Lawsuit against mega-dairy in California's Central Valley seeks to reduce greenhouse gases
On October 15, 2008, the Center for Biological Diversity and California Rural Legal Assistance filed a lawsuit challenging the failure to consider global warming impacts in conducting the environmental review of a mega-dairy in the Central Valley of California. This is the latest in a series of actions focusing on the environmental review process under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires public agencies to consider the environmental impacts of a proposed project before approving it. In the case of greenhouse gas emissions, several suits have claimed that CEQA requires identification of a project’s emissions, and if they are significant, may require the agency to impose mitigation measures to lower the project’s carbon footprint.
The new lawsuit asserts that the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution District failed to properly consider the global warming and human health impacts of a mega-dairy with 6,120 animals when it conducted its project review under CEQA. Mega-dairies produce large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, ozone precursors, particulate pollution, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia. The lawsuit contends that the mega-dairy project’s impacts were ignored or down-played.
New and expanding dairies, poultry houses, and other agricultural operations in the Central Valley have been targeted by environmental groups in recent years, once they lost their exempt status from Clean Air Act permitting requirements. Agencies reviewing permits and other approvals for such facilities are struggling to define which impacts are potentially “significant” impacts under CEQA. In Senate Bill 97, a companion bill to the California Global Warming Solutions Act (“AB 32”), the California legislature required the Office of Planning and Research (“OPR”) to develop draft CEQA guidelines “for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions or the effects of greenhouse gas emissions” by July 1, 2009 [link to Joanne Lichtman’s ClimateBlog posting on this], but no regulations are currently available to assist the public agencies in conducting their reviews. Air pollution agency officials belonging to the California Air Pollution Control Officers’ Association (“CAPCOA”) have published a non-binding white paper to assist local governments in conducting these reviews.
