A version of this piece previously appeared in The Tyee.

Seth Klein is an adjunct professor with Simon Fraser University’s Urban Studies program and the former B.C. director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. His book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (ECW Press) was published in September.

All of us who heed the warnings of climate scientists are increasingly alarmed, as we stare down the harrowing gap between what the science says is necessary and what our politics seems prepared to entertain. Despite decades of calls to action, our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are not on a path to stave off a horrific future for our children and future generations.

Case in point: The accompanying chart tracks British Columbia’s GHG emissions going back to the year 2000. What is evident is that, in the face of the defining challenge of our time, our politics are not rising to the task at hand.

Source: Environment and Climate Change Canada. Tables: IPCC Sector Canada.

Let this deeply disturbing chart sink in. And then let us all agree — political leaders, civil servants, environmental organizations, academics and policy wonks, labour leaders, socially responsible business leaders — that what we have been doing is simply not working. We have run out the clock with distracting debates about incremental changes.

But where it matters most — actual GHG emissions — we have accomplished precious little, and have frequently slipped backwards. 2018 is the last year for which we have GHG data, and granted B.C.’s new Clean BC climate plan was only introduced late that year, so it may yet show some progress, but our track record leaves much to be desired.

B.C. is lauded for its introduction of a carbon tax in 2008, and I support the tax. But a distressing truth is that B.C.’s GHG emissions in 2018 stood at about 66 megatonnes, four megatonnes higher than in 2007, the year before the carbon tax was introduced.

True, emissions might have been higher still without the carbon tax. But that’s ten years with no progress to show. Ultimately, the planet does not care if our GHG emissions are relatively lower than might have occurred under status quo conditions.

At least things have more or less flatlined, you might say; our emissions are no longer rising. But as the great climate change warrior and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben has said, “Winning slowly on climate change is just another way of losing.”

Politics, as the saying goes, might be all about compromise and the art of the possible. But there is no bargaining with the laws of nature, and nature is now telling us something fierce, the latest smoke-filled weeks but the latest example of “attacks on our soil.” It’s time to dramatically bend the curve.

And so, a new approach is needed. We need a “wartime” mindset and political/policy agenda to tackle the climate emergency.

What would a real ‘wartime’ B.C. climate emergency plan look like?

As we’ve all experienced in this pandemic, emergency responses need to look, sound and feel like emergencies. And they need to align with that the science says we must do. I have spent the last year and a half writing a book about Canada’s Second World War experience, searching for lessons for how to confront the climate crisis and quickly transition off fossil fuels (A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, ECW Press). Based on that, here are some markers of what one would expect to see when a government shifts to a wartime footing:

1. Adopt an emergency mindset. As we’ve witnessed in recent months, something powerful happens when we approach a crisis by naming the emergency and the need for wartime-scale action. It creates a new sense of shared purpose and liberates a level of political and economic action that seemed previously impossible.
2. Shift from voluntary measures to mandatory policies. Why have we made so little progress on lowering our GHG emissions? Because our governments have mainly sought to encourage and incentivize change, employing price signals and rebates, etc. But that’s not what one does in an emergency. In an emergency we require certain actions, using clear timelines and regulatory fiat. Notably, the City of Vancouver, which has a much more ambitious climate plan than the province, is requiring that all new buildings cease using natural gas or any other fossil fuel for space and water heating by 2021, more than a decade sooner than the province. That date should be province-wide. The province has said all new vehicles will need to be zero-emission by 2040. That should be 2025.
3. Rally the public at every turn. It takes leadership to mobilize the public. In frequency and tone, in words and in action, our government needs to communicate a sense of urgency as we mobilize to confront this emergency. Health Minister Adrian Dix and Dr. Bonnie Henry have now shown us what that looks like with respect to the pandemic, but this stands in stark contrast to the lackadaisical communications on climate. If our governments are not behaving as if the situation is an emergency – or they send contradictory messages by approving new fossil fuel infrastructure like LNG – then they are effectively communicating to the public that it is not. And why not ban the advertising of fossil fuel vehicles and gas stations, just as we do tobacco products? Their continued presence also sends a confusing message.
4. Create the economic institutions needed to get the job done. During WWII, starting from a base of virtually nothing, the Canadian economy and its labour force pumped out planes, military vehicles, ships and armaments at a speed and scale that is simply mind-blowing, much of which occurred right here in B.C. (where we produced about 350 ships in the space of six years). Remarkably, the Canadian government established 28 crown corporations to meet the supply and munitions requirements of the war effort. The climate emergency demands a similar approach. We must conduct an inventory of conversion needs, determining how many heat pumps, solar arrays, wind farms, electric buses, etc., we will need to electrify virtually everything and end our reliance on fossil fuels. And we will need a new generation of crown corporations to then ensure those items are manufactured and deployed at the requisite scale. So far, however, in response to the climate emergency, we have created no new crown enterprises.
5. Spend what it takes to win. A benefit of an emergency mentality is that it forces governments out of an austerity mindset and liberates the public purse. That is what we have all witnessed in response to the COVID emergency. But with respect to the climate emergency…not yet. In order to finance the war effort in WWII, governments issued new public Victory Bonds and new forms of progressive taxation were instituted. As we confront the climate emergency, financing the transformation before us requires that we employ similar tools. And when we undertake public investments at the scale the climate crisis demands, we can and will put to rest the employment anxieties of those who’s economic security is currently tied to the fossil fuel sector — there will be too much work to do.
6. Stop trying to appease those who seek to block necessary action. The B.C. government’s current Climate Solutions Advisory Council includes a representative from Shell Canada. Previous iterations of this council have included other reps from major fossil fuel corporations. The government is keen to have a climate plan these companies will endorse. But the hour is much too late to be seeking such approval. If our governmental climate plans aren’t making the members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers deeply anxious, then they aren’t climate plans worth having.

