Premier John Horgan was in San Fransisco Thursday with the governors of Washington, Oregon and California to sign a climate change deal called the Pacific Coast Collaborative.
Premier John Horgan signed a climate agreement Thursday with the governors of Washington, Oregon and California, but critics said it was merely a “symbolic gesture” that glosses over B.C.’s failure to meet its greenhouse-gas emissions targets.
The signing took place Thursday, just days after an environmental group began its case in B.C. Supreme Court against the provincial government over allegations that the province isn’t meeting its own climate reporting standards.
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Standing amid a haze of wildfire smoke blanketing San Francisco, Horgan, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an updated deal under the Pacific Coast Collaborative.
It’s a largely symbolic document encouraging the four governments to collaborate on “accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy, investing in climate infrastructure such as electric vehicle charging stations and a clean electricity grid, and protecting communities from climate effects such as drought, wildfire, heat waves and sea-level changes.”
Horgan told the crowd that the effects of climate change have been most profound on the West Coast, which is why collaboration is essential.
“We’ve had fires that have been unprecedented. A community called Lytton in my province no longer exists because of wildfires,” Horgan said. “We’ve had atmospheric rivers, we’ve had heat domes, terms that we’d never heard of before that have had a profound impact on our people, on our economy and our way of life.”
The four governments first reached a pact to work together to address climate change in 2013.
B.C. Green party Leader Sonia Furstenau said it’s critical that the “symbolic gesture” by Horgan and his state counterparts “is followed up with real action.”
Furstenau pointed to several examples where the B.C. NDP’s “actions don’t match the words when it comes to climate change.”
The government touts its Clean B.C. climate plan, Furstenau said, “but is being sued for failing to meet their own legal obligations under their climate accountability legislation, they are continuing to subsidize the oil-and-gas industry and we are seeing the building of climate-change-driving infrastructure in the Coastal GasLink Pipeline.”
Jens Wieting, Sierra Club B.C. senior forest and climate campaigner, said the agreement lacks meaningful targets to ensure the four partners meet their climate change commitments.
Compared to the climate achievements by the three states, B.C. is an “outlier,” Wieting said, with massive investments in liquefied natural gas terminals, its reluctance to ban fracking, subsidies to fossil fuel companies and “huge doubts around whether it’s possible for B.C. to meet their (greenhouse-gas emissions) targets.”
“Unless Premier Horgan and the B.C. government follow other (U.S.) states and other provinces in Canada by banning fracking … we will remain the outlier,” Wieting said. “We cannot accept the claim that B.C. is a climate leader within North America.”
The Sierra Club was in court this week for its lawsuit against the B.C. government that alleges the government failed to report if its climate plans will achieve key greenhouse-gas emissions targets for 2025, 2040 and 2050, as required by a provincial law. The Sierra Club wants the province to come up with a new accountability report for 2021 by filling in the gaps of missing information on its progress toward meeting emissions target for 2025.
The province set a legislated target of a 16 per cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 2007 levels by 2025, 40 per cent by 2030, 60 per cent by 2040 and 80 per cent by 2050.
Provincial figures released last month show emissions were just one per cent lower in 2020 than they were in 2007, or three per cent if carbon offsets from forest management projects are included.
B.C. Environment Minister George Heyman told Postmedia News on Thursday that he can’t comment on the court case but said the province has extensive transparency and accountability measures through its Climate Change Accountability Act.
“We put out a detailed report … we provide a lot of information. We continue to develop new policies and programs and legislation that will lead us to our targets,” Heyman said.
Heyman pointed to the ambitious targets in the Clean B.C. Roadmap to 2030 that aims to transition B.C. to 100-per-cent zero emission vehicle sales by 2035, hike the carbon tax starting next year and requires all new large industrial projects to have a plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
— With files from Nathan Griffiths and The Canadian Press
kderosa@postmedia.com