Open letter calls on British Columbia government to change its climate plan

For Gordon Murray, the loss of his home during this summer’s Lytton wildfire shows that the British Columbia government is not doing enough to curb the climate crisis.

“I still feel the taste of smoke from the firestorm that wiped out our home and 90 percent of Lytton as we fled from that unexpected and unstoppable manifestation of the human-caused climate emergency,” Murray said.

“Political leaders must face this as an existential crisis, not as a public relations crisis; the time for non-binding goals and aspirational incentives is over. We as a society need to mobilize at least on the scale of our COVID response to fight this invisible enemy, and the enemy is us. “

He joins many others in calling on the British Columbia government to revitalize its climate plan, CleanBC, which was unveiled in 2018. Around 200 organizations published a open letter Tuesday saying the plan needs serious revisions and outlining 10 “bold emergency actions” they want the John Horgan administration to take now.

Titled, “An Urgent Call to the Government of British Columbia to Address the Climate Emergency,” signatories to the letter include the Union of Indian Chiefs of British Columbia, Stand.earth, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and others. religions, workers, youth, elderly and community groups.

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the British Columbia Indian Chiefs Union, wrote a part on the Tyee Earlier this month, leaders who had previously backed the province’s plan no longer believed in its effectiveness in reducing emissions.

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“Simply put, CleanBC does not sufficiently address the severity of the climate crisis,” said Phillip.

“The concessions for dirty emissions from the fossil fuel and forestry sector will increase the deadly and devastating impacts that communities in the province and the world are experiencing, and will not help us pay for a just transition to a clean economy. The (province) must fully accept that they need to devise an alternative economy because we are not going to achieve a clean BC with dirty fossil fuels. “

The letter comes ahead of an update from CleanBC, which is expected to be released sometime before COP26 in November. Dogwood BC Campaigns Director Alexandra Woodsworth points to the August Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which sounded alarms for many by warning that Paris’s global goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 C is slipping out of reach, as a particularly timely measure. Push to put BC on the right track.

It explains that CleanBC allows the development of LNG and does not comply with plans to reduce emissions: its goal is to reduce them by 40% from 2007 levels by 2030, but the signatories are calling for a 60% reduction by 2030. Even with the current goal, Woodsworth says there is no proper plan to achieve it.

“So, for me, this really comes down to the contradiction between a province that says it has a solid climate plan and a province that is doubling down on the expansion of the fossil fuel industry in British Columbia and doing it with billions of dollars. dollars of public money. ”He said, referring to the province’s $ 1.3 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas industry in 2020.

Stopping any new oil and gas projects, and phasing out any existing fossil fuel efforts, is one of the calls to action presented in the article, which also requires actions for a just transition, improved actions on food security and a path towards net zero buildings.

The provincial government is ready to review its fossil fuel subsidies (an electoral promise that the province says it will begin to take on in “the next few weeks”), which have doubled since Horgan’s NDP took power, according to an analysis. annual published by Stand.earth.

Woodsworth said how the government addresses this review will be an important window into seeing how seriously the climate crisis is being taken.

The provincial government spent $ 1.3 billion on fossil fuel subsidies between 2020 and 2021, and that needs to be cut significantly, Woodsworth said.

“I think it’s a really important and concrete opportunity where they could achieve a lot of these goals,” he said.

“You could show that you are serious about the climate emergency by listening to what the British Columbia public is telling you and actually reducing royalties and fossil fuel subsidies through this review.”