A coalition of more than 60 environmental, labor, community and academic groups is calling for a moratorium of up to two years on new warehouse development in Southern California's Inland Empire, demanding in an open letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom that the governor declare the market's 1B SF warehouse sprawl a "public health emergency."

The letter, which called the exponential warehouse growth in Inland Empire "one of the most critical environmental justice issues of our time," summarizes the findings of a working paper entitled "A Region in Crisis: The Rationale for a Public Health State of Emergency in the Inland Empire."

According to the paper, the logistics traffic from Inland Empire's growing network of more than 4,000 warehouses generates more than 200 million truck trips annually—at a rate of more than 600K per day—spewing more than 15 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, 30 billion pounds of nitrous oxide and 300K pounds of diesel particulate matter annually into the nation's most polluted air.