Prime Minister John Horgan was in San Francisco on Thursday with the governors of Washington, Oregon and California to sign a climate change agreement called the Pacific Coast Collaborative.
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Prime Minister John Horgan signed a climate deal Thursday with the governors of Washington, Oregon and California, but critics said it was merely a “symbolic gesture” that overlooks BC’s failure to meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets. greenhouse.
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The signing took place on Thursday, just days after an environmental group launched its case in British Columbia’s Supreme Court against the provincial government over allegations that the province is not meeting its own climate reporting standards.
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Standing amid a haze of wildfire smoke blanketing San Francisco, Horgan, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Oregon Governor Kate Brown and California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an updated agreement under Pacific Coast Collaborative.
It is a largely symbolic document that encourages the four governments to work together to “accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy, invest in climate infrastructure such as electric vehicle charging stations and a clean electricity grid, and protect communities. climatic effects such as drought, forest fires. , heat waves and changes in sea level.
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Horgan told the crowd that the effects of climate change have been most profound on the West Coast, so collaboration is essential.
“We have had unprecedented fires. A community called Lytton in my province no longer exists due to the bushfires,” Horgan said. “We have had atmospheric rivers, we have had heat domes, terms that we have never heard of before and that have had a profound impact on our people, our economy and our way of life.”
The four governments first reached a pact to work together to tackle climate change in 2013.
BC Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau said it’s critical that the “symbolic gesture” by Horgan and his state counterparts “is followed up by real action.”
Furstenau pointed to several examples where the BC NDP’s “actions do not match words when it comes to climate change.”
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The government touts its Clean BC climate plan, Furstenau said, “but it is being sued for failing to meet its own legal obligations under its climate responsibility legislation, they continue to subsidize the oil and gas industry and we are seeing climate-driven infrastructure being built. climate change in the Coastal GasLink pipeline”.
Jens Wieting, senior forestry and climate campaigner at Sierra Club BC, said the deal lacks meaningful targets to ensure the four partners meet their climate change commitments.
Compared to the climate achievements of the three states, BC is an “outlier,” Wieting said, with massive investments in liquefied natural gas terminals, its reluctance to ban fracking, subsidies to fossil fuel companies and “enormous doubts about if it is possible for BC to meet its goals (for greenhouse gas emissions)”.
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“Unless Prime Minister Horgan and the BC government follow other (US) states and other Canadian provinces in banning fracking… we will continue to be the outliers,” Wieting said. “We cannot accept the claim that BC is a climate leader in North America.”
The Sierra Club was in court this week over its lawsuit against the BC government alleging the government failed to report whether its climate plans will meet key greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2025, 2040 and 2050, as required by a provincial law. The Sierra Club wants the province to submit a new accountability report for 2021 filling in the missing information gaps on its progress toward meeting the 2025 emissions target.
The province set a legislated goal of a 16% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2007 levels by 2025, 40% by 2030, 60% by 2040 and 80% by 2050.
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Provincial figures released last month show emissions were just one percent lower in 2020 than in 2007, or three percent if carbon offsets from forest management projects are included.
BC Environment Minister George Heyman told Postmedia News on Thursday that he cannot comment on the court case, but said the province has extensive transparency and accountability measures in place through its Climate Change Accountability Act.
“We presented a detailed report… we provided a lot of information. We continue to develop new policies, programs and legislation that will lead us to our goals,” said Heyman.
Heyman pointed to ambitious goals in Clean BC’s 2030 roadmap that aims to transition BC to 100 percent zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035, increase the carbon tax starting next year, and requires that all new large industrial projects have a plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
— With files from Nathan Griffiths and The Canadian Press