Calfornia AG Wants Michigan Workers' Pension Money

California is the largest car market in the country, so it would make perfect sense for an automaker to locate a factory in California. Making cars near where they are sold makes basic business sense. Well, automakers don't do this for a variety of reasons that can be summed up in this latest silliness. (Not only is California failing to attract the auto industry, it is actively repelling it.) This may seem like politicians trying to score cheap political points coming into an election. It is anything but. Anti-business politicians and their tort lawyer donors are looking to make global warming lawsuits the next shakedown bonanza, hoping to repeat the $230 billion score that they wrung from the tobacco industry in order to fund expanding government without directly raising our taxes. The desire to extract massive gobs of filthy lucre is about the only similarity though to the assault on tobacco. To begin with, the case againse tobacco actually had some scientific grounding to it. The global warming (remember global warming is not one question but five) premise of the suit is scientifically shaky. Second, the villians in the tobacco suits, some CEOs and some southern farmers, were inconsequential or unsympathetic and so easily slaughtered in the press where much of this battle was fought. That is not the case here, where the face of the auto industry is not a CEO with a drawl but the beleaguered auto-worker, that pure salt of the earth soul struggling to keep a job and make ends meet. GM and Ford are drowning in healthcare and pension liabilities for their workers that they can't fund (because consumers have decided they don't want to pay for them, "just the steel, bolts and the gears please," they say with their dollars) and California Democrats and their lawyers want to extract billions from this already bare kitty? Do you think Jennifer Granholm would be on board with this? Finally, this is a grand scale assault on a MAJOR sector of the US economy. The auto industry (counting the manufacturers, parts makers, dealers and allied industries) is HUGE, dwarfing the tobacco industry. Not everybody smokes but most have a car, and need their cars. The effects of a successful suit would hit the economy hard.

All in all, California's suit is a disastrous gambit that is not likely to play out like the tobacco suits. Still, I think the auto industry ought to entertain strategies to reduce the likelihood that other states get the same idea. I always thought the tobacco companies should have stopped selling cigarettes in the states that sued them, seeing how long politicians could stand not to have cigarette tax revenues flowing in. Something along those lines could work here. Automakers couldn't actually refuse to sell cars into California, but they could, say, tack on a fee that would place the cost burden of the litigation squarely on California rather than spreading it across their entire customer base. Call it the "California Global Warming Lawsuit Defense Fee" and have it right there on the sticker below the "Destination Charge". $250 would do the trick. That might disabuse ambitious AGs in other states from pursuing this irresponsible and dangerous course.