On December 26, 2019, Cara Horowitz and Julia Stein, counsel for amici California CEQA and climate policy experts, filed an amicus brief to the Court of Appeal of the State of California in a case concerning the World Logistics Center, a proposed 40 million square foot warehouse development in Moreno Valley, CA, that is estimated to draw 70,000 truck trips per day at full buildout.

The authors argue the project’s environmental impact report includes analysis of greenhouse gas impacts that misapprehends the state’s cap-and-trade program and misinforms the public and decision makers about the true significance of the project’s emissions. The analysis, if endorsed, would have dire consequences for California’s ability to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals and would upend settled California Environmental Quality Act precedent about the role state-level regulation should play in assessing the significance of project impacts.

Amici curiae include Ken Alex, director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment and former senior policy advisor to Governor Jerry Brown; Dallas Burtraw, Darius Gaskins Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future; Ann E. Carlson, Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law and faculty co-director at the Emmett Institute at UCLA Law; Fran Pavley, former California State Senator and Assemblymember, and principal author of AB 32; and Michael Wara, senior research scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment and director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford Law School.

Horowitz and Stein drafted the brief through the Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic, with contributions from UCLA Law students Shalaka Phadnis and Emily Warfield.

Download Amicus Brief