Let Long Beach build

Southern California’s strict environmental rules and green political culture make it notoriously difficult to build industrial facilities here, especially when they’re on the coast and bring pollution with them. That’s as it should be -- with the worst air quality in the country, Los Angeles and environs have to take extraordinary measures to protect residents’ health and welfare. But there are times when the touchy local environmental community doesn’t know when to unman the barricades and declare victory.

That time is now in Long Beach, where the City Council on Tuesday must decide whether to approve an environmental study for the first major project at the Port of Long Beach since 2002. The Middle Harbor project would update a pair of old piers to double the amount of cargo they’re capable of handling, adding thousands of good-paying jobs. And it would incorporate innovations that would ultimately cut pollution generated by the facility to half the current level, despite the traffic growth.

The project would do this by increasing on-dock rail capacity, meaning most of the added cargo could be carried to and from the docks by train rather than more-polluting trucks. The piers would have clean cargo-handling equipment and would allow container ships to plug in to shore-based power while docked, so they wouldn’t have to keep their engines running during loading and unloading. That would cut a tremendous amount of diesel pollution, as would rules imposed on ships using the new terminals -- they would have to switch to low-sulfur diesel fuel when within 40 miles of the port, and slow down to about half their normal speed.

Despite the obvious benefits, several cities and organizations are lobbying the council to send the environmental report back to the city’s Harbor Commission for more study, which could further delay an already overdue project. The cities of Riverside and Commerce fear the new terminals would add truck and train traffic in their communities (even though the study shows the traffic increase wouldn’t be significant), and environmental and labor groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Teamsters are raising a host of picayune objections, such as the notion that the port should have to account for emissions with only a tenuous relationship to the project -- for instance, the greenhouse gases emitted by ships along the entire journey from their home countries to the port.

That’s posturing, not environmentalism; blocking this project would foul both the region’s economy and its air. The Long Beach City Council should embrace green growth at the port and approve it.