AB32, passed in 2006, mandates that the state reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The law is hailed as landmark environmental legislation for its aggressive action to reduce global warming emissions while “generating jobs, promoting a growing, clean-energy economy and a healthy environment for California at the same time.”
It wouldn’t be surprising if leading-edge environmental legislation like AB32 were to draw fire from climate-change deniers and tea-partiers who undoubtedly see it as a challenge to the god-given right to pollute; indeed, the last attempt to derail the law was last year’s California Proposition 23, pushed by the oil lobby and roundly defeated by grassroots climate justice groups.
But the lawsuit against AB32 was undertaken by the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment (CRPE) and Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) — two groups that advocate on behalf of low-income people and people of color who live, work and play in the shadow of refineries in Wilmington and Richmond, in the agro-toxic fields of the Central Valley, near the waste-dumps of Kettleman City, and in other California communities plagued by industrial pollution.
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