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For those who are interested in attending Sunday's imatter protest
in San Francisco, please read this. It is connected to much larger
efforts. <br>
<br>
The person forwarding this to me helped in the 2006 campaign and has
remained close to McCloskey. <br>
<br>
Wes<br>
<br>
-------- Original Message --------
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<th nowrap="nowrap" align="RIGHT" valign="BASELINE">Subject: </th>
<td>NY Times: McCloskey et al Suing US, States Over CO2
Emissions</td>
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<th nowrap="nowrap" align="RIGHT" valign="BASELINE">Date: </th>
<td>Fri, 6 May 2011 07:19:10 -0400</td>
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<th nowrap="nowrap" align="RIGHT" valign="BASELINE">From: </th>
<td><br>
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<th nowrap="nowrap" align="RIGHT" valign="BASELINE">To: </th>
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<br>
<br>
Under the concept that the atmosphere is a "public trust" - and that
the govt is required to protect it...
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Not a bad article overall, but the NY Times lead on Pete is
laughable:</div>
<div>_________________</div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:
Georgia,serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">Among the
lawyers representing them is Pete McCloskey, a former Republican
congressman from California who became a Democrat in 2006 *for*
an unsuccessful bid to defeat former House Natural Resources
Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.).</span><span
class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,serif;
font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"> </span></div>
<div>_________________<br>
<div>** added by ****** - I think they meant to say
*after*...notwithstanding this minor typo, this sentence is
certainly good for a yuk or two!!</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Hope you're all doing well!</div>
<div><snip></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:
Georgia,serif; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 13px;">
<div class="timestamp" style="margin-top: 15px; font-size:
10px; font-weight: normal ! important; font-family:
arial,helvetica,sans-serif; white-space: nowrap; color:
rgb(168, 24, 23);">May 5, 2011</div>
<h1 style="font-size: 2.4em; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px;
color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.083em;"><nyt_headline
version="1.0" type=" ">Young Activists Sue U.S., States
Over Greenhouse Gas Emissions</nyt_headline></h1>
<nyt_byline>
<h6 class="byline" style="margin: 2px 0px; color: rgb(128,
128, 128); font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.2em;
font-weight: bold; font-family:
arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br>
</h6>
<h6 class="byline" style="margin: 2px 0px; color: rgb(128,
128, 128); font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.2em;
font-weight: bold; font-family:
arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">By GABRIEL NELSON</h6>
</nyt_byline><nyt_text>
<div id="articleBody"><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;"><br>
</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">They might not be old enough to
vote, but young climate activists are helping stage a
legal campaign that seeks to force the federal
government and all the states to curb greenhouse gas
emissions because of their role in global warming.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Attorneys representing the
children and teenagers filed yesterday, or are preparing
to file, 52 separate lawsuits and petitions based on a
novel legal theory: that the government has failed in
its duty to protect the atmosphere as a "public trust"
for future generations.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">As a legal theory, the idea
that the environment is a public trust has been around
for centuries, and has often been used to protect water
and wildlife. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in
1892 that Illinois lawmakers couldn't hand over a large
portion of the Chicago harbor to the Illinois Central
Railroad because the government was responsible for
safeguarding waterways.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Similarly, that's the reason
people usually need government licenses to shoot deer or
catch fish. State and federal officials manage wildlife
as a public trust to ensure that it remains plentiful.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">The idea has never before been
applied to the atmosphere, said Julia Olson, an attorney
who led the legal team as executive director of the
Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children's Trust. But it
captured the imagination of 16-year-old Alec Loorz of
Ventura, Calif., who is helping run the legal campaign
and has spent the past year finding teenagers across the
country to sign onto the lawsuits.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">"The legislative and executive
branches of our government have failed us," Loorz said
in an interview yesterday. "People have been trying to
push for real change at the legislative level for a long
time, and nothing has worked. That's why we're going
after it through the judicial branch of government."</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Among the cases is a federal <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/05/05/document_gw_03.pdf"
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;"><strong>lawsuit</strong></a> (pdf),
filed late yesterday in district court in San Francisco,
that names U.S. EPA and the departments of Agriculture,
Commerce, Defense, Energy and Interior as defendants.
