Documents released on Monday reveal that B.C.’s climate plan under the previous Liberal government was drafted by the oil and gas industry in a Calgary boardroom, just as the province’s new NDP government moves to ban corporate and union donations to B.C. political parties.

The documents speak to long-standing concerns over the influence of political donations in B.C.’s political process. B.C. has long been considered the ‘wild west’ of political cash for placing no limits on corporate, union or foreign donations.

“I think this is deeply corrosive to our democracy and it encourages cynicism about politics,” Max Cameron, political science professor and director of the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia, told DeSmog Canada.

The documents, released to Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as part of her research with the Corporate Mapping Project, reveal that while the B.C. government under former premier Christy Clark hired a celebrated Climate Leadership Team and conducted public consultations, a parallel industry consultation process occurred behind closed doors in a boardroom of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The BC Liberals have raked in cash from the fossil fuel industry, including more than $3.7 million from just the top 10 industry donors between 2008 and 2015.

Cameron said the documents, which include slides outlining industry working groups tasked with addressing carbon pricing and methane emissions, provide a much-needed glimpse into what exactly industry is paying for when making large donations to political parties.

“Reading these documents gives us some real insight into how it is that these kinds of donations can buy not just access to government but access to actually writing policy,” he said.

Clark’s Secret Consultations with Oil and Gas Donors Revealed As BC Introduces Big Money Ban #bcpoli @CCPA_BC https://t.co/nFjm9W8Vqx

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 18, 2017

Climate Leadership Team Unaware of Parallel Industry Consultations

B.C. handpicked a blue-ribbon team of 17 academic, business, environmental and First Nations stakeholders to form the Climate Leadership Team. That team made 32 official recommendations to the B.C. government, none of which were implemented in the province’s eventual Climate Action Plan.

Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada, was a member of the team and said the fact that not a single recommendation was adopted “really says it all.”

Christy Clark’s government “allowed the oil and gas sector to write the climate plan for B.C. that is mostly status quo and has very little impact on B.C.’s growing climate pollution,” Smith told DeSmog Canada.

She added once the team made its recommendations to the government, their involvement in the crafting of the Climate Action Plan tapered off quickly.

“We had very few meetings with the B.C. government once the recommendations were created. It was clear that they actually had very little interest in doing anything with recommendations.”

Meanwhile, Christy Clark pointed to the recommendations at the UN Climate Summit in Paris as evidence of B.C.’s climate leadership.

Tzeporah Berman, a prominent environmental advocate in B.C. and member of the Climate Leadership Team said she had no idea B.C. was conducting parallel consultations with industry.

“I was shocked when I saw these documents,” Berman told DeSmog Canada.

“Consultation should be a transparent process and should be done with multiple stakeholders. These were secret meetings in Calgary where the oil and gas industry was rewriting B.C. policy. That's not consultation, it's corruption.”

Berman said the documents reveal an “unacceptable level of access and influence with the Liberal government.”

“They also help those of us from the leadership team understand how the climate plan that the Liberals put together really had no similarity to what the Liberals’ own climate team recommended,” she said.

The team worked hard for months to deliver a plan within a short timeframe and offered to meet with stakeholders to “problem solve any concerns” if that would help B.C. “ensure implementation” of the recommendations, Berman said.

But that offer was never taken up.

“From our end it was a bizarre process,” Berman said.

Fossil Fuel Companies Regularly ‘Craft’ Climate Plans

Laurie Adkin, professor of political science at the University of Alberta, said when it comes to government consultations with corporations, “secrecy is routine” and “transparency is the exception.”

“Even when governments reveal that they have met with representatives of private corporations, reporting on these meetings typically does not reveal which corporate representatives were in the room, or what their positions were,” Adkin told DeSmog Canada.

Adkin, who is a member of the Corporate Mapping Project, specializes in documenting corporate influence in politics and on university campuses.

Government consultation with industry is the status quo, Adkin said, while public consultation is meant to merely survey public opinion and “give the appearance that government has created meaningful opportunities for citizen input into policy decisions.”

“I do not believe that any climate change plan has been written, to date, in which the major fossil fuel corporations have not ‘directly crafted’ the plan,” Adkin said.

Adkin and Cameron agree the documents are reflective of “institutional corruption.”

“Corruption isn’t just quid pro quo of privately benefitting from your public office, it’s also a corruption of the institution, when the public purpose of the institution is undermined by private actors in a way that diminishes our trust in those institutions,” Cameron said.

“The goal of public policy is to serve the public’s interest, not to serve particular private interests.”

Leadership Team Hopeful Under New NDP Government

Berman said the oil and gas industry has too much political influence in Canada, but said she is hopeful the new B.C. government will “design policy to benefit the people and not just polluters.”

“I was very glad to see the carbon tax increase in the last budget,” Berman said.

“I think the next step is removing all the subsidies that the Liberal government handed out to the gas industry. We shouldn't be spending taxpayers dollars to help the fossil fuel industry expand in the climate era”

Berman said she also looks forward to the new government moving forward on the zero emissions vehicles targets and strengthening the clean fuel standard.

Smith said she is pleased the Climate Leadership Team had the opportunity to craft the recommendations when it did.

“The silver lining is that we still have a good, solid set of climate action recommendations sitting there, and we now have a Premier and government who is interested in taking climate action and building a clean growth economy for the twenty-first century.”

Image: Former premier Christy Clark at a Woodfibre LNG announcement. Photo: Province of B.C. via Flickr

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By Shannon Daub & Zoë Yunker.

Newly uncovered documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests reveal the cozy relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the last B.C. government went even further than suspected — all the way to inviting industry to directly craft the province’s climate “leadership” plan.

Let’s rewind for a second: back in the spring of 2015, then-premier Christy Clark announced the provincial government would create a new climate plan.

A 17-member climate leadership team was appointed and tasked with developing recommendations to meet B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction targets. The government released the team’s recommendations in the fall of 2015 — allowing then-Premier Christy Clark head off to Paris for the December 2015 UN climate talks cloaked in the mantle of climate “leadership,” after four years of near-total inaction by her government.

That’s where things got interesting.

Documents obtained via Freedom of Information legislation indicate that while the Paris talks were underway, the government launched a closed-door three month-long process to work jointly with the oil and gas industry to revise and re-write the climate leadership team recommendations.

The process entailed five rounds of meetings over three months with all the key corporate players, from oil and gas producers to distributors. It was divided into working groups on the carbon tax; methane and fugitive emissions (i.e., from natural gas production, a significant source of B.C.’s greenhouse emissions); and electrification (i.e., the provision of cheap electricity to natural gas extraction sites and LNG plants in order to make gas production less GHG-intensive).

