Last year California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed a lawsuit stating that GM, Ford, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, Honda and Nissan were to blame for the air pollution and related problems in the state (California sues 6 carmakers over greenhouse gases) . That lawsuit was just thrown out by Martin Jenkins, the U.S. District Judge presiding over the case.
Judge Jenkins stated that it was impossible to assess how much responsibility automakers had in contributing to the damage caused by global warming in California...
Furthermore, he went on to say that lawmakers – not judges – should be the ones responsible for determining if automakers should be held accountable.
Full story here at Autoblog and at Motor Authority here.
Full story here at Autoblog and at Motor Authority here.
ateixeira says:
07:30 AM, 09/18/07
How about all the heaters and A/C units for those millions of residences? I'm sure they consume far more energy. Why is the car the bad guy?
jriz says:
09:03 AM, 09/18/07
I'm a pretty avid environment guy, but filing a lawsuit against the car companies is ridiculous. If we're to sue anyone, it should be state and federal governments for failing to recognize the global warming warning signs sooner and enacting more gradual steps to counteract it. As has been shown in the past, car companies can do pretty amazing things when they're ordered to do something -- given enough time for R&D and for costs to come down. Unless the government orders them to do that thing, though, they have no real obligation to do so. Perhaps a moral one, but there's rarely anything moral about the legal system.
rick8365 says:
10:31 AM, 09/18/07
jriz -
My thoughts exactly, well said.
estreka says:
02:45 PM, 09/18/07
You can't just sue somebody because you suddenly don't like what they're doing. No law was ever broken. To counter my own argument; however, the tabacco companies were retroactively sued successfully for all those cancer claims.
It was a political maneuver anyway. The lawsuit came out a month before elections last year.
crashtestdingo says:
04:01 PM, 09/18/07
@jriz: "As has been shown in the past, car companies can do pretty amazing things when they're ordered to do something -- given enough time for R&D and for costs to come down."
Is twelve years enough time? The Big 3 (and likely some of the other automakers) are against the bill that passed the Senate that would raise CAFE to 35 mpg by 2020. On the other hand, in defense of the automakers, I'll quote Dennis Simanaitis in the September 2007 issue of Road & Track: "[T]his new combined [cars and light trucks together] CAFE is an increase of around 10 mpg, or 40 percent, by 2020... [A] lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. Incremental gains in mpg are going to be increasingly costly."
As for what the laws say, or direct, that's how lawyers sometimes earn their money, by finding new ways to apply existing laws and convincing judges and juries that such unprecedented applications are valid. Though the laws specific to auto manufacturers don't direct them to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, it appears to me that the California AG thought he found a valid way to apply other laws (product liability laws, I imagine) to achieve that end. The defendants appear to have convinced the judge that there was a hole in his arguments, however.
sddoc07 says:
10:32 PM, 09/18/07
jriz - this is America, not China. You do no order auto companies to make a huge paradigm shift like changing the basic fundamental method of powering their only product. The only way it gets done efficiently and more importantly, effectively - is if you make it economically feasible. If you look at other examples such as air travel and healthcare, the gov't role is to facilitate research and encourage innovation. It does not invent new sources of energy - but it can make it cheaper to do so.