The lawsuit asks the government to stop greenhouse
emissions in 2012 and reduce them by 6 percent per year
after that.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Loorz said he started focusing
on climate change at age 12 after seeing former Vice
President Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." Now,
he and four other teenagers are the main plaintiffs in
the federal case, which was assigned to Donna Ryu, a
U.S. magistrate judge in Oakland, Calif.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Among the lawyers representing
them is Pete McCloskey, a former Republican congressman
from California who became a Democrat in 2006 for an
unsuccessful bid to defeat former House Natural
Resources Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.). In a
statement yesterday, McCloskey described the public
trust theory as "the most common-sense, fundamental
legal footing for the protection of our planet."</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Also participating in the
lawsuit are Wildearth Guardians, a Colorado-based group
that often sues the government to protect wildlife and
wilderness areas, and Kids vs. Global Warming, a group
that Loorz founded with support from the nonprofit Earth
Island Institute.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">The first states that will face
lawsuits are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado,
Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon
and Washington. Hawaii and New Jersey are going to be
served with notices that lawsuits are coming, while the
other 38 states and the District of Columbia will
receive petitions that ask to put climate policies in
place.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">"What courts can do is, they
can take the politics out of atmospheric protection, and
they can put the science back in," Olson said. "They can
establish the threshold of what needs to be done, and
tell the government, you need to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions by 6 percent a year, so we can protect the
atmosphere for future generations. We're not trying to
tell government the ins and outs of how to do it."</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;"><span class="bold"
style="font-weight: bold;">Climate and common law</span></p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Legal experts say the new legal
campaign parallels another common-law case brought by
states and environmental groups that was heard by the
Supreme Court earlier this year.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">That lawsuit, which was filed
against the five largest coal-burning utilities in the
country, claimed that greenhouse gas emissions from coal
plants are a "public nuisance" because of their
contribution to climate change. A federal appeals court
had ruled that the case could proceed, ordering a
district judge to decide whether specific power plants
should cut their emissions.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Most of the Supreme Court
seemed skeptical during oral arguments last month.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is generally considered
one of the more liberal judges on the nation's high
court, asked why judges should weigh those concerns when
EPA has the scientific expertise to do it (<em><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2011/04/19/1"
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration:
none;">Greenwire</a></em>, April 19).</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Under a 2007 decision by the
Supreme Court, the agency has decided that greenhouse
gases are a threat to human health and welfare and must
therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The
Obama administration has argued that the new Clean Air
Act rules should pre-empt legal challenges that ask
judges to limit greenhouse gas emissions.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Critics of the new lawsuits say
climate change is a wide-reaching and complex "political
question" that is best left to Congress and the
executive branch. Even some proponents of policies to
cut down on greenhouse gas emissions have doubts about
the public trust strategy.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">"When you're suing the
government for failure to regulate, good luck," said one
environmental attorney who is not involved in the new
round of lawsuits. "That plays into the political
question doctrine, so they've got their hands full. I
don't buy into this strategy."</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Hans von Spakovski, a senior
legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation,
said the public trust doctrine doesn't make sense for
climate change. While it might make some sense for
public waters, where there is often a clear source of
pollution, there are billions of sources of carbon
dioxide, and most of them are in other countries.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Even if the United States
managed to cut its emissions, there's no guarantee it
would make a difference, von Spakovski said. That's what
makes it a policy question that the legislative branch
must answer, he said.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">"If you think state government
should be doing something about this, go lobby the state
government," von Spakovski said. "Work on electing
people to the state legislature who you think will have
the right opinion on these kinds of issues. That's how
you do it in a democratic system. It's a slow,
complicated process, but it's the system that we have."</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;"><span class="bold"
style="font-weight: bold;">State lawsuits</span></p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">The activists aren't sparing
any states from their lawsuits -- not even California,
which passed a climate change bill in 2006 and is now
preparing a cap-and-trade program to limit carbon
dioxide emissions in the state.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Lawyers <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/05/05/document_gw_04.pdf"
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;"><strong>filed
suit</strong></a> (pdf) against the state and Gov.
Jerry Brown (D) yesterday in San Francisco Superior
Court. California's A.B. 32, which established a target
of 1990 emissions levels by 2020 and set up a host of
regulations and a market-based system to achieve it, is
not enough, Oakland-based lawyer Sharon Duggan said.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Duggan said she spoke to
Brown's staff about the case, but they couldn't reach an
agreement. A spokesman for Brown declined to comment.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">"The state of California has
told us unequivocally that they will not agree that the
atmosphere is a public trust resource," Duggan said.
"Everyone will agree that California is a leader in
trying to deal with the climate crisis, but on this
particular issue they would not concede that point."</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">Though no one has argued in
court that the atmosphere should be a public trust, the
underlying concept isn't unheard of in California. One
precedent could be the California Supreme Court's 1983
decision that the state should have considered the
public trust before granting Los Angeles users the right
to tap Mono Lake, northeast of Yosemite National Park.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;">"California is doing a lot, but
their failure to embrace the atmosphere as a public
trust resource prevents them from exercising their duty
to take all action necessary to prevent the escalation
of the climate crisis," Duggan said. "Whether you're at
the state or federal level, the government has failed
and the political arena is not getting the job done."</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/05/05/document_gw_03.pdf"
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;"><strong>Click
here</strong></a> (pdf) to read the federal lawsuit.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/05/05/document_gw_04.pdf"
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none;"><strong>Click
here</strong></a> (pdf) to read the California
lawsuit.</p>
<p style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px 0px
1em; line-height: 24px;"><em>Reporter Debra Kahn
contributed.</em></p>
<div style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; margin: 0px
0px 1em; line-height: 24px;"><br
class="webkit-block-placeholder">
</div>
<p class="note" style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em;
margin: 0px 0px 1em; line-height: 24px;">Copyright 2011
E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.</p>
<nyt_author_id>
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2.8em;">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 15px !
important; margin: 0px; line-height: 24px;
font-style: italic;">For more news on energy and the
environment, visit <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greenwire.com/" style="color:
rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration: none; font-size:
15px ! important; line-height: 22px;">www.greenwire.com</a>.<br
style="font-size: 15px ! important; line-height:
22px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
Greenwire is published by Environment & Energy
Publishing. <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/supplemental-content.html"
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102); text-decoration:
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