California said on Thursday it planned to sue the US government for failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from ships, aircraft, construction and agricultural equipment.
In the latest legal threat from the state against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown said the agency was “wantonly ignoring” its duty to set pollution standards.
California is already suing the EPA over the agency’s failure to approve the state’s proposed standards for vehicle emissions.
“Ships, aircraft and industrial equipment burn huge quantities of fossil fuel and cause massive greenhouse gas pollution yet President [George W.] Bush stalls with one bureaucratic dodge after another,” Brown said in a statement.
“Because Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency continues to wantonly ignore its duty to regulate pollution, California is forced to seek judicial action,” he said.
Brown said under federal law the EPA was authorized to regulate greenhouse gases on ocean-going vessels and aircraft, as well as agricultural, construction and industrial equipment.
However, Brown accused the EPA of failing to act to combat pollution from those sources and said California would sue if it failed to enforce regulations within six months.
The lawsuit threat comes one week after Californian environmental regulators approved stringent guidelines aimed at forcing ocean-going vessels visiting the state’s ports to use cleaner fuel.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has made the environment a central plank of his tenure, signing a historic bill in 2006 that saw the state become the first in the US to impose limits on global warming gases.
Under the plan, California aims to slash the state’s carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by the year 2020, a figure that Schwarzenegger has said is equivalent to removing 6.5 million vehicles from the road.
Meanwhile, the London-based New Economics Foundation warned that rising greenhouse gas emissions could pass a critical tipping point and trigger runaway global warming within the next 100 months.
The estimate, the foundation said in a report, is based on when emissions will reach such high levels that it “is no longer likely” the world will be able to avoid a 2ºC rise in average temperatures.
“We know climate change is a huge problem, but there’s a missing ingredient of urgency,” said Andrew Simms, policy director at the foundation.
The UN’s expert panel on climate change has said that greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, which today are at around 430 parts per million (ppm), would have to be stabilized at 450ppm to avoid a temperature rise of more than 2ºC.
In the report Simms and Victoria Johnson made a conservative estimate of future emissions based on six greenhouse gases and other pollutants, such as aerosols, which have a cooling effect on the atmosphere. They predicted that 100 months from today emissions would rise above the critical 450ppm threshold.
The UK government’s 2006 report on climate change by Nicholas Stern estimated that a 2ºC rise could release vast quantities of carbon stored in soils and permafrost, see 15 percent to 40 percent of land species threatened with extinction and up to 4 billion people experiencing water shortages.
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