This is the first of a four-part series on B.C.’s climate action plan. Part One addresses B.C.’s GHG reduction targets. Part Two addresses how that plan is at risk of being co-opted by Big Oil. Part Three takes a closer look at the B.C. Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for the carbon tax. And Part Four focuses on how the oil and gas industry stands to profit from that advisory team’s proposed climate action plan.
Any day now, the B.C. government is expected to release its updated climate action plan. Then again, it initially promised to do that last December and then last spring, before revising that deadline again to the end of June, so who knows?
Honouring its commitments has never been the Clark government’s strong suit, to put it mildly.
Nothing proves that more than its failure to honour B.C.’s legislated targets to reduce provincial greenhouse gas emissions.
As premier Christy Clark’s Climate Leadership Team determined, the province won’t even come to close to meeting its legal obligation to cut its GHG emissions by 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020.
Nor will it fulfill its statutory requirement to reduce those emissions by 18 per cent as of this year.
And it is wildly off-track from being able to meet the 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases that it is legally required by 2050.