A year and a half into the term of B.C.’s NDP government, in December 2018, the province released its new climate plan — Clean BC. The plan contains many welcome elements, and it is a great improvement over what the province had seen to that point. The plan was enthusiastically endorsed by the B.C. Green Party and widely praised by key B.C. environmental groups. Core elements include:

• Maintaining annual increases to B.C.’s flagship carbon tax (although this has been paused this pandemic year), along with enhancements to the offsetting carbon tax credit for low-income households. But, refreshingly, the plan de-emphasizes the role and importance of the carbon tax and focuses instead on regulatory policy measures.
• Specific dates by which certain things will be banned or required. For example, the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles will be banned as of 2040, and all new buildings must be net carbon-zero by 2032. Firm dates are good, but as noted, these dates are set much too far into the future. (The B.C. Greens now propose to bump forward the date for all new vehicles to be zero-emission to 2035 – an improvement, but still too late.)
• Promises to continue expanding the electric vehicle charging network and to subsidize EV purchases.
• Increased spending for building retrofits, and new rebates for those switching to electric heat-pumps.
• The requirement that all natural gas used in buildings must be 15 per cent “renewable” gas by 2030, meaning, the gas must be captured from landfills or agriculture rather than extracted from the earth, although it is frustrating that this 15 per cent target is so modest.

Clean BC is, quite likely, the most aggressive and comprehensive provincial or federal climate plan in Canada. And yet, sadly, it does not constitute a real climate emergency plan.

The B.C. government’s targets are not aligned with what the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we must do. B.C.’s legislated targets are to reduce GHG emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 (from 2007 levels), and by 80 per cent by 2050. The IPCC now says we need to hit at least 50 per cent by 2030 and be carbon-zero by 2050.

The difference between a 2050 target of carbon-zero versus reducing GHGs by 80 per cent may feel largely academic, given the extended time frame. But the difference matters greatly. The problem with a target of 80 per cent reductions by 2050 is that so many of us — both individuals and businesses — falsely presume that what we do or plan to do can be made to fit in the remaining 20 per cent of emissions room. A carbon-zero target disabuses us of this notion.

In this election campaign, the NDP announced it would shift the legislative target to net carbon-zero by 2050 (while the Greens committed to meet that target by 2045). That’s an improvement, but such long-term targets lack credibility, given the track-record and their mathematical incompatibility with fossil fuel expansion plans.

The site of the LNG Canada project in Kitimat B.C. in 2017. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

It would seem the NDP are counting on a massive reliance on carbon-offsets and/or methods to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. We will indeed need both technological innovations and natural eco-systems enhancements to pull GHGs out of the air, but such drawdown efforts must be in addition to ending GHG emissions, not a substitute, if we are to get CO2 accumulations back to safe levels.

The current B.C. plan only purports to lay out steps to get three-quarters of the way to the province’s 2030 GHG reduction target (although operationalizing and funding many of these measures remains to be seen). The government had committed to outline how to close the remaining 25 per cent gap by December 2020. So far, that updated plan has yet to arrive.