Notably, most of these B.C. government-organized meetings took place not in B.C., but in Calgary — specifically in the boardroom of the most powerful fossil fuel lobby group in the country, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

The documents include a power point deck dated January 2016 that outlines the process for the “Climate Leadership Team Recommendations – Consultation with Oil and Gas Industry.”

The document is from the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, which led the “consultation”— not the Climate Action Secretariat, which coordinated the Climate Leadership Team (and, as far as the public knew, was the lead government agency working on the plan). The documents released also include agendas from one round of working group meetings on January 13, 2016, along with the attendee lists for those meetings.

These lists show that senior officials from the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, the Climate Action Secretariat and BC Hydro attended the January 13 meetings in person. We do not yet have access to the daily calendars for several other senior officials who we believe may also have been present.

Also in attendance were over two dozen representatives from at least 16 oil and gas corporations and industry groups, including the B.C. LNG Alliance (which also had a seat on the official Climate Leadership Team), Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Encana, Imperial Oil, Nexen/CNOOC, Progress Energy (wholly owned subsidiary of Malaysian state-owned Petronas), Shell Canada, Suncor, Teck, Woodfibre Energy, CAPP and others.

Recall that when the climate leadership plan was released in the summer of 2016 it largely ignored the leadership team’s 32 recommendations, in what was dubbed by some as a “climate non-plan.”

Meet the Real Climate “Leadership” Team: Big Oil and Gas Corporations

Most troubling of all is that this was much more than a “consultation” process.

The documents obtained make it clear that in fact the process constituted an invitation to the country’s most powerful oil and gas companies to shape both the substance and language of B.C.’s next climate plan.

For example, the working groups on methane emissions and electrification were each asked to “refine language in CLT recommendation” and to “add detail and process direction” regarding timing and whether policy measures would be voluntary or regulatory. The working group on the carbon tax was asked to “ensure consistency with other jurisdictions” and to “determine ‘the art of the possible’ (how much and how fast).”

The working groups were asked to come together to “work on offsets.” The timeline for the working groups also include the action item “finalize language” for the “CLP Framework” (ie, Climate Leadership Plan Framework).

Our FOI request asked for minutes and/or summaries of the meetings and industry consultation process, but none were released to us. Pages 19 to 38 of the relevant records were withheld on the grounds they constitute advice or recommendations to a public body or minister (S. 13) and/or that they would be harmful to the business interests of a third party (S. 21).

Perhaps these missing pages are the minutes and summaries. Or perhaps they are something else. We have asked the Information and Privacy Commissioner to review the government’s decision to withhold these records.

It should be noted that it took two FOI attempts to even receive this much information. In July 2016, we submitted identical requests to the Ministry of Environment/Climate Action Secretariat and the Ministry of Natural Gas Development for documents relating to any meetings or other communication between the fossil fuel industry and senior officials in relation to a wide range of energy and climate policy matters starting in January 2016.

The Ministry of Natural Gas Development withheld all documents having to do with the industry engagement process and Calgary meetings.

The Ministry of Environment released the agendas for the January 13 working group meetings (just the agendas, no other contextual information). It was only through a follow-up request to the Ministry of Natural Gas Development (now part of the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources) that we obtained the fuller set of documents reviewed here. These should all have been released in response to our initial request, along with material from the other rounds of working group meetings (and who knows what else).

A Stunning Example of Institutional Corruption

In sum, the B.C. government carried out secret meetings in another province with an industry that is a top contributor to the BC Liberal Party to shape policy that ought to constrain that very industry — as any meaningful climate policy must do in relation to the fossil fuel sector.

Ironically, none of these meetings “count” as lobbying under B.C.’s current Lobbyist Registration Act, which doesn’t require meetings or communication invited by public officials to be reported by lobbyists. Meanwhile, no other sector — environmental organizations, First Nations, etc. — could even dream of this kind of access.

BC’s Last #Climate 'Leadership' Plan Was Written in Big Oil’s Boardroom (Literally) https://t.co/lUKX67Hsy9 #bcpoli @CCPA_BC @bcliberals

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 18, 2017

This is more than a case of ideological alignment between a corporate-friendly party and its corporate donors. It is a profound blurring of the lines between government and industry, who set out to make policy together behind closed doors, while what can only now be characterized as a pretend consultation process was acted out publicly.

This blurring of the lines is an example of what ethicists refer to as “institutional corruption:” a “systemic and strategic influence that undermines the institution’s effectiveness by diverting it from its purpose or weakening its ability to achieve its purpose, including…weakening either the public’s trust in that institution or the institution’s inherent trustworthiness.”

The whole charade also represents an abuse of the climate leadership team’s time and a mockery of B.C.’s claims to leadership during the Paris climate talks, not to mention a tremendous waste of public resources.

How much did the province spend on the climate leadership team process — convening the 17-member team for meetings, carrying out extensive climate modeling to support their deliberations (services that were contracted from the private firm Navius, no doubt at significant expense) and public consultation activities? How many thousands of hours of staff time were spent by ministry personnel to support it all?

B.C.’s new government has committed to more ambitious climate policies than what the previous Liberal government outlined in its non-plan last year. But with the fossil fuel industry accustomed to putting pen to paper on policy and regulation, a great deal of political will is required to move forward. And that ban on corporate donations to political parties? It can’t come soon enough.

   —

Shannon Daub is Associate Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. Office, and co-director of the Corporate Mapping Project. Zoe Yunker is Zoë is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at the University of Victoria and a research assistant with the Corporate Mapping Project.

This report is published as part of the Corporate Mapping Project, a research and public engagement initiative investigating the power of the fossil fuel industry. The CMP is jointly led by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ B.C. and Saskatchewan offices, and the Parkland Institute. In March, the project reported on the millions of dollars donated by the fossil fuel industry in recent years to B.C. political parties.  This research is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

DeSmog Canada is a community partner of the Corporate Mapping Project.

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It’s 31 degrees outside and I was planning to go to the lake this afternoon — and I’d be willing to hazard a guess that many British Columbians are in the same boat.

That’s exactly why B.C. Premier Christy Clark chose tomorrow to release her Climate Action Plan — originally scheduled for release nearly six months ago.

Politicans often "take out the trash" on Fridays during the dog days of summer and this time is no different.

The plan — according to a leak in the Globe and Mail today — will fail to increase the carbon tax or update greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Those were two of the cornerstone recommendations from the province’s own expert committee.

“The depths of August on a Friday afternoon is not the time you release a plan that you want a lot of people to pay attention to,” said Josha MacNab, B.C. director for the Pembina Institute.

Pembina was a member of the Climate Leadership Team comprised of environmental, academic, business and First Nations leaders. The team presented 32 recommendations reached by consensus (except for one dissenting vote by LNG Canada on the carbon tax recommendation).

