Investor's Business Daily, September 19th, 2007
Environmentalism: Global warming alarmists were hit with a well-deserved setback Monday, when a federal judge threw out a lawsuit against automakers. Too bad, though, that the ruling won't end the fearmongering.
Exactly one year ago, then-California Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed suit against the six largest automakers in the U.S. -- General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Chrysler, Honda and Nissan -- claiming they make vehicles that contribute to climate change that is hurting the state. Relying on a theory that has yet to be proved, the suit sought damages for pollution, beach erosion and reduced water supplies.
It was so much hogwash that even a Clinton appointee saw through Lockyer's legal fog. Judge Martin Jenkins of the Northern District of California rejected the argument, saying that the "the global warming thicket" is a political matter that should be sorted out by policymakers, not the courts.
"The court is left without guidance in determining what is an unreasonable contribution to the sum of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, or in determining who should bear the costs associated with global climate change that admittedly result from multiple sources around the globe," Jenkins wrote from his San Francisco chambers.
In the suit, Lockyer (who is now state treasurer) called the companies a "public nuisance" because they make millions of vehicles that discharge immense clouds of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Funny, some of us think carmakers are actually a public good, since the vehicles they make are an essential part of our economy.
Lockyer wasn't going for the laugh, though. He was aiming for the takedown and the political points that would go with it. After all, he had an election coming up in less than two months.
But even Jerry Brown, another career politician who was elected to succeed the term-limited Lockyer, understood that the suit was frivolous. Damages in tort cases, Brown said last fall, "should not be speculative."
Brown should put his incisive analytical powers to work and rein in his own office. Ken Alex, the state's supervising deputy attorney general, has said it is possible that the state might appeal the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
But then, as Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters notes, "Brown did the sort of political pirouette for which he was justly famous as governor three decades ago, declaring that the suit was 'a solid case and we're going to pursue it vigorously ... to prevent the catastrophic consequences of this global warming problem."
Not one to waste a political opportunity, Brown today remains a zealous soldier in the war on global warming.
Should Lockyer's case make it to the 9th in San Francisco, the appropriate relief that Jenkins granted the automakers might be lost. The 9th has the most leftward bias of the 13 federal circuit courts. Sixteen of its 27 judges -- there is one vacancy -- were appointed by a Democratic president.
The face of the court's leftism is arguably Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a Nixon appointee and Constitution-stretcher who believes "in a generous or expansive interpretation of the Bill of Rights."
Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama who spent 15 years as a federal prosecutor, took a good look at the 9th's bias seven years ago.
"There is no circuit in America that is looked on with less respect on questions of law enforcement than the 9th Circuit," Sessions concluded. "It is the furthest left circuit in the American judiciary, and there is no doubt about it."
Automakers can take some comfort in knowing that the 9th also is the most-reversed federal circuit court in the land. That might eventually save them and the millions of California car buyers who would have to pay the enormous passed-down costs of building vehicles that emit less CO2.
In a rational world, though, the case never would have made it to the 9th. In fact, it never would have been filed.