The lofty commitments of Clean BC are not yet reflected in the B.C. Budget, where one must always see if fine words are backed up with real dollars. When the B.C. government tabled its February 2019 three-year budget plan (the first since Clean BC was introduced), Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives senior economist Marc Lee, a long-time analyst of B.C. climate and fiscal policies, calculated the plan would see the province spend only about 0.1 per cent of provincial GDP on climate-related expenditures. Climate investments are similarly lacking from the COVID recovery plan, where the climate transition gets only passing reference.

The framing of the plan is very positive — Clean BC! It rightly says our future can look nice, with plentiful employment opportunities as we tackle climate change. The plan does not, however, communicate that we face a climate emergency. Indeed, Clean BC never once uses the terms “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” or “climate breakdown.”

Most significantly, B.C.’s climate plan is fundamentally at odds with the province’s LNG plans. Earlier in the same year that the plan was unveiled, the provincial and federal governments celebrated the final investment decision of LNG Canada, an international consortium led by PetroChina and Shell that is building a massive new LNG plant in Kitimat, B.C. “The largest private-sector investment in Canadian history,” both governments repeated ad nauseam.

The problem is that the project represents another huge “carbon bomb” — a massive new source of domestic GHG emissions. Just phase one of the LNG Canada project, along with its “upstream” impacts from extracting and transporting fracked gas, will add between 4 and 6 megatonnes of GHGs to B.C.’s annual emissions. All this when the government has committed to reduce total provincial GHGs to 12 megatonnes by 2050. These folks aren’t making their job any easier.

Given the climate crisis before us, the ambition of the current B.C. climate plan is simply not where we need it to be. Even putting aside the reluctance to speak some hard truths on the future of fossil fuels, nothing is stopping the governments from substantially staffing up its climate action team (B.C.’s Climate Action Secretariat within the Ministry of Environment has about 75 staff), from undertaking much higher levels of climate infrastructure investment and, vitally, from using the regulatory power of the state to drive faster change. The net impact on job numbers would undoubtedly be positive. Yet they have not. The current plan — which, again, represents the most determined climate program in Canada to date — is painfully slow. It does not reflect or communicate a sense of urgency.

Explainer: B.C. election: where the NDP, Greens and Liberals stand on climate and environment issues

The B.C. Green Party platform is more ambitious on climate, and they party’s positions are not riddled with the contradictions that plague the NDP platform. The Greens have been clear that they do not support LNG and are opposed to fossil fuel subsidies.

When Green leader Sonia Furstenau speaks, she uses the language of climate emergency. Yet during the term of the last government, the Greens proved unable to use their position in the minority government and its Confidence and Supply Agreement to extract commitments to end the expansion of fossil fuels. And the targets, timelines and modest climate-related spending commitments in the Green platform still do not constitute a climate emergency plan. (As for the BC Liberals … there is really not much one can say. Their platform contains no targets nor any climate-related spending commitments of any note, and their commitment to LNG remains firmly intact.)

There are climate champions in the current government, among the NDP and Green Party candidates, along with the two Green MLAs (who surely deserve to be returned). Now is the time for them all to flex their muscle. And we need all of our leaders to reflect on the leaders who saw us through the Second World War and to consider who they want to be, and how they wish to be remembered, as we undertake this defining task of our lives.

If our current leaders believe we face a climate emergency, then they need to act and speak like it’s a damn emergency. We need them to name it, speak continually about it, and rally us at every turn. Because that’s what you do in a crisis.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This piece originally appeared on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

There is no question that the new B.C. government’s decision to proceed with the Site C dam was a very difficult one. The previous government left them with a poison pill.

With $2 billion already spent, the Horgan government faced a no-win choice, with substantial political and economic costs for either terminating or proceeding with what is one of the largest and most expensive capital projects in B.C. history.

I don’t envy them.

But count me among those who believe the wrong decision was made.

In a difficult decision like this one, it matters who gets listened to, whose expertise wields authority and what considerations win the day. That’s why unpacking this decision matters — so we can consider how progressives might shake up the framework by which future decisions are made.

First things first, this decision does deep harm to the prospects for reconciliation with Indigenous people. It is fundamentally at odds with the government’s stated commitment — affirmed in the NDP-Green Agreement and in the mandate letters of each Minister — to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Fundamental to UNDRIP is the duty to secure consent before engaging in major projects that impact the land and title of First Nations people. Achieving that consent should be embedded in our decision-making process. And yet in this case it is absent.

For thousands of people who strongly oppose Site C for both environmental and Indigenous rights reasons, this decision feels like a political betrayal — and will for many years. And with every likely new announcement of a cost overrun in the years to come, more salt will be ground into the wound.

