The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG)’s 2011 environmental impact review of Cleveland National Forest development ignores “the elephant in the room”, said the lone dissenter in a much-anticipated and recently decided California Supreme Court ruling.

“No one is asking SANDAG to singlehandedly prevent California from blowing through its greenhouse gas emissions limits,” Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar said in his dissent to a state court ruling handed down July 14. “But the agency was given a specific role in the state’s coordinated climate change agenda: to reduce transportation emissions from the San Diego region. Under SANDAG’s plan and according to its projections, the opposite will occur.

“While the agency is, for the most part, entitled to make that choice, it does not have discretion to downplay the consequence – one requiring blunter acknowledgement as the elephant in the room that it is.”