Greenhouse Gas Emissions a Factor in California Land-Use Cases

The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed in 1970, is becoming an important tool in the state’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by controlling land-use decisions.

In August 2007, Attorney General Jerry Brown successfully sued San Bernardino County under the law for failing to address GHG emissions in its main planning document, even though clear statewide standards for evaluating and reducing GHG emissions were not yet available; a settlement was reached in August 2007. Brown has also threatened to sue Nestlé to stop its construction of a water bottling plant on the McCloud River unless it accounts for its GHG impact, including the emissions attributable to manufacturing and shipping plastic bottles.

Bolstering Brown’s actions, the California legislature exempted certain public projects from legal action for failure to address their GHG consequences, implicitly paving the way for litigation against other public projects and private developments. Approval of a proposed 2,600-unit golf resort in Desert Hot Springs was overturned when the Riverside County Superior Court ruled that the developers had failed to adequately address the project’s climate-change impact, and several similar cases are in the works.