“The Climate Leadership Team was very clear that the recommendations needed to be accepted as a package and they warned against picking and choosing amongst the recommendations that they put forward,” MacNab said.

MacNab says she is shocked the government appears ready to cherry pick from the recommendations.

“The premier herself appointed this panel to give her advice to get B.C.’s emissions back on track because under her leadership they have been going up,” MacNab said.

B.C. had promised to reduce its emissions by 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020. That’s not going to happen.

Instead, emissions are expected to increase 39 per cent above 2014 levels by 2030, according to modeling by the Pembina Institute.

Now the province will continue touting its pie-in-the-sky goal of reducing emissions by 80 percent below 2007 levels by 2050 — without any credible pathway to get there.

.@ChristyClarkBC Hopes You’re Not Reading This https://t.co/1SZDfJqUVY #summertime #holidays #bcpoli #climateactionplan

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) August 19, 2016

That puts B.C. in stark contrast to Canada’s other most populous provinces — Ontario, Quebec and even Alberta, all of which are projecting a decrease in emissions.

Merran Smith of Clean Energy Canada was a part of Clark's Climate Leadership Team and says B.C. has a legal obligation to reduce carbon emissions.

"We’ve been a climate leader in the past and our economy has thrived as a climate leader so I’m a bit shocked that this government has put all its eggs in the oil and gas basket and really procrastinated on climate action," Smith said.

"The carbon tax is the cheapest and most effective way to reduce carbon pollution. And that’s why it was a key part of our recommendations," Smith added. "We didn’t create a shopping list of different ways to reduce carbon pollution to meet our targets. We created a cohesive, coherent plan and you need all those different recommendations to work together in order to reduce carbon pollution."

Clark appears poised to defend her inaction on the basis of protecting “affordability for families” and maintaining a “strong economy.”

But the old dichotomy of environment versus economy is false, according to MacNab.

“The mandate of the Climate Leadership Team was to present a plan that met B.C.’s climate targets and maintained a strong economy. A strong climate plan going forward needs to meet our climate targets. But a strong climate plan also needs to position B.C. to be competitive in a low-carbon economy — in an increasingly de-carbonizing international market.”

In an attempt to placate anyone who’s paying attention, the province will announce feel-good measures like rebates on electric vehicles and incentives for industry to switch to electricity tomorrow.

The Globe and Mail has also reported that the plan will include details of the electrification of upstream natural gas production, one of the ever-changing justifications for building the controversial $8.8 billion Site C dam on the Peace River.

And therein lies the rub. Clark desperately wants to develop a natural gas industry — but she can’t do that and meet B.C.’s climate targets.

Instead of all the smoke and mirrors, it’d sure be refreshing if someone would just come out and tell the truth.

As it stands, the plan to be released tomorrow ought to be named B.C.’s Climate Inaction Plan. Question is: if we’re all at the lake, will it matter?

Photo: Province of British Columbia

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This very long piece is the last of a four-part series on B.C.’s climate action plan. Part One addressed B.C.’s GHG reduction targets. Part Two addressed how that plan is at risk of being co-opted by Big Oil. Part Three took a closer look at the B.C. Climate Leadership Team’s recommendations for the carbon tax. This analysis explores how the oil and gas industry, and especially the LNG industry, might financially benefit from hidden subsidies recommended by that advisory body.

Like so many other governments around the world, British Columbia’s Liberal government led by Premier Christy Clark has been duped by the barons of Big Oil.

Beguiled by the petroleum industry’s promises of new investment and jobs, the Clark government has repeatedly proved itself a patsy in acceding to the LNG industry’s every demand.

In the process, it has subjugated B.C.’s global-leading 2008 climate action plan to its misguided vision for the unchecked exploitation of non-renewable natural gas.

It has broken its own law, in failing to meet B.C.’s legislated targets for provincial greenhouse gas reductions.

And it has tugged its forelock, at every turn, to meet each new industry demand for special treatment and locked-in subsidies and tax concessions that are fully underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

This analysis explores how that taxpayer-subsidized boon to Big Oil stands to be further entrenched under the recommendations for updating B.C.’s climate action plan last fall by the government’s handpicked Climate Leadership Team (CLT).

The Ludicrous Foundation of B.C.’s Climate Avoidance Plan 

As I have explained in previous installments, B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction plan is woefully off-track. The CLT has suggested a plan to help remedy that situation, mainly through a long-term commitment to a 12-fold increase in B.C.’s carbon tax.

Several other recommended measures that I address below are largely aimed at subsidizing B.C.’s worst carbon polluters, to help them offset the added carbon emissions they hope to impose upon B.C. in the name of economic development.

Underlying that project is the Clark government’s abiding obsession with LNG as B.C.’s principal driver of new resource development.

It intends to further aggravate B.C.’s GHG emissions challenges with a forthcoming climate “action” plan — more accurately, a climate action avoidance plan — that is sure to be tailor-made for the province’s largest industrial polluters.

Whenever that plan is released, it will be grounded in a vision for a massive expansion in fossil fuel development.

More drilling rigs and roads. More scars on our land base. More fracking and seismic instability. More water waste and groundwater poisoning. More pipelines. More energy burned in B.C. to produce still more non-renewable energy destined to be burned in far-flung places. And many, many times more greenhouse gas emissions.

All to “liberate” the “dream” of building plants on B.C.’s Pacific coast that will liquefy natural gas by chilling it to -160°C and ship it halfway around the world to China and other countries.

All in a rush to profit from that product that other countries are now struggling to sell because there is already far too much of it on the market.

It is to be a climate action plan aimed at largely undoing the anticipated damage from a new LNG industry that may never ultimately materialize in British Columbia, ironically, because it is so demonstrably unnecessary — a victim of its own global rapacity and redundancy.

It is an industry that is struggling to cope with the falling price of a product it wants to wish upon our choking world.

A product that has been devalued by the global glut of LNG that it has created from overproduction and from the world’s suddenly serious attempts to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels.

A product that at least one study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows will be devastating for B.C.’s environment and may well increase global GHG emissions over at least the next fifty years, compared to even building state-of-the-art coal plants.

Indeed, it is an industry that should have no future in B.C. if we are truly concerned about shifting to a low-carbon economy, about mitigating avoidable greenhouse gas emissions, and about seriously combating global warming.

That should be the central, unwavering message from British Columbia’s environmental community and from all those who should know better.

Which makes it all the harder to fathom why the environmentalists and academics who served on the CLT ever agreed to embrace a climate action plan that is innately dedicated to advancing the Premier’s LNG vision and to offsetting its negative impacts largely at taxpayers’ expense.

