In today’s article, Rob Davis described the pressure the Attorney General’s Office has brought to bear on the city of San Diego and the San Diego Association of Governments, calling on the agencies to address global warming as part of their long-term development plans.
As The Sacramento Bee reported recently, San Diego is not the only region that has felt Brown’s wrath:
Squeezing the trigger on the 37- year-old California Environmental Quality Act, Brown is pressuring high-growth cities and counties such as Sacramento and Yuba to immediately include climate change — alongside traffic congestion, sewage treatment capacity and water supplies — in assessing environmental impacts of major proposed projects. …
The attorney general’s office has written 14 letters in the past 16 months admonishing counties and cities to calculate and curb a region’s projected emissions of heat-trapping, or greenhouse, gases.
But not everyone thinks Brown has the power under CEQA to push for more efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The Republicans in the state Legislature have vowed to keep the state budget from passing until Brown is harnessed.
In its first global warming-related lawsuit brought against a local agency, the attorney general’s office sued the [San Bernardino County] in April for allegedly failing to “fully evaluate and disclose the reasonably foreseeable effects of (its) general plan update on global warming” and failing to “consider and adopt appropriate mitigation.” …
The lawsuit angered Senate Republicans who have made it a weapon in the ongoing state budget fight.
Earlier this week, the Senate Republican caucus proposed budget language that would prohibit CEQA lawsuits over greenhouse gas emissions. The moratorium would stretch to 2012, when California begins enforcing its Global Warming Solutions Act, known as Assembly Bill 32.