The California A-G, up for election later this year, is suing car makers for damages to Calfornia caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Damien Carrick had a good interview with his deputy, James Pollack, this morning on the ABC Law Report http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2006/1758349.htm#transcript.

Listening to it I couldn't help but think that a neat defence ploy by the car makers would be to follow him and his colleagues around and film them every time they step into a car. It's not as though anyone is forced to use a car, so if they do, then surely they are the emitter?

It seems bizarre that the manufacturer of anything used so widely, and with such benefits, could be sued for something which is essential to the way the product works. We're not talking about product defects here, but product features!

And then I wondered what would happen if California won its suit. Would carmakers refuse to sell into California, or would there be an effective tax put on their sale in California to be applied towards the environmental damage they are alleged to cause? Maybe Californians will be walking and biking everywhere sometime soon.

Graham,
Unholy smoke! An alliance of the US litigation industry with aspirant political incumbents goes in search of deep pockets to sue for global warming! This alliance trumpets that it has already found suitably wealthy guilty perpetrators of this heinous deliberate environmental vandalism targetted upon the State of California. If its litigation succeeds, it will have diverted attention from the fact that it was, presumably (I say this as an outsider), the function of the State government in California over the years to have legislated for the abatement of the public niusance it now claims to be of such seriousness. It will have done nothing by way of proposing a dependable legislative framework for future amelioration of the niusance, but it will have shifted the blame for past ignorance or inaction!

Of course, this alliance does not have to concern itself overly with the actual legal merits of its suit. The litigation will be funded by the Californian taxpayer, win, lose, or draw. Takes public funding of political campaigning to a whole new level.

Nowhere in the report did I see anything about the oil industry being joined in the suit as a respondent. After all, it is the burning of their product that is the direct cause of the nuisance. The cars are but a convoluted pipeline through which this evil product is spewed out upon the hapless State. But then again, the automotive industry should have known this and planned to introduce cars powered by Heath-Robinson double-acting gravity anomaly perpetual motion engines. In fact it did know, and chose deliberately not to do so for reasons that are unclear. Guilty, guilty, guilty!

It is of course a little rude of me to intrude, as a non-citizen, into a political debate in a State that is part of a federal Union. It is just that I, too, live in a relatively very large State within an indissoluble Federal Commonwealth, speak a very similar language, and have seen this sort of blame-shifting before. I just can't remember where. Must be early onset Oldtimer's disease.