comes from these overpaid, $300,000-a-year quacks in the schools of public health, which I refer along with CARB and EPA as the “Ministries of Public Health Enlightenment and Propaganda Advancement?”

There are now dozens of studies like this one that have come out over the last 15 years, all systemically framed in a way to justify CARB’s continued regulations, even as the air gets cleaner and cleaner. It’s all a propaganda machine! It has all helped to dissemination or move manufacturing out of here and cripples industries like ours.

Reason TV Video 29,000 and Counting

I hope everyone had the opportunity to watch the Reason Foundation TV video that came out in late March that tied this all together. CDTOA member and Orange County-based Crooks Truck and Equipment Rental, co-owned by Dwayne Whitney, explained what CARB regulations have already done and will do to his trucking business once implemented. The video also exposes the scientific fraud that CARB has been allowed to perpetrate on us all, along with the unfair firing of UCLA Prof. James Enstrom, who in the first week of March was involved with a week-long hearing to address his termination and whistle-blower case against the university, John Fronies, and the rest of these overpaid public health school evildoers. As of the April 10, the Reason video had about 29,000 hits. It deserves a million. All truckers and diesel equipment owners should watch this. It should also be played in all California schools so that our kids can understand the truth, or at least the other side!

We Can’t Stop – Because They Won’t

At a time when the nation’s economy was circling the drain, CARB regulations and Mary Nichols’s insensitive comments sucked us all down with not a care. With no perceived financial equity in our trucks and equipment, we could not secure financing for retrofits or replacement. And with uncertainty in the economy and construction industry, most businesses could not or would not invest to move forward. Thousands of employees have been laid off, and in many cases there are owner-operators now with no benefits to help them or their family. Employment taxes have collapsed, and the state’s economy has slipped and will continue to slip further down that financial black hole. Who believes that we can all work for Hollywood, Silicon Valley, government or the green industry?

Yes, one of the most overlooked aspects of all this is the collateral damage to all the families, the supporting industries, the manufacturers, the parts companies, the insurers, and the public because with no money, these trucks certainly have not been operated as safely as they should have been. How many lives will these rules negatively impact, all in the name of a scientific lie?

CDTOA on Social Media

Also new for us is CDTOA’s Facebook page. Visit us at  facebook.com/cdtoa. Let’s be friends, post pictures of your chapter’s activities, discuss problems with CARB, etc. or leave your comments, we love to hear from your. Other sites I find interesting and great for information are listed below.

JunkScience.com
Debunkosaurus.com
GreenHellBlog.com
CorporateEnergySubsidies.com
KillCARB.com
CERTReform.org
AB32IG.com
YouTube.com - A&G Steve Milloy Green Hell

Remember, KILL CARB!
Robert McClernon
Always Strength in Numbers