Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Ninth Circuit Tosses Frivolous Lawsuit

It only took a year of wasting California's legal budget, but California's junk lawsuit was dismissed by one of judges most people would think would be sympathetic to an outlandish environmental damages claim. States better learn that the science is settled enough to start treating carmakers like they are tobacco farmers. It took about 40 years of cancer research before anyone could take on Big Tobacco. Here, we have a 9th Circuit judge actually using "logic" to dismiss the suit: can't calculate future damage from global warming for a local region; can't calculate autos' contribution to emissions for CO2 theory for global warming; and can't use the judiciary to make legislative policy regarding emissions. I wrote about this case last year and this is what I predicted:

The carmakers are right to call this a nuisance suit, and this case will get dismissed, with prejudice, at the federal level, just as a case in New York was. Meanwhile, California wastes money on the legal proceedings. Disgusting.

Pretty good, huh? The worst part of the nuisance suit, was that it was suing for future damages, which on its own was a novel legal argument. The democrats here in California really do live in their own version of Fantasy Land, and I'm glad that even the 9th Circuit still has a tangible thread tying them to reality.

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