The CCPA’s Marc Lee, in his submission last summer to the B.C. Utilities Commission, outlined why he felt the electricity Site C will provide is not needed. Indeed, our contention for many years has been that what was truly driving the push for Site C was the natural gas industry’s demand for electricity — both for fracking operations and, down the road, to electrify the process of liquefying that gas. Meaning it was primarily about producing “clean” energy in service of dirty fossil fuels, and it still might be.

In the final years of the Clark government, the push to take Site C “past the point of no return” was, I believe, driven by a different but related political imperative.

Having failed to secure foreign investment for a new LNG industry (and the associated promise of thousands of jobs for B.C.’s northern regions), Premier Clark, ironically, beat a path back to the public sector and looked to BC Hydro to deliver those jobs through construction of the Site C dam.

“In a difficult decision like this one, it matters who gets listened to, whose expertise wields authority and what considerations win the day. That’s why unpacking this decision matters.” via @SethDKlein and @CCPA_BC https://t.co/UFcqbxEui2

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) January 18, 2018

Economic rationale doesn’t hold water

Notably, when Premier Horgan made the announcement that the government would proceed with Site C he appeared decidedly unenthusiastic. Make that downright miserable. He made clear that Site C was, at its outset, a wrong-headed policy choice, and not a project his government would have started. But with $2 billion spent and reclamation costs of termination pegged at $1–2 billion more (likely the low end), the Premier felt his government had “no choice” but to proceed.

Granted, the prospect of spending $3–4 billion and having nothing to show for it hurts.

But the government went further, stating that absorbing such a bill would put its progressive economic and social agenda at risk. Some ministers expressed the view that termination costs would threaten B.C.’s Triple-A credit rating and would consequently drive up our debt service costs.

Minister Mungall, in an email sent to those who wrote to her about Site C, stated, “To do anything but move forward would require British Columbians to take on $4 billion in debt that would have to result in massive cuts to the services people count on us to deliver. After witnessing the legacy of BC Liberal cuts, I can’t allow that to happen again” (emphasis mine).

This line of argument may sound compelling. But on closer inspection, it is not at all convincing.

Had the costs of termination remained on BC Hydro’s books, this would indeed have resulted in an increase in Hydro rates, but not to the degree stated by the government. And proceeding with Site C will also result in increases in Hydro rates down the road (quite possibly more so).

Given that the decision to green-light Site C was politically driven by the previous government, my view is that the costs of terminating the project should not have been borne by BC Hydro, but rather by the provincial government as whole (as it seems the government considered).

Some may say this makes no difference — taxpayers and ratepayers are one and the same after all. But it does make a difference. As the CCPA has noted in past research, Hydro rates are regressive — they impact lower-income households harder than upper-income ones. In contrast, provincial government debt is serviced from overall taxes, which are mildly progressive now that the new government has brought in an upper-income tax bracket and is phasing out MSP premiums. With further fair tax reform, the costs would be even more fairly distributed.

Relieving BC Hydro of the costs of termination could have been done by either transferring the Site C sunk costs and termination costs onto the provincial government’s debt or, if the government did not want to assume the $3–4 billion debt from BC Hydro, it could simply have agreed to annually transfer the interest costs of that debt to BC Hydro (as restitution for this politically imposed cost).

Four billion dollars in debt would result in additional interest costs of at most $150 million a year. That’s not insignificant. But neither is it enough to derail a government’s agenda: it is 0.3 per cent of the province’s $50 billion annual budget.

Would taking on $3–4 billion in termination debt, with no asset to show for it, squeeze out the rest of the government’s agenda and potentially erode B.C.’s credit rating with the consequence of driving up debt interest costs? This seems highly unlikely.

At today’s interest rates, $4 billion in debt would result in additional interest costs of at most $150 million a year. That’s not insignificant. But neither is it enough to derail a government’s agenda. $150 million is less than the current surplus. And for context: it is 0.3 per cent of the province’s $50 billion annual budget.

In contrast, consider that in the September 2017 Mini-Budget, the new government cut MSP premiums by 50 per cent and chose not to replace those revenues with progressive tax increases (as the CCPA has previously recommended). In doing so, the government chose to walk away from $1.2 billion in annual revenues — a much more costly decision it did not feel put the rest of its agenda at risk.

Similarly, as Green Party leader Andrew Weaver has noted, the government chose to cancel tolls on the Port Mann Bridge and take on that debt at a price of $3.5 billion (and annual costs of replacing the toll revenues of about $150 million), but expressed little concern about the impact this would have on the affordability of B.C.’s debt.