Accepting that vision for increased carbon emissions as the starting point for renewed climate action plan will make it even more challenging and more costly to meet British Columbia’s legislated GHG reduction targets.

This is the fundamental point that compromised the CLT’s mandate and mission, which it failed to articulate and which must be soundly rejected.

The most rational response to any problem is to first address it by doing less of the thing that is the problem, not the opposite.

You wouldn’t council a drug addict to take even more drugs as a way to kick their habit.

You wouldn’t advise a person mired in debt to max out their credit cards and to apply for new ones as a path to reducing their spending.

You wouldn’t urge someone who is drowning to keep gulping the stuff that is sinking them as they dog paddle their way back to safety.

So why on Earth would anyone think that the way to solve our global warming crisis is to intensify fossil fuel developments in Canada that we can readily live without and that will only compound the problem they are creating?

How crazy must we be to think that the best way to lower greenhouse gas emissions that are threatening our planet’s very existence is to launch a new carbon-intensive industry in B.C. that we don’t have, don’t need and can’t afford?

Nuttier still is planning to do that when the bottom has fallen out of the global LNG market, leaving exporting countries like Australia holding the bag for that industry’s environmental and social costs, with virtually nothing of worth for taxpayers to show for it.

Carbon emissions are the problem we want to solve.

It makes no sense to invite more of them, only to have to offset them, as we also try to eliminate the ones we are already producing at a rate that exceeds our efforts to reduce them.

Yet that is precisely what the CLT plan struggles to achieve, largely by transferring the risks and costs of the most onerous climate actions that would be required to follow that nonsensical course, from the largest industrial polluters, to B.C. taxpayers and families.

We need to reject that plan to further subsidize B.C.’s worst carbon polluters, and instead, make them more accountable for the actions and costs that will flow from eliminating their unwanted emissions.

This much is evident.

The well-meaning members of the CLT who care deeply about reducing British Columbia’s greenhouse gas emissions got outplayed by their government and industry colleagues.

The LNG representatives and advocates who sat on the CLT well understood that its “consensus” recommendations to increase and expand the carbon tax would never be adopted by the B.C. Liberal government.

They signed onto that package not for what it purports to demand in terms of right-pricing carbon; but rather, for what it might help to legitimize in further subsidizing their industries’ obligations to reduce their emission intensity levels, if not their actual emission outputs.

They signed onto it knowing that it would be “cherry-picked” by the Clark government, notwithstanding the CLT’s contention that its recommendations must be accepted a total indivisible package.

They signed onto it hoping that at least some of the hidden subsidies, regulatory concessions, risk avoidance measures and tax relief policies that stand to benefit their industries would be embraced by the government.

In short, they signed onto to that CLT “consensus package” because of what it does not demand. And also because of the enormous “wriggle room” for climate action avoidance that it provides, through its lack of specificity and through its lip service to future policy reviews and business relief measures in the interests of “global competitiveness.”

The Clark government will not support all of the measures that the CLT has recommended to most benefit B.C.’s largest carbon polluters. Yet the CLT’s report provides it with plenty of new ammunition to double down on its failing LNG vision with new mitigation measures that will principally mitigate industries’ costs of paying for their own carbon pollution.

Revisiting the B.C. Liberals’ LNG Subsidy Plan

The CLT suggested several actions that would especially benefit the LNG industry, the oil and gas industry, and more broadly, carbon intensive industries.

To appreciate the scope of those suggested hidden subsidies for LNG in particular, it helps to know a little about the incredibly generous tax arrangements that the Clark government has already extended to those huge firms, in furtherance of its LNG strategy.

Key among those is the infrastructure royalty credit program, which was introduced in 2004 by the Campbell administration to encourage natural gas exploration and development.

For a great analysis of the true hidden cost of that program, check out this piece from blogger Norman Farrell, who has written extensively on the subject.

The royalty credit program grants companies deductions from the royalties they would otherwise have to pay on the natural gas they extract. It is a well-hidden subsidy that is really a tax expenditure and that has poured billions into the pockets of the oil and gas industry over the last 12 years.

It was arguably a defensible trade-off for government back in the days when that royalty credit was at least partially offset by the billions of dollars in natural gas revenues that that industry returned to the provincial treasury from its investments.

But today, it is harder than ever to justify.

The Clark government recently approved yet another $120-million in tax breaks to 10 energy companies under that program, ostensibly, to “buy” ongoing industry investment in British Columbia’s northeastern region.

Yet the province is only expecting to collect $128 million in natural gas royalties this year — almost a dollar-for-dollar subsidy.

It was exactly a year ago, in the dead of summer that the Clark government pushed through its Liquefied Natural Gas Act Projects Agreement Act over the objections of the opposition.

That Act paved the way for the government to enter into the Petronas precedent, a 25-year, ironclad sweetheart deal aimed at landing the proposed Pacific NorthWest LNG project in Prince Rupert. (See my critiques in the Georgia Straight here.)

It also allowed the government to enter into similar project agreements with other LNG consortiums, without the requirement for legislative debate and approval.

The Petronas precedent set the floor for LNG subsidies in B.C. It guaranteed Pacific Northwest LNG ridiculously low corporate income tax rates, ongoing LNG tax credits and taxpayer-backed indemnities that would all be locked-in until for 25 years.

Initially the government planned to set the LNG industry’s tax on net income at seven per cent. When the industry balked, the government caved like a cheap campstool. It cut that rate in half, to 3.5 per cent, until at least 2037, when it may rise to five per cent.

To further sweeten the pot, the tax on net operating income from liquefaction activities, which is applicable for companies that technically don’t have a net income, was set at a mere 1.5 per cent.

That tax is not even payable until there is a zero balance in any LNG plant’s net operating loss account and its capital investment account.

Plus, any tax that the companies pay at the 1.5 per cent rate on their net operating income is only notionally payable in the short run. Their supposed tax “contributions” are actually set aside and accrued in a tax pool that can be later used to reduce the amount of income tax payable at the 3.5 per cent rate, after an LNG facility’s net operating loss account and its capital investment account are reduced to zero.

On top of that sweetheart deal, the Petronas precedent guaranteed that the current Natural Gas Tax Credit will also be locked-in for 25 years.

That tax credit, which reduces the amount of corporate income tax that LNG plants would otherwise have to pay from 11 per cent to as little as eight percent, will be increased next January.

The amount they will be able to deduct for the cost of any natural gas delivered to their facilities will rise from 0.5 per cent to three percent. And that tax credit can also be carried forward from previous years to reduce those companies’ corporate income taxes in future years.

Think of that.

Those oil and gas behemoths have now been guaranteed a special 25-year tax freeze, at rock-bottom tax rates, and a 25-year tax credit that will be six times higher next January than it is today.

