US Chamber of Commerce calls California’s new climate legislation ‘compelled speech’
From our friends at Courthouse News:
LOS ANGELES (CN) — The U.S. Chamber of Commerced claims that two recent California laws requiring large businesses to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and to report their climate-related financial risk amount to “compelled speech” in violation of the First Amendment.
On Tuesday the chamber, joined by several other business associations, sued the California Air Resources Board, the agency tasked with enforcing Senate Bills 253 and 261, which were signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom this past October.
“This lawsuit challenges two novel California laws that unlawfully attempt to regulate speech related to climate change,” the chamber says in the complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court. They “impermissibly compel thousands of businesses to make costly, burdensome, and politically fraught statements about their operations, not just in California, but around the world, in order to stigmatize those companies and shape their behavior.”
California’s so-called Climate Accountability Package imposes unprecedented reporting requirements on large U.S. public and private companies doing business in the state, attorneys with Sidley Austin observed last year, and it has the potential to reach “every part of a company’s value chain.”
Full Story HERE.