In Cleveland National Forest Foundation v. San Diego Association of Governments, a 6-1 Supreme Court today holds that, although an environmental impact report had to analyze whether the subject project — a regional development plan for the San Diego area intended to guide its transportation infrastructure from 2010 to 2050 — would significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions, it did not need to “explicitly engage in an analysis of the consistency of projected 2050 greenhouse gas emissions with the goals” in a 2005 executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in California to 80 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050.  The court’s opinion by Justice Goodwin Liu nonetheless concludes that’s not the end of the story — California’s environmental statutes “require[ ] public agencies . . . to ensure that such analysis stay in step with evolving scientific knowledge and state regulatory schemes.”

Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar dissents.  He finds “the EIR manages to occlude the elephant in the room — that the plan was associated with a major projected increase in greenhouse gas emissions, diverging sharply from emission reduction targets reflecting scientific consensus.”  Justice Cuéllar concludes, “If [the San Diego planning agency] plans to permit hundreds of billions of dollars to be spent in pursuit of a plan that departs so starkly from scientific and political consensus about the emissions decreases needed to avert climate catastrophe, it must explain this divergence in sufficient detail for the public to recognize the long-term harm that will unfold in its name.”