"Moonbeam Lawsuits" to Stop Growth 
By John McClaughry

The little mountain town of McCloud, high in the Cascade Range of Northern California, is a long way from Vermont. But recent events centering on McCloud may be a forerunner of what can easily happen here.

The McCloud area is famous for its natural springs. That abundance of pure water attracted the attention of Nestle Waters North America, a division of the Swiss-based Nestle corporation. Nestle entered into an agreement, accompanied by environmental impact studies, with the local government to pump 195 million gallons of spring water a year, and ship it off in three billion plastic bottles from a large new plant built in the former lumber town.

In 2006 California voters elected as their attorney general Jerry Brown, known during his two erratic terms as governor as "Gov. Moonbeam". Brown's current obsession is to save Planet Earth from the supposed evils of manmade global warming.

Brown has aggressively pursued a state lawsuit to force the Environmental Protection Agency to give his state a waiver to allow it to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles. He has also sued automakers and coal plant manufacturers for damages (floods, fires, etc.) that Brown believes were caused by CO₂ emissions.

For all this, Brown has become the hero of the most radical enviros. The policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, one Kieran Suckling, says Brown is "taking the strongest action of any attorney general in the country", an accolade that must sorely chagrin Vermont's William Sorrell.

On July 29 Brown plunged into the McCloud project with a ten-page letter to the Siskiyou County planning department.  The letter denounced the draft environmental impact statement, demanded that it be done over, and made it clear that he would take legal action to block the water project in court if Nestle failed to comply.

Certainly there are important environmental issues here that would be of concern to any district environmental commission in Vermont: water withdrawal, electric power demand, and truck traffic come to mind. But to the hyperGreen California AG, the fatal defect in the McCloud project is the failure of the local government and Nestle to propose some way to stop greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing process, the electricity to
run the factory and pumps, and the motor fuel burned to move trucks in and out.

The specific authority for what the local newspaper called Brown's "war on carbon" is his state's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. This act requires action to reduce California's greenhouse gas emission levels to pre-1990 levels by 2020. Brown takes that as a license to threaten legal action whenever he spots a suitable target - manufacturing, road construction, shopping centers, rural housing, whatever.

In 2006 the Vermont legislature passed a sister bill to California's act. Act 168 established the state's goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions not just to the 1990 baseline, as California's does, but 50% below that baseline by 2028. This Greenie feel-good legislation passed 25-0 in the Senate and 132-6 in the House.

Act 209 just signed into law this summer requires that every new state government rule include a greenhouse gas impact statement. Rules shall be "crafted to reduce the extent to which greenhouse gases are emitted."

Act 250 requires that a project will not result in undue air pollution. For its first 30 years that was taken to refer to the pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act. But now the attorney general has made the state a party to a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal EPA to regulate what the enviros call "greenhouse gas pollution", that is, carbon dioxide.

Add all this up, and sprinkle liberally with AG Sorrell's enthusiasm for joining enviro lawsuits initiated by publicity-seeking AGs in other states, and it should come as no surprise when the AG blocks a development because its electricity, heating and motor fuel consumption would - when added to everybody else's - make it impossible for Vermont to meet its declared greenhouse gas reduction goals.

When Act 168 passed, Rep. Joyce Errecart (R-Shelburne) voted No. Said she, "the goals in this bill will be impossible to meet, and we don't know what the consequences are of placing unattainable goals in statute." Now that Attorney General Moonbeam has blazed the trail in the McCloud controversy, Vermonters may find out those consequences soon enough.
 

John McClaughry is President of the Ethan Allen Institute