America's Global Warming-Fighting Attorney General

"Nearly four decades after entering California politics, Jerry Brown has reinvented himself again, this time as a carbon-fighting attorney general.

"He was environmentalist before it was fashionable," said Barbara O'Connor, who directs the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at California State University Sacramento. "I think he really does believe this is essential for the planet."

"Jerry Brown is taking the strongest action of any attorney general in the country," said Kieran Suckling, policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "What Brown is doing is not only setting a precedent for other states, he's also setting precedent for national policy on global warming at a time when there is a national vacuum."

"Some observers compare Brown to Eliot Spitzer, who made a national name by taking on powerful Wall Street firms as New York's attorney general. His campaign for corporate reform landed him in the Governor's Office.

Nationally, Brown has teamed with the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups to petition the Bush administration to start regulating carbon emissions from automobiles, airplanes and large oceangoing vessels. They plan to sue if the government doesn't act on their requests."

"We disagree with the way he's using the courts to set national social and environmental policy," said Dave Stirling, vice president of the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation. "He's trying to force certain types of solutions on very difficult problems" – problems that should be handled by lawmakers in Washington, Stirling said.

[Editor's note: Related links below point to Attorney General Brown's widely watched litigation of an update of a county general plan, linking land use to global warming.]

Thanks to The Roundup