City of Riverside v. Ruckelshaus
Case Summary
The US District Court ordered federal and state agencies to prepare air quality improvement plans by which the LA Air Basin must meet rigorous Clean Air Act standards despite difficulty and expense of attainment.
Additional Information
The federal Clean Air Act mandates each state prepare detailed plans for how each air basin will achieve nationally established air quality standards. Because Los Angeles has consistently had the worst air quality in the nation, the difficulties of achieving these legislative goals has greatly compounded. As a result, our state and local agencies in charge of complying with these legislative mandates have sometimes failed to have the political will to pursue the needed remedies
CLIPI filed several lawsuits in the 1970s and ‘80s to enforce the Clean Air Act mandates. Probably the most visible of these cases was City of Riverside v. Ruckelshaus, which resulted in the federal district court’s mandate requiring air quality officials to prepare appropriate plans to achieve CAA air quality standards. In complying with this mandate, plans were promulgated that initially included plans for car-pooling, gas rationing and other politically unpopular strategies, and Congress soon intervened to modify the mandates so as to avoid the inevitable political backlash. Ruckelshaus nevertheless showed that citizen litigation would be an important tool in achieving the clean-up of our air resources, and it also educated the public to the fact that these important legislative policies would require strong actions.
One subsequent suit, California Lung Association v. Air Resources Board, resulted in a federal court mandate ordering air quality officials to prepare plans for smog emergency air pollution episodes, when air pollution reaches levels dangerous to human health. Notably, in the ensuing years, Clean Air implementation efforts in the Los Angeles basin have been so successful that emergency episodes have virtually disappeared. In fact, air quality in the Los Angeles basin has improved significantly in the past twenty years, due in substantial part to the citizen lawsuits that have consistently enforced the Clean Air Act’s important legislative aspirations.
(Published in the 30th Anniversary of CLIPI Dinner Program)
Where were at today
For the last couple of decades, much of the attention surrounding air quality legal and political issues has related to greenhouse gas emissions and their impacts on climate change. The Obama administration’s EPA made findings that provide the legal basis for EPA’s enforcement of restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, but the Trump administration has recently claimed to be “aiming a dagger at the heart” of those earlier findings. At the same time, Trump and the Senate have sought to nullify California’s authority to enact its own mobile source restrictions such as those that would mandate all-EV sales within ten years. Trump and Congress have also weakened federal subsidies for renewable energy development and implementation, while promoting fossil fuels. A key question is whether the Trump administration is pushing the nation (and the world) to a “point of no return” regarding the reversibility of climate change.
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