It may have sounded like the understatement of the year when a lawsuit was filed last week against five major U.S. energy companies, alleged to be among the biggest global-warming culprits in the nation, on the legal grounds that they're causing a "public nuisance."
In reality it may have been one of the gutsiest legal maneuvers the U.S. has ever seen on climate change -- and some observers say it could have the strange side effect of encouraging energy companies to ask the feds for mandatory emissions caps.
Last Wednesday, the chief lawyer for New York City and attorneys general of eight states, including New York, California, Iowa, and Wisconsin, sued industry top dogs -- Cinergy Corp., Southern Company, Xcel Energy, American Electric Power Company, and the Tennessee Valley Authority -- for coughing up a whopping 10 percent of America's carbon-dioxide emissions. [more]
I didn't hear about this until today. Why isn't this big news?
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