It is an outrageous sell-out to the world’s richest oil companies that provides them a 25-year contractual tax benefit and tax certainty that no other industry or individual enjoys.

And it doesn’t stop there.

As I explained in my last analysis on the carbon tax, the gas industry is now also benefiting from the Clark government’s repeal of its predecessor’s Cap-and-Trade Act.

Instead of being obliged to reduce its carbon emissions under annually declining hard caps on emissions levels, the LNG industry is now subject to a new Greenhouse Gas Industrial Reporting and Control Act that only obliges it to meet prescribed carbon intensity levels.

Under the new regime, B.C.’s LNG companies can pollute without limit.

They are allowed to emit 0.16 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of LNG exported, without penalty. Beyond that threshold, theoretically, the companies must either purchase market-based emissions offsets or pay into a technology fund at the rate of $25 per tonne.

But the government will actually subsidize that penalty by as much 100 per cent for LNG plants that barely exceed the new intensity benchmark. That subsidy declines to “only” 50 per cent of the penalty that would otherwise be applicable for those who emit 0.23 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

Given that almost all of the proposed LNG plants plan to produce C02 emissions that vastly exceed the allowable emissions intensity benchmark, it is yet another whopping gift to polluters. It makes a mockery of the government’s claim that B.C. will have the “cleanest LNG industry in the world.”

And here’s the capper.

The Petronas precedent also gave those Asian state-oil monopolies a special 25-year indemnity that is underwritten by B.C. taxpayers.

That indemnity will save them harmless from any so-called “discriminatory events.”

It assured the LNG industry that any companies covered under such project agreements would not have to face any industry-specific carbon taxes or any new industry-specific GHG reduction initiatives for at least 25 years.

If any future government changes those locked-in tax rates and benefits at a cost to those companies that is greater than $25 million in any year, or more than $50 million over five years, they will be entitled to full compensation, courtesy of B.C. taxpayers.

Similarly, any changes in government policy that impose new rules or tougher standards specific to the LNG industry, which entail higher costs relating to carbon taxes or to greenhouse gas emissions and reporting requirements, will be fully compensable above that threshold.

And the Petronas precedent further stipulated that if any other LNG project got an even sweeter deal from the government, the Pacific Northwest LNG project would get that too.

In essence, the Clark government was so desperate to land a major LNG deal, it contractually signed away British Columbia’s ability to control its own tax regime, carbon pricing and climate action strategies in specific regard to that industry.

All of it amounts to a new license to profit from uncapped carbon pollution, as it also essentially prevents governments and taxpayers from properly taxing the natural gas industry for their profits and for their pollution.

To my knowledge, the Pacific Northwest LNG project is the only project thus far formally covered by an agreement authorized under the new Act.

But the concessions granted in the Petronas precedent and by the new emissions intensity regime are potentially a major additional problem for rebalancing B.C.’s climate action plan.

They will make it that much more difficult and potentially costly for taxpayers to make the LNG industry fully pay for its carbon emissions and for its incremental emission reduction measures under any serious climate action plan.

The last thing we should be doing is tying government’s hands in how it can use its available policy measures to put more onus on industrial carbon polluters to clean up their act and to pay disproportionately more for their disproportionately high carbon emissions.

If anything, we should be revisiting the carbon tax to create differential carbon tax rates that escalate with the type and usage of fossil fuels covered by its carbon tax, similar to Norway.

We should be putting more financial pressure, not less, on B.C.’s most carbon-intensive industries to expedite the mitigation measures necessary to dramatically cut their emissions that represent such a huge proportion of B.C.’s emissions inventory.

As I suggested in my last installment, a cap-and-trade system should also be embraced to do that at the lowest possible cost, as was originally envisioned in the 2008 climate action plan.

It should be implemented in tandem with a revised carbon tax that is gradually increased over time, in a politically sensitive way that will achieve the CLT’s end goal in that regard.

And the carbon tax should also differentially adjusted to oblige B.C.’s largest polluters to pay for their process emissions and for any other emissions that are not adequately captured within a globally integrated cap-and-trade system.

We should not be exempting the LNG sector or other carbon-intensive industries from any industry-specific carbon taxes or mandatory emissions reductions requirements. Rather, we should be requiring them to bear the full brunt of the cost of their carbon pollution as we also put new standards in place to drive them more quickly to adopt cleaner technologies.

In doing that, we must remain vigilant not to devise climate action strategies that would actually further subsidize those major polluters at taxpayers’ expense.

Unfortunately, many of the CLT’s recommendations would move us in the opposite direction.

Let me now turn to some of the uncosted hidden subsidies that would be effectively extended to the LNG sector and to other carbon-intensive industries under the CLT’s recommendations.

Hidden Subsidy #1: A Potentially Lower Carbon Tax for “Trade-Exposed” Sectors

The heart of the CLT’s plan is to increase B.C.’s carbon tax by $10 per year, from 2018 to at least 2050. That would raise the cost of the carbon tax from $30 a tonne to $360 a tonne.

But here’s the catch. The largest industrial polluters — that is, the “emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors” — might not have to pay that under the CLT’s recommendations.

The following quotes from its report are instructive:

“Establish targeted and transparent mechanisms for emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors that mitigate the competitiveness issues created for those sectors if B.C.’s carbon pricing is materially greater than jurisdictions with which they compete, provided that such mechanisms are structured in a manner that does not adversely impact the price signal to reduce emissions. These adjustments should remain in place until such time that carbon pricing and regulatory policy equivalency with other jurisdictions is achieved.”

“The scheduled annual increases in the carbon tax and the competitiveness adjustments for emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors should be reviewed by the Province, with the support of a Climate Leadership Team, every five years, or more often where warranted, taking into consideration GHG reductions, economic competitiveness, carbon pricing and regulatory policy in other jurisdictions, and impacts on vulnerable communities.”

In other words, the CLT has thrown open the door to exempting B.C.’s worst carbon polluters from some or all of the carbon tax increases that would apply to all other British Columbians.

Its vision for carbon tax hikes is an open question for the “emission-intensive, trade-exposed sectors,” subject to future review and competitiveness considerations that are sure to mean those industries will enjoy breaks on their carbon taxes, while everyone else has to pay ever higher carbon taxes whether they like it or not.

For the LNG industry, it means that not only will it not be subject to a specifically targeted carbon tax to properly price its inordinately high carbon emissions. But it might not even have to pay the level of carbon tax this is generally applicable to individuals, families and small businesses.

Hidden Subsidy #2: A Lower Sales Tax That Will Disproportionately Benefit Large Emitters

As the CLT noted, “natural gas production accounts for 16 per cent of the province’s greenhouse gas emissions and is the largest industrial sector.” If the LNG vision ever comes to fruition, that proportion will grow by leaps and bounds, potentially doubling B.C.’s overall emission levels.

