Environmental Law

Global Warming Solutions Act halted-by environmentalists

By STEPHEN HOLZER

California's sweeping plan under AB 32 (The Global Warming Solutions Act)  to institute cap and trade and regulate "greenhouse gases" has been thrown out by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ernest H. Goldsmith. As SFGate.com recently reported: "The California Air Resources Board violated state environmental law in 2008 when it adopted a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gases and again last year when it passed cap-and-trade regulations, a San Francisco Superior Court judge has ruled in a tentative decision."

            What is unusual about this case is that the attacks on the law came not from business interests or from conservatives nut from an unexpected source-- six "environmental justice" community groups and seven low-income individuals, represented by the San Francisco-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.  These plaintiffs argued to the Court that the Air Resources Board's implementation of the "cap and trade" system envisioned by the Act was being implemented in an unfair fashion which would have the effect of polluting the air in relatively impoverished communities.

            The cap-and-trade system is designed to set an overall cap, or limit, on the amount of greenhouse gasses that industry can emit.  Within that limit, companies using less of these gases than they are permitted could sell "carbon credits" to companies that have reached their own limits but need to emit more as part of their industrial processes.

            Plaintiffs claim that the net effect of this system would be to allow high-polluting companies-- with factories often located in low-income areas--to continue polluting at high levels, thus allegedly continuing to befoul the local air even if, overall, carbon-gas emissions in the State are reduced.  The Court said that the Act cannot be implemented as intended by the Air Resources Board until there has been a full environmental study in accord with the California Environmental Quality Act.

            Business-interest critics of AB 32 tried and failed in this past November's election to place a moratorium on implementing; now it seems, somewhat ironically, that environmental groups are succeeding in doing what the business critics could not do.

From my column originally published in the San Fernando Valley, California group of newspapers Valley News Group (Valley Vantage, Warner Center News and Las Virgenes Enterprise).

Full post as published by Environmental Legal Blogs on February 11, 2011 (boomark / email).