Maine State House. Photo: Shutterstock
July 18, 2024 (PORTLAND, ME) – Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), Sierra Club, and Maine Youth Action (MYA) are keeping up their fight to ensure Maine cuts carbon pollution as required by the law. The groups on Thursday filed their response to Maine’s motion to dismiss their April lawsuit.
“Maine’s Climate Action Plan isn’t just empty promises—it’s a pledge to shield our communities and environment from the devastating impacts of climate change,” said Emily K. Green, Senior Attorney for CLF Maine. “Yet, the Department of Environmental Protection has not been willing to make the hard decisions, leaving our state vulnerable to increasing floods, property damage, pests that make it harder to enjoy the outdoors, and threats to marine life from warming waters. The State had an initial deadline to act in 2021, and now wants us to wait for the next climate action plan to be issued in 2025 before it takes action. But there is no reason to believe it will take action this time around. And every day wasted makes it that much more difficult to tackle climate change.”
In April, CLF, MYA, and Sierra Club filed their lawsuit. The groups sued following the Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) failure to act even as climate change threatens livelihoods, coastal communities, and health. Maine asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit in June.
“Our goal is to ensure Maine meets its climate commitments,” said Matt Cannon, Sierra Club Maine’s State Conservation & Energy Director. “Maine’s legislature set clear climate targets and tasked DEP with adopting rules to uphold them. We need DEP to do its job – our leaders must fulfill their obligation to responsibly and equitably reduce emissions, starting with our most significant polluters.”
Cole Cochrane, Policy Director for Maine Youth Action, a fully youth-led advocacy group, said: “It is not only crucial for our generation to have the state reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is quite simply the law. If the state does not want to adopt significant rules like Advanced Clean Cars II for the sake of my generation’s future, then they should at least do it in accordance with what the legislature mandated as such.”
Maine’s legislature and governor approved the Climate Law in 2019, requiring Maine to slash climate-damaging emissions 45% by 2030 and 80% by 2050 – reductions lawmakers and climate experts said were necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Since that time, the state has failed to enact emission regulations for buildings, has approved plans for more highway miles that will add to, not reduce, emissions from cars and trucks, and seen repeated delays in construction of offshore wind. But the failure in curbing emissions from cars and trucks – Maine’s biggest source of pollution – has been stark.
The suit targets both the DEP and Maine’s Board of Environmental Protection (BEP) after the BEP rejected regulations in March requiring that clean electric vehicles make up the majority of new car sales by 2030. Similar rules have passed in neighboring states and would have resulted in dramatic cuts to emissions and better health for Mainers.
Instead, the DEP and BEP have failed to adopt a single policy to cut emissions from transportation, despite their own assertions that cutting transportation emissions is crucial to Maine’s climate future.
The full response to Maine’s motion to dismiss can be found here.
Experts are available for further comment.
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