The CLT recommends many measures to address that fact, including new targets for reducing process and fugitive emissions and lots of lip service to adopting “best practices” and unspecified new regulatory standards and policies.

Its most specific recommendations are all hidden subsidies to that sector and to other industrial polluters that would cost B.C. taxpayers an unquantified bundle.

The CLT wants to lower the provincial sales tax from seven per cent to six per cent.

The biggest beneficiaries of that initiative, by far, would be B.C.’s largest corporations, typically in the natural resource sector.

They would get millions of dollars in annual tax relief, whereas most middle class families would receive a few hundred dollars a year in benefits.

The sales tax is a regressive tax that imposes the same dollar-for-dollar burden on anything subject to it, regardless of buyers’ different incomes.

A cut in the sales tax rate would most benefit those who buy the most, be they high-income wage earners or large corporations.

A middle income earner who spends even $40,000 a year on items that are subject to the sales tax — a fairly high amount — would save $400 a year on a one per cent sales tax cut.

A wealthy individual who makes ten times that amount would save ten times that amount. A large natural resource company that spends exponentially more would save exponentially more.

The CLT explained its rationale as follows:

“B.C. is competing with a number of new suppliers for a limited market. Our recommendations to reduce the PST (generally by one basis point and entirely on electricity rates) and make available transitional support for emissions-intensive, trade-exposed sectors are intended to address this reality — particularly if B.C.’s climate policy materially exceeds the stringency of our competitors.”

I noted in my last installment how the recycled money from the revenue-neutral carbon tax is already disproportionately benefiting business rather than individuals.

This recommendation from the CLT would further exacerbate that disparity, with the biggest benefits — by far — going to B.C.’s largest companies: the large natural resource companies that are B.C.’s biggest carbon polluters.

Hidden Subsidy #3: The Elimination of Sales Tax on Electricity for Industry

The CLT also recommended eliminating the PST on electricity rates for industry, noting that it does not apply to electricity purchased by individuals.

It did not quantify how much that gift to industry would cost, but suffice it to say, it would be massive — at least tens of millions of dollars annually, if not more.

That would represent an enormous gift to B.C.’s largest industrial polluters — the oil and gas industry, the forest industry, the mining industry, the cement industry and others.

It would substantially reduce the amount of revenue that would otherwise be available for crucial services, like health care, education, child protection, public safety and other social services.

Like the proposed sales tax cut, which would be financed from incremental carbon tax revenues, that measure would represent a whopping tax subsidy to big business and to B.C.’s largest energy users, at the expense of the individuals and families who depend on the services funded by those tax dollars.

It is only fair and sensible to retain that sales tax on industrial electricity, given the inordinate pressure those energy-intensive sectors put on British Columbia’s electrical system.

Even without LNG the industrial sector is expected to account for the most growth of all key sectors in the next 10 years, mostly for mining, forestry, and oil and gas activity.

As the B.C. government gradually weans itself off of the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual “dividends” it obliges B.C. Hydro to contribute (including through deferred debt), it will need every penny of its existing sales tax revenue to offset those revenue losses.

Carbon intensive industries that are already buying electricity and paying sales tax on that energy will not produce one less molecule of carbon dioxide if that sales tax is eliminated. They will only make more profit at the expense of all other carbon taxpayers.

Hidden Subsidy #4: Risk-free, Cost-free Electrification for LNG Plants

Of all the suggestions made by the CLT, perhaps none would be so costly to taxpayers as its proposal to oblige B.C. Hydro to electrify the LNG industry.

Its recommendation on that point reads as follows:

“Instruct BC Hydro to develop a strategy (generation and transmission) to supply in a competitive, timely manner the clean electricity required to facilitate electrification of upstream natural gas, LNG, and associated infrastructure. Amongst other things, the strategy should enable BC Hydro to commit to supplying new industrial projects with clean electricity by project start up, if necessary through the use of temporary natural gas generation until transmission infrastructure is available.”

The CLT rightly points out that “LNG plants … can rely on clean electricity instead of natural gas for both the liquefaction process and their auxiliary demands” to reduce their emissions.

True enough. If we are to be saddled with an LNG industry that exponentially ramps up B.C.’s carbon emissions, it makes sense to minimize those additional GHGs by requiring LNG plants to adopt e-drives or other zero emission technologies.

But the ones who should bear the cost for that should be that industry and those companies — not B.C. taxpayers.

Instead, the CLT wants BC Hydro to bear the brunt of that cost.

It wants to transfer those incremental costs and risks associated with electrifying those proposed LNG plants to the rest of us. That’s wrong.

The CLT also wants BC Hydro to incur the added costs of generating the additional electricity capacity and the untold billions of dollars in new costs that would be required to build new transmission lines and to service the added debt of that infrastructure.

It wants to guarantee those LNG companies expedited construction schedules that would transfer the risks of building those transmission lines and of supplying them with the electricity they need in accordance with their project timelines to B.C. Hydro. And it further wants to guarantee them they will be able to buy their new power at “internationally comparable” rates.

The CLT’s report put it this way:

“If a proponent wants to use clean electricity instead of gas, they need to be confident that the electricity transmission and supply will be available on the timelines they are advancing their project…One aspect of providing electricity in a competitive, timely manner is ensuring that BC Hydro is able to commit to supply contracts that provide, on reasonable commercial terms used in other jurisdictions in similar circumstances, for damages in the event of failure to deliver new supply within agreed upon time frames and, in the case of LNG, for liquidated damages in the event of interrupted supply. In the event of any damages being payable by BC Hydro, the ratepayers should not bear the burden.” [Emphases added.]

That last line sounds reassuring on the surface. But if ratepayers “should not bear the burden,” and the LNG companies are not expected to bear those costs, it can only mean that the government will — meaning B.C. taxpayers.

Essentially, what the CLT is recommending is that all future LNG plants in B.C. should use so-called “outside the fence” power sourced from outside the plant, instead of the on-site “inside the fence” gas-fired power that is now typically contemplated for most projects.

The Northwest Institute for Bioregional Research rightly observed, “If ‘outside the fence’ power is sourced for LNG production, large upgrades to B.C.’s transmission and generating capacity will be needed. This could cost tens of billions of dollars, but could also generate significant income to First Nations, or crown corporations.”

I repeat, it could cost “tens of billions of dollars” that someone would have to pay, ostensibly, ratepayers, or taxpayers, if not the LNG companies.

Even without the added electrification requirements suggested by the Climate Leadership Team to power LNG plants with e-drive systems, BC Hydro anticipates that its load forecast from oil and gas will climb by almost five-fold over the next 10 years, if the Clark government’s LNG vision comes to pass.

