RUTHFULLY YOURS

Earlier this month California Gov. Jerry Brown promised to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. This goal will be nearly impossible to achieve with California’s current population, projected to grow by 30% over the next 35 years to 50 million. So ecovangelists are trying to block any economic development that could help support more people.

The Newhall Ranch project in north Los Angeles County, which aims to provide housing for nearly 60,000 people as well as tens of thousands of jobs at stores, schools and recreational centers, is the most recent target. With energy-efficient lighting, comprehensive recycling, bike trails and drought-tolerant landscaping, the 12,000-acre planned community would be a green Levittown. But the proposed development—one of the biggest in state history—has been under siege from its inception in 1994 by environmental activists.

The California Supreme Court recently rejected Newhall’s final environmental-impact report. The court’s legally nebulous decision could delay construction for years—and cast a pall over future development.

Newhall’s report, which the Department of Fish and Wildlife approved in 2010, was more than 5,000 pages, with hundreds of pages dedicated to analyzing its greenhouse-gas emissions as required by recent regulatory amendments to the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The state wildlife agency projected that Newhall would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 31% by 2020 relative to the California Air Resources Board’s 2008 “baseline” model. This was a larger reduction than the 29% cut that the board has mandated statewide.

The report also included measures for the developer to restore habitat for species potentially affected by the development, such as the coast horned lizard and Townsend’s big-eared bat. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials would move any unarmored threespine stickleback—a tiny fish protected under state and federal law—out of harm’s way.

No matter. The Center for Biological Diversity, along with other local green groups, sued to block the development, arguing that the state wildlife agency’s methodology for analyzing its greenhouse-gas emissions was flawed. They also contended that the stickleback conservation plan violated California’s prohibition against “taking” and “live transplanting” legally protected species—although state law allows “regulated taking” of threatened species.

California’s Second District Court of Appeal rejected all of the lawsuit’s dubious claims, but a 5-2 majority of the state Supreme Court sided with the obstructionists. The majority nitpicked the report’s methodology, conjecturing that perhaps a greater than 31% reduction in greenhouse emissions from new projects might be needed to meet the 29% statewide mandate because it could be harder to achieve efficiencies from older, already-constructed developments. There was no scientific evidence in the court record to support this hypothesis, which was floated by the state attorney general’s office.

The court suggested ways to revise the report but emphasized that it cannot “guarantee that any of these approaches will be found to satisfy CEQA’s demands as to any particular project.” In dissent, Justice Ming Chin said that the majority “is permitting the project opponents to relitigate some already decided issues.” He noted that “delay the project long enough and it has to meet new targets, and then perhaps new targets after that. All this is a recipe for paralysis.”

Green activists have long sought to block new development—and California housing costs are the highest in the country due to the mismatch between supply and demand. The median house price in the Los Angeles metro area is $507,000 compared with $210,000 in Dallas, $290,000 in Miami, $388,000 in Washington, D.C., and $412,000 in New York.

Housing costs have helped to drive middle- and low-income residents out of the state. Newhall Ranch appears to be one more human sacrifice on the altar of the greater environmental good.