How California’s ‘green’ port fee raises costs for everyone

California has a “green” rule that is raising the costs of goods on store shelves all across America. Most Americans have never heard of it, and that’s the point.

The regulation is called the Vessels At Berth rule. It has been effect since 2023, and it requires every cargo ship, tanker, and container vessel docked at California ports to shut off its diesel engines.

Ships also have to plug into the state’s electrical grid, install state-approved emissions technology, or pay fees into a state account for every hour of every visit.

The California Vessels At Berth rule functions as a climate change tax on the entire country — set by an unelected California agency, paid for by consumers in all 50 states, but never voted on by Congress.

California’s ports move around 40% of the nation’s containerized imports. The shipping companies don’t just eat these costs; they fold them into freight rates, which flow into wholesale prices, which are passed along to what you pay at checkout for produce, electronics, clothing, and anything else that touched a container ship.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB), the state agency responsible for the regulation, estimated the pass-through cost to consumers when it applied for a waiver from the Biden administration in 2023. It claimed costs were minimal: $1.14 per Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) of cargo; $4.65 per passenger on cruise ships; $7.66 per automobile; and less than one cent per gallon of gas on tanker ships.

Whether you trust the agency’s math or not, California never asked anyone outside California whether it was acceptable to raise their prices for the sake of the state’s “green” priorities.

Ships that can’t comply face penalties of around $50,000 per vessel per day. California’s own regulatory impact assessment puts the total cost to the shipping industry at roughly $2.3 billion through 2032, a cost that doesn’t stay with the shipping industry.

When CARB began enforcing the rule against tankers in January 2025, the Western States Petroleum Association had already warned that the California tanker fleet had no feasible way to comply, because shore power infrastructure didn’t exist at scale, and the emissions-capture technology was still in testing.

California went ahead anyway.

So ships began paying an hourly fee into a remediation fund, a state account that was set up to accommodate ships when they can’t comply with the rule.

The fund was supposed to be a temporary bridge. A year and a half later, it’s functioning as a permanent cost of doing business, passed down the supply chain like everything else.

Wall Street has noticed.

Bain Capital recently put $150 million into STAX Engineering, a company whose barge-mounted exhaust-capture rigs let tankers comply with California’s rule without retrofitting their engines.

That’s institutional capital treating this not as an ongoing political fight, but as a permanent cost of doing business, even though the Trump administration has sent other Biden-era California waivers to Congress for repeal.

The Biden EPA granted the At Berth waiver in 2023 without ever submitting it to Congress for review, on the theory that delegating federal regulatory authority to a state isn’t technically a “rule.”

Congress doesn’t have to accept that theory. The Congressional Review Act allows Congress to disapprove a federal rule, including regulatory waivers, with a simple majority vote — no filibuster, and no amendments.

Congress used exactly this mechanism last year to strike down three EPA waivers behind California’s electric-vehicle mandates, with dozens of House Democrats joining Republicans to pass the resolutions.

The legal path for California’s Vessels At Berth rule is identical. The EPA has already sent four other CARB waivers to Congress for review this year. Vessels At Berth has not been among them, for no better reason than that nobody has submitted it yet.

California can pursue whatever climate goals it likes within its own borders. What it cannot do, at least not without a serious accountability problem, is quietly export the bill to 49 states that had no say in the matter.

Congress has the tool to end California’s climate change tax. It just has to use it.

Iulia Lupse is editor-in-chief of Clear News Daily, founder of I&A Communications Solutions, and a contributor with Young Voices.

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