Sierra Club v. San Diego County

Sierra Club and other organizations commenced challenges to a revised Climate Action Plan adopted by San Diego County in 2018. In one case, Sierra Club filed a third amended petition asserting that the County had failed to comply with earlier judicial directives requiring, among other things, that the Climate Action Plan contain enforceable measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sierra Club and six other groups also filed a <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/sierra-club-v-county-of-san-diego-2/">new lawsuit</a> seeking to set aside certain portions of the revised Climate Action Plan and the supplemental environmental impact report on which it was based, and also to set aside a threshold of significance established by the County that the petitioners alleged would allow development not contemplated by a 2011 General Plan Update, so long as developers obtained offsets, which could be obtained out of state or even outside of the country. In the new lawsuit, the petitioners asserted that this “offshoring of GHG emissions offsets” had been done without proper review under the California Environmental Quality Act.

In April 2013, the court set aside the County’s approval of the climate action plan (CAP). The court held that the CAP was not properly approved because it should have been subject to a supplemental environmental impact report (EIR). (The county had concluded in an addendum to the program EIR for the County’s 2011 General Plan Update (GPU) that the CAP fell within the program EIR’s scope.) The court further held that even if the CAP had been properly approved, it failed to meet the mitigation obligations in the program EIR for the GPU, which required the County to set detailed greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and deadlines and to implement enforceable greenhouse gas emissions reduction measures. Noting that the CAP describes itself as a “living document” and as a “a platform for the County to build strategies to meet its emission-reduction targets,” the court stated: “There is no time for ‘building strategies’ or ‘living documents;’ as the PEIR quite rightly found, enforceable mitigation measures are necessary now.”