Friends of Oroville v. City of Oroville

In a case challenging the approval of an expanded and relocated Wal-Mart store in Oroville, California, an intermediate California appellate court held that the City of Oroville had failed to adequately assess the impact of a project’s greenhouse gas emissions. The court ruled that in the review of the project under the California Environmental Quality Act, the City had improperly applied the threshold for determining the significance of project greenhouse gas emissions. The court found that the City had made a “meaningless” comparison of the proposed store’s emissions to statewide emissions and had failed both to calculate the existing Wal-Mart store’s emissions and to “quantitatively or qualitatively ascertain or estimate” the effect of mitigation measures on the proposed store’s emissions.