The California coast seems like the ideal location for an offshore wind
energy project: the state offers attractive incentives for renewable energy
generation, Pacific wind patterns are strong and consistent, and the unusually long coastline provides plenty of space for offshore wind facilities to expand. Despite these favorable factors, the State of California is woefully behind its East Coast counterparts with respect to offshore wind development.
The movement of air pollutants across state lines, or interstate air pollution, presents an externalities problem in which downwind states suffer from pollution originating from outside of the state and are powerless to address it. The Environmental Protection Agency has made multiple attempts to regulate interstate air pollution, its most notable success in the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, upheld in EME Homer, where the Supreme Court approved a framework that would allocate emissions among upwind states based on a cost-minimization principle.
In Sierra Club v. EPA, the Third Circuit Court of Appeal held that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) approval of Pennsylvania’s State Implementation Plan (SIP) was arbitrary and capricious because it failed to lower emissions, had a broad exception, and gave operators wide reporting discretion. The court held that these elements, taken together, demonstrated that agency approval was inappropriate. This In Brief argues that EPA should never have approved the Pennsylvania SIP because the operators’ reporting discretion component demonstrated that the proposed limitations did not comply with the Clean Air Act (CAA).
In 2017, the cities of Oakland and San Francisco filed suit in California state court against BP, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil. The complaint asserted a claim of public nuisance and alleged that the energy company defendants had created or contributed to climate change by producing and promoting fossil fuel products for decades. Plaintiffs requested an abatement fund to construct infrastructure to adapt to climate harms such as sea level rise. In the short period since Oakland v. BP was filed, over a dozen cities, counties, and states have brought climate suits against energy companies in state courts