As it stands, BC Hydro’s most recent integrated resource plan only contemplates having sufficient supply to meet an initial expected LNG load of 3,000 gigawatt hours per year, before applying its demand-side management measures.

It anticipates that demand from the LNG industry could be as much as 6,600 GWh/year, even without powering all of its proposed plants with e-drive systems.

BC Hydro also projects a mid load forecast for LNG peak demand at 360 megawatts — an amount equivalent to roughly one-third of the 1,100 MW that the $8.8 billion Site C project would create.

But that vastly underestimates the amount of power that would actually be required to power even a handful of LNG plants with e-drive systems.

For example, the proposed the Grassy Point LNG Project would alone require 1,000 MW of power. The now indefinitely delayed LNG Canada Project would require 1200 MW and a new 500 kV line from Prince George to Terrace. And the Pacific Northwest LNG Project would require at least another 700 MW of electrical energy

And those are just three of the 20 proposed LNG projects that are at least theoretically on the drawing board in British Columbia. Many of those other projects — like the proposed Kitsault Energy Project, the Canada Stewart Energy Project and the Nisga’a LNG Project — are in very remote areas that would be incredibly expensive to power via the BC Hydro grid.

If the LNG “dream” ever comes true, even without the added pressure from e-drive plants and their associated transmission, BC Hydro estimated that the oil and gas sector will consume almost double the electricity consumed by the pulp and paper sector, and much more than even the energy-intensive mining industry.

The cheapest form of energy savings is conservation. The biggest projected driver for new electricity demand is natural gas development, including LNG.

The CLT’s proposal would serve the goal of reducing emissions from LNG plants. But it would place untold new power demands on BC Hydro that would put upward pressure on Hydro rates that would otherwise be avoidable.

Bear in mind, the new Northwest Transmission Line (NWTL) along Highway 37 alone cost $716 million, up from an original budget of $395 million, when Premier Clark came to power.

A major reason for its budget increases related to expedited construction schedules, to meet timelines mandated to supply power from the new Forrest Kerr run-of-river power project and other smaller energy projects to the new Red Chris mine and other new mines in that wild and remote area of B.C.

The much shorter Iskut Extension that extended that 287 kV transmission line from Bob Quinn Substation to the mine, was also over budget. Its cost increased from $180 million to $209 million, because building new transmission lines in that part of northern B.C. are no small feat.

As Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer recently pointed out, the budgets for four recent transmission projects, including the NWTL rose from a combined $1.4 billion to over $1.9 billion, for a collective over-run of $516 million or 36 per cent.

On top of all of those cost considerations, the requirements for consulting and accommodating First Nations’ constitutionally protected rights is a further cost challenge. Especially if commitments are made to deliver fully compensable power rights to LNG companies within their projects’ designated timelines.

In the interest of providing clean, cheap, reliable electricity to power LNG plants that would reduce their GHG pollution, the costs of properly respecting Aboriginal rights and title could be astronomical.

No one really knows how high they might be, but the CLT was altogether silent on that point, which represents another aspect of the hidden subsidy for power its industry representatives succeeded in advancing in its recommendations.

The fact is, the CLT’s recommendations for powering LNG plants could have dramatically adverse unintended consequences for taxpayers and the environment alike.

Mostly, however, they would stick taxpayers and BC Hydro with the lion’s share of costs and risks for making e-drive LNG plants more economical for the large oil companies that stand to profit from them.

If those costs and risks were properly factored into the government’s LNG vision, it would significantly alter its cost-benefit bottom line.

Yet in the absence of e-drive LNG plants, British Columbians will be left holding the bag for much of the cost and sacrifice needed to offset the added emissions those gas-fired plants will entail.

Either way, most B.C. taxpayers and most B.C. families will lose.

Hidden Subsidy #5: A Five-year Minimal Carbon Tax Holiday for Process Emissions

The CLT recommended expanding “coverage of the current carbon tax to apply to all greenhouse gas emission sources in B.C. after five years, starting with measurable GHG emissions covered by the current reporting regulation.”

Essentially it is proposing to let the oil and gas industry off the hook for paying carbon taxes on their methane process and fugitive emissions for at least five more years, until 2021 at the earliest. While it also envisions that the carbon tax will also go up for everyone else by another $40/tonne over that period.

In the meantime, it hopes the natural gas industry will voluntarily act to cut its process emissions by some 40 per cent, assisted by further subsidies from the forthcoming green infrastructure tax credit.

But there is no guarantee that will happen. And the only hard action recommended by the CLT to address fugitive and vented methane emissions to require “industry through regulation to implement leak detection and repair programs in line with best practices in North America.”

Why that has not already been required is beyond me.

Ditto for the CLT’s suggestion that the industry “develop best practices for methane reduction, including transparent reporting, through a collaborative initiative involving the provincial government, industry, and other stakeholders with expertise in this area…and seek alignment with Canada and other provincial jurisdictions in this regard.”

The Pembina Institute and others are right to maintain that we should not wait until 2021 to act on reducing deadly methane emissions with an earlier imposition of the carbon tax and other measures.

Yet the CLT’s most important recommendation in respect of addressing fugitive and vented emissions is this one:

“Providing that at the time of the first five year review of the Climate Leadership Plan, a new reduction goal for fugitive and vented methane emissions should be established and a determination made whether future reductions in fugitive and venting methane emissions are best achieved through expanding the coverage of the carbon tax to such emissions…[or through] a continuation on a voluntary basis of the best practices developed above for methane reduction (provided the industry has reached the 40 per cent methane reduction goal within five years), or such best practices developed for methane being mandated by regulation at that time (with such regulations to be reviewed every five years thereafter).”

In other words, under that recommendation, even after another five years’ carbon tax holiday on those emissions, it might well be that the industry will continue to be exempt from paying carbon taxes on those uncaptured process emissions.

Stunning.

Once again, the environmentalists and academics on the CLT got completely snookered by the industry representatives and the government mouthpieces that succeeded in rendering its carbon tax commitment almost meaningless for B.C.’s largest carbon polluters.

No wonder the oil industry representatives on the CLT signed onto that almost meaningless “commitment.”

Conclusion

All of these are only a handful of the effective subsidies to carbon emitters that were tacitly recommended by the CLT, mostly for the benefit of Big Oil.

It is unfortunate that the CLT offered so little in the way of specific “bullet-proof” recommendations for reducing B.C.’s carbon emissions.

British Columbians must now await the government’s Climate Action 2.0 to ascertain what more it will actually do to meet its legislated GHG reduction targets, besides buying itself more time, as suggested by the CLT, which failed to prescribe new provincial interim targets before 2030.

