WHEN MOST PEOPLE think about environmental laws, they think about holding bad actors responsible for polluting air or water or destroying public lands. This makes sense: the government has a legitimate role in prohibiting noxious activities that infringe on the rights of others.
Frequently, however, environmental laws are co-opted by government agencies and activist groups to promote agendas having nothing to do with protecting people from environmental harm. PLF has taken on many cases defending individuals and small businesses from this kind of abuse.
For example, activist groups leverage environmental laws to frustrate land uses they don’t like, even as typical as plowing fields or building roads. This type of misuse is plainly seen in an Alaska case in which PLF represents Tin Cup, LLC, a family business that fabricates large pipes used in oil pipelines.
About 87% of the lawsuits in recent years targeted “infill” construction projects— housing, office buildings, and road building—in urban population centers, not rural areas or natural preserves.
The company needed a new gravel pad, construction of several buildings, and a railroad spur on 455 acres it owns in North Pole, Alaska. Because gravel is considered a “pollutant,” the company had to seek permission from the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps tied up the project for more than seven years, then demanded control over 200 acres of Tin Cup’s property as a condition of a building permit. It based these demands on its own theory that permafrost (soil that remains frozen through the year, common in polar regions) is a kind of “wetland,” authorizing it to take control of the development. There is no claim that the buildings or the fabricating business do any harm to the environment. But many environmental groups and bureaucrats oppose oil pipelines. It’s likely the Clean Water Act is simply being abused to frustrate the family’s unpopular but legal business activities. Lower courts upheld the Corps’ position, and PLF is asking the Supreme Court to review the case.
Perhaps the most tragic examples of environmental law being co-opted involve California’s Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). A CEQA lawsuit can be filed by anyone, even anonymously, to cancel a development permit granted by a government agency if there is the slightest inadequacy in even one of the more than 100 issues that must be studied and reported under the law. Far from remedying environmental damage, the CEQA enables corruption. CEQA lawsuits have been used as a bludgeon by activists, from labor unions to tenants’ rights groups, to block development and advance agendas having nothing to do with the environment.
One outrageous example comes from San Francisco. Anti-development activists there have used a CEQA lawsuit to prevent a property owner from converting an aging laundromat into a 75-unit housing development. They claimed the government should have required more environmental studies. The project was then halted when a study showed that the proposed building would cast a shadow on one quarter of the playground of a nearby school for two hours per day. The result: a delay of more than four years so far, not to protect the environment, but to block much-needed housing.
The most comprehensive study ever done of CEQA, analyzing every lawsuit filed since 1970, showed that they are rarely, if ever, focused on protecting forests or fighting pollution sources as intended. In fact, about 87% of the lawsuits in recent years targeted “infill” construction projects— housing, office buildings, and road building—in urban population centers, not rural areas or natural preserves.
Often, CEQA lawsuits are used by opportunistic lawyers and activists to gain control over worthwhile projects that pose no actual environmental harm for the purpose of extorting benefits for themselves and their allies.
For instance, the study documents lawsuits brought by labor unions to slow down government or private development projects. The suits are quickly settled when union workers are hired to complete the projects. Lawsuits are frequently brought by individual suburban homeowners, or a small group of them to drive up the cost of perfectly legal development in their neighborhoods with a cry of “not in my backyard.”
Environmental laws can be used to secure individual rights, providing protection from others who would engage in harmful activities or uses of property. But when those laws are bent to thwart rather than protect the responsible use of property, PLF does not hesitate to defend the principles of liberty and limited government.
