Chilling effect

Environment | A federal ruling in California could slow climate-change litigation but can’t stop it | Mark Bergin

Having once campaigned to the left of such Democratic presidential candidates as Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, California attorney general Jerry Brown provoked little surprise last year when he carried out the plan of his predecessor to sue the world's six largest automakers for causing global warming. The surprise came Sept. 17 when a Clinton-appointed federal judge in San Francisco threw Brown's case out of court.

The so-called "big six" of Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, and the North American subsidiaries of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota escaped the expense and negative publicity of a trial meant to impugn the green credentials of their product lines. Brown's case charged that the automakers' vehicles release a combined 289 million tons of CO2 in the United States each year, damaging California's coastline and water supply.