Cars are still okay in Californiay

Yeah, Californians are suing each other over exhaust emissions now. They’re nuts over there. Must be something in the air.

This BBC report says a judge ruled against the state in a case brought by California’s former attorney-general, Bill Lockyer against six car makers. The case claimed that the car makers had created a “public nuisance” by making “millions of vehicles that collectively emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide”. Presumably they intended to be a less ambiguous, since I’m sure your average Californian would have considered the failure to make millions of vehicles for them an even greater public nuisance.

The court ruled that there is no law about what level of emissions constitutes a “public nuisance”, and laws are for elected legislators to write. Kudos to the judge for recognising this important principle. The losing side — the state government, that is — told the BBC that:

…the state brought the action on behalf of the people of California because national authorities had failed to act over setting emission targets.

“We do think that because the federal government has failed to act, this is a judicial obligation to jump in where those entities had failed to act.”

So why doesn’t the Californian government not sue itself to force itself to pass the required legislation? And if it was the federal government’s fault (of course it’s Bush’s fault!), why does the state government sue a bunch of innocent citizens who were only trying to solve the nuisance of having to walk everywhere in the brain-addling Californian sun?