The September Mini-Budget estimated that taking on the Port Mann Bridge debt would increase B.C.’s debt-to-GDP ratio (the size of the provincial debt compared to the size of the economy) by about 1.2 percentage points. The cost of terminating Site C would have been similar in debt-to-GDP terms — an impact that is entirely manageable in economic terms and well within B.C.’s recent debt levels.

Would taking on this debt have resulted in a downgrade to B.C.’s credit rating?

Possibly, but not necessarily. B.C.’s fiscal situation would have remained enviable (with respect to both debt-to-GDP and debt service costs relative to other provinces). It is arguably also possible that credit rating agencies would have given kudos for termination, seeing it as an expression of fiscal caution that avoided further potential multi-billion dollar cost over-runs (as is common with such mega-projects), particularly given the fact the credit agencies and B.C.’s Auditor General have already expressed concerns about BC Hydro’s debt load.

Even with a downgrade (if it occurred), would B.C. face significantly higher interest costs?

Again, while there is frequently fear-mongering about this outcome, this result should not be assumed — bond markets don’t respond slavishly to credit rating agency assessments. And if there was a credit market response to a downgrade, it would have been minimal.

Canadian provincial credit ratings vary from B.C.’s Triple-A high to PEI’s Single-A low. But as economists Trevor Tombe and Blake Shaffer note, the practical significance of this difference is that long-term provincial bond interest varies from 3.1 per cent in B.C. to 3.5 per cent in the Atlantic provinces. They note further that, “On average, each notch on the S&P ratings scale is associated with 0.04 per cent higher yield on a 25-year bond.”

In other words, not much.

Letting others call the tune

Numerous NDP MLAs have offered public explanations of the decision to proceed, all stating some variant of: we referred the BCUC’s report for further analysis to financial experts, and with great regret, were told that, while the actual costs of termination versus completion were similar, the accounting treatment of the choices would be very different.

Effectively, the government has said that accounting practices — as interpreted by finance ministry officials — trumped good policy and UNDRIP.

The problem, I fear, is that the full scope of options gets lost at the Cabinet table. If one’s deputy minister, for example, sounds the debt and/or credit rating alarm, few politicians feel comfortable pushing back. Or if the government is spooked by a credit rating agency warning — Finance Minister Carole James did go visit the rating agencies early in the new government’s mandate — there is political fear of a downgrade.

It is a curse of modern social democratic governments that, on economic matters especially, they are inclined to let others tell them what is and isn’t allowed. This dynamic plagues otherwise progressive people who lack confidence in economics, and it is heightened when senior civil servants remain in place after a change of government — the same people giving the same advice as always.

It is a curse of modern social democratic governments that, on economic matters especially, they are inclined to let others tell them what is and isn’t allowed.

Another way was possible. The government could and should have taken on the costs of termination (realistically a figure closer to $3 billion). It could have taken on other energy conservation and renewable electricity projects over the coming years (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.) as needed and in partnership with local First Nations and the building trades.

In doing so, it could have created just as many jobs as Site C will provide, but more helpfully spread across the province and closer to where people actually live, rather than concentrated in one locale (which will mean having to import much of the labour). Indeed, this is exactly what the NDP proposed in its 2015 Power B.C. plan.

Sadly, that plan was short-lived. A lost opportunity to move forward with far less of a price and much more to gain.

What now?

In the end (and official explanations notwithstanding), Site C was clearly a political decision — not an economic one. Only time will tell if that political decision was strategically correct or a costly mistake.

The government made a calculation (affirmed by recent polls) that the majority of the public would support continuation. They likely worried about the reaction of mainstream media pundits and the corporate sector had they chosen termination.

But the economic and political costs of proceeding with Site C will haunt the government throughout its mandate and beyond.

It seems at this point that the prospects of an about-face are highly unlikely. So why bother rehashing the decision?

First, it is important that unconvincing economic justifications — and the fear-mongering of credit rating downgrades — be challenged, otherwise the precedent is set for more disheartening decisions down the road.

Second, understanding this decision matters so that the new government can be encouraged to approach future ones differently. Much progress is clearly still needed to truly implement and operationalize UNDRIP in B.C. policy-making. And this is an opportunity to change the frame, to shift whose expertise wields authority and to reconsider what priorities win out.

In the last election British Columbian voted for change. Rather than deferring to the same accountants and ministry officials, this still new-ish government can continue to bring in new voices, invite more creative solutions and engage more fully with civil society.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.