California's Climate Change Litigation Heralded at International Conference

SAN FRANCISCO – Yesterday in Buenos Aires, at a side event to the latest round of climate change talks, a representative of the California Attorney General’s office spoke about how litigation can be used to force cuts in CO2 emissions. The event was hosted by Friends of the Earth International, the World Wildlife Fund, and Greenpeace.

Earlier this year, California was the first state to launch climate change litigation against private companies, to force deep cuts in emissions. Speaker Ken Alex from the California Attorney General’s office said the potential liability is substantial and the state is interested in a settlement. He commented that “Tobacco litigation has helped change human attitudes toward tobacco and the same could be achieved for climate change.”

While the state is schooling other countries in such tactics, some experts question the motives behind these suits. Dr. Benjamin Zycher, senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute commented that “The environmental left is and always has been far less interested in environmental improvement than in using politics to transfer wealth. The recent move to do so by judicial fiat is an attempt to circumvent the democratic process. That they need to resort to such maneuvers reveals the weakness of their case, which is based on uncertain science and a complete disregard for costs.”

As Dr. Zycher points out, “Spending $300 billion annually to implement the Kyoto Protocol would be unwise in a world in which millions of poor perish each year from malaria and unsanitary water supplies.”

Dr. Zycher is co-author of Attorneys General versus the EPA, published by PRI in 2003. He is a former senior economist with RAND and an expert on many policy issues including the environment, energy, and regulation. He is published regularly in the Los Angeles Times, National Review Online, San Francisco Chronicle, and other leading outlets. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.

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For more than two decades, the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRI) has championed individual liberty through free markets. PRI is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to promoting the principles of limited government, individual freedom, and personal responsibility.