There are millions of laws that affect our lives everyday and we do not even realize the immense impact it has on each particular area that forms our complex society. Social, market, economic and political factors are just some aspects that are influenced by laws and how we as consumers react to them. In fact, the concept of LAW is very broad. Black's Law Dictionary defines it as a body of rules of action or conduct prescribed by controlling authority and having binding legal force. It is said by many that the main function of a law is to guide us as citizens and to establish a tangible enforcement of what is right and what is wrong. Yet, it has its specific functions: keeping the peace, shaping moral standards, promoting social justice, maintaining the status quo, facilitating orderly change, facilitating planning, providing a basis for compromise, and maximizing individual freedom . The law to be addressed is the Assembly Bill 1493 that was signed by California's Governor, Gray Davis, on July 22, 2002. This was a great step forward in the fight to stop Global Warming being the nation's first law to require automakers to limit emissions greenhouse gases.
To begin to scrutinize acutely into the reasoning and effects this law has and will have in our society we must first address its history and distinct factors that shaped the law. In the postwar years some pollution crises began to occur that got the population off guard because these issues were never seen before. A perfect example is the Temperature Inversion in 1948 in a small town named Donora in Pennsylvania. The tragedy consisted of a smoke cloud of sulfur dioxide that never cleared away in a steel mill for several days killing 19 people. Later in 1952, a cloud of smog in London killed 4,000 people f ...