CALIFORNIA ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY ACT

California is a national leader in climate-change policy, with dozens of laws addressing greenhouse gas pollution and energy efficiency — including, most famously, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. The nation’s first mandatory cap on greenhouse gas pollution, this law requires greenhouse gas emissions to fall to 1990 levels by 2020, and that’s not all: A 2005 executive order sets a goal of emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Meeting these reductions while the state continues to grow will be challenging, which is why the Center has led the charge to bring the state’s flagship land-use and environmental protection statute, the California Environmental Quality Act, into play. The California Environmental Quality Act requires state and local agencies to assess and reduce the environmental impacts of new development projects prior to their approval, providing the ideal forum for analyzing solutions to global warming before new projects add to it. Since the Act was passed in 1970, it’s gained a proven track record of having a positive effect on air quality, water supply, and plants and wildlife. The problem was, prior to the Center’s advocacy, global warming and greenhouse gas emissions were almost universally ignored during the important California Environmental Quality Act review process.

That’s why we’ve filed scores of comment letters and brought a number of lawsuits against agencies including the cities of Banning, Desert Hot Springs, and Perris for approving plans for developments that didn’t take measures to address global warming impacts. In 2007, we joined with other conservation groups and California Attorney General Jerry Brown to challenge San Bernardino County’s failure to consider greenhouse gas emissions in adopting its long-range growth plan. Our suit, along with the attorney general’s, resulted in a settlement requiring San Bernardino County to inventory greenhouse gas emissions, set reduction targets for greenhouse gases, and adopt feasible measures to meet those targets for the next 20 years.  The Center was recognized for this victory in Environment Now’s Top Achievements Report 2007, a yearly review of the most successful environmental initiatives led by nonprofits in Southern California.

This pressure from the Center and Attorney General Brown has helped California make huge strides toward considering and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from new growth. Of course, this progress has not gone unnoticed, and oil companies, developers, and others are lobbying hard for a legislative rollback to gut the California Environmental Quality Act and remove the requirement to address greenhouse gas pollution. We’re vigorously defending the Act against these attacks, at the same time working for its full implementation as one of California’s most important global warming laws.

In 2008, we won the rejection of a proposal for the Palmwood luxury resort because it didn’t address greenhouse gas emissions; moved to intervene in the licensing process for the Carlsbad Energy Center Project to ensure it addresses its emissions; filed suit against the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District to force a Central Valley mega-dairy to reduce its greenhouse gases and other pollutants; and finally, in December, fought global warming on two levels simultaneously when we submitted comments on a California timber-harvest plan that failed to address proposed logging projects’ carbon emissions. In 2009, we blocked the construction of a CO₂-spewing Wal-Mart Supercenter near Joshua Tree Park, and we’re continuing our efforts to ensure that logging companies and the California Department of Forestry no longer ignore the atmospheric effects of clear-cut logging.

The year of 2009 began with proposed changes to the California Environmental Quality Act that could have upheld the law’s full potential to fight global warming in the state, requiring projects to consider whether they’ll comply with California’s effort to reduce emissions statewide and to consider all reasonable ways to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, the proposed amendments failed to actually pinpoint criteria for determining the level to which emissions must be reduced.

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