While a number of court decisions have considered how CEQA lead agencies should assess the significance of a project’s greenhouse gas emissions, few have examined mitigation measures for those impacts. In Golden Door Properties, LLC v. County of San Diego, 50 Cal. App. 5th 467 (2020), the Fourth District Court of Appeal issued the first published decision on the use of purchased offset credits to mitigate GHG emissions. The court concluded the mitigation measure was inadequate because it did not ensure that offset credits would result in emissions reductions that would be genuine, quantifiable, additional and verifiable. It also faulted the measure because it gave the County planning director authority to approve a project’s use of particular offset credits without providing clear, objective standards to guide those determinations.
Background.
The Golden Door case arose from San Diego County’s approval of a climate action plan along with guidelines for determining the significance of greenhouse gas impacts. The key issue in the case was whether a GHG mitigation measure in the SEIR for the climate action plan complied with CEQA. That measure, GHG-1, was designed to mitigate the GHG impacts of pending projects requiring general plan amendments which had not been included in the climate action plan’s emissions inventory. Measure GHG-1 required that those projects mitigate GHG impacts through onsite design features and, if those onsite reductions were not sufficient to provide full mitigation, they could use offsite mitigation, including purchasing GHG offset credits. The measure allowed identification of the specific offset credits to be used for a project to be deferred until after the project was approved and gave the County planning director discretion to determine the acceptability of the proposed offset credit program.
Mitigation measure GHG-1 found legally inadequate.
The CEQA Guidelines allow the...