Hopefully it will be as detailed and progressive as Ontario’s truly excellent new climate action plan.

Just as that province’s first climate action plan largely borrowed from many of the measures adopted in B.C.’s 2008 plan, British Columbia would now be well advised to use Ontario’s new blueprint as the key resource it is for advancing climate action.

In a future article I will suggest a number of hard measures that B.C. could take to help meet its targets in the oil and gas sector and in other sectors I did not address in this analysis.

The fact is, the CLT’s recommendations for emissions reductions from buildings, forestry, agriculture, transportation and other sectors are pretty much all as vague as they are aspirational.

The good news is that, by and large, they do not overtly suggest anywhere near the level of hidden subsidies that I have highlighted above in regard to the LNG and natural gas sector. It’s just that they say so little of substance to advance the mission that the CLT was given.

The bottom line is this: the only sensible way to responsibly address British Columbia’s growing greenhouse gas emissions is to stop unecessarily adding to them in the first place.

Instead of digging ourselves ever deeper in the hole by inviting an LNG industry that British Columbians will also be expected to subsidize in addressing its added emissions, we should just say, “enough.”

We do not need that industry and do not want its added carbon pollution.

Enough. It is time to develop a serious climate action plan that embraces a low-carbon economy and that duly ensures its largest carbon polluters pay their full share of the cost of reducing those emissions.

Martyn Brown was former B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff and a key architect of B.C.’s climate action plan and clean energy plan. He was the top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia. A frequent contributor to the Georgia Straight, Brown is also the author of the eBook Towards a New Government in British Columbia. Contact Brown at towardsanewgovernment@gmail.com.

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 is the second 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.

In accepting its mission as defined by the government, the Climate Leadership Team (CLT) also implicitly accepted the government’s plan for increased emissions from LNG and from other carbon-intensive development.

As laudable as the CLT’s climate action plan is in most respects, it is wrongly predicated on accommodating the oil industry’s vision for increased fossil fuel extraction.

Which is to say, it is innately co-opted by its mandate, which is wedded to the acceptance of an overriding economic plan for carbon-fuelled growth.

That is not to suggest that all, or even a majority, of the CLT members support that economic vision. Far from it.

But in accepting their mandate, they were all obliged to respect the Clark government’s four Cornerstone Objectives as their starting point for climate action.

Those objectives basically obliged the CLT to recommend measures for meeting B.C.’s 2050 GHG reduction target, while also allowing for the added emissions that will flow from the government’s LNG Strategy and from its carbon-intensive B.C. Jobs Plan.

As the CLT noted, if that (or any) Cornerstone Objective “were to be deemed not a priority, the substance of the recommendations of the Climate Leadership Team may well be different.”

Therein lies the fatal flaw of the proposed plan.

Mission Impossible

It rests on an economic foundation that purports to dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions that, in turn, will make the task of reducing those and all provincial emissions by some 80 per cent below 2007 levels vastly more difficult and more costly to achieve.

Accepting that foundation as our starting point for climate action turns B.C.’s “mission improbable” into “mission impossible,” regardless of any theoretical assurances offered to the contrary from any private consulting firm specializing in climate and energy modeling.

I have had enough experience with such environmental and econometric modeling to know how readily compliant with their client’s wishes their statistical outputs tend to be. I am certainly not suggesting they fudge the figures or in any way act unprofessionally; but they are always mindful of the unspoken “truths” their clients hope to prove.

In my experience, it was never too challenging for the government to obtain “proof” that its policies, plans and “business cases” made sense, typically from thoroughly respected and utterly professional firms.

Only history typically makes of an ass of those econometrically-sound leaps of science, faith and mathematically-inspired feats of assumption.

From the economic benefits of the Olympics, to the rosy picture painted by the properly qualified findings of the quantitative analysis of British Columbia’s initial climate action plan, history tends to discredit even the most credible economists’ “crystal-balling.”

Their seemingly “firm” findings are always carefully qualified in the fine print that their clients usually are not so keen to talk about.

They are always based on the quicksand of often-dubious reference scenarios, economic and other assumptions, and interpretations of loosely worded policy statements, strategic directions and unspecified actions.

Push on any of those analyses hard enough and you will be happy enough to bury them, lest someone else shows how magically they rest upon their mucky postulations and presumptions.

With few exceptions, there is simply nowhere near enough detail or specificity in the Climate Leadership Team’s plan to make any credible forecasts about its potential GHG reduction impacts.

The truth is, it is fundamentally impossible to quantify the impacts of so many open-ended and interacting variables. It is a qualitative art, in the first instance, to try to interpret the mostly aspirational strategies to develop strategies, “best practices” and actual mitigation measures that are suggested in the CLT’s plan.

Nor can any such modeling account for the political will — or lack of it — in interpreting and actioning the CLT’s suggested strategies over some 34 years.

All of which is to flag the obvious: we should take any modeling that says we can meet our 2050 GHG reduction targets by exponentially adding to our emissions pressures with a grain of salt.

At a minimum, that can only make the challenge more difficult and more costly to achieve.

That incremental emissions pressure from incremental fossil fuel extraction, shipping and processing can only make their attendant environmental risks, financial costs and behavioural burdens more onerous, especially for individuals, families and those who can least afford them.

The best chance we have at meeting B.C.’s 2050 GHG targets is to minimize its emissions baseline, instead of the opposite.

The last thing we should be doing is planning for a future that is intentionally predicated on potentially doubling our emissions pressures, in pursuit of the economic lure being dangled out by the LNG consortiums and large oil companies.

Rush to Increase Oil and Gas Development

As B.C.’s chief cheerleader for LNG, and as the oil industry’s passive accomplice in “getting to green” in moving Alberta’s bitumen to Pacific tidewater, our premier is both a friend in deed and a friend in need to the barons of Big Oil who so generously fund her party.

Indeed, her government has been thoroughly co-opted by those who want us to stake our economic future on their increased exploitation of fossil fuels for their profit, global warming be damned.

It is content to suck and blow at the same time on climate action by dramatically expanding oil and gas development while simultaneously trying to eradicate its unwanted and entirely avoidable incremental emissions.

That wrong-headed approach will oblige us all to pay a much heavier price to reduce the added emissions that will result from the government’s rush to yield export-driven profits for the mostly foreign multinationals that want to increase Canada’s oil and gas development.

The largely state-owned oil companies from China, Malaysia, India, Brunei and elsewhere that are driving B.C.’s slavish devotion to LNG development couldn’t be happier.

Whether or not they eventually move forward with their potential investment plans in B.C., they are thrilled with the B.C. Liberals’ penchant for prostrating themselves to their industry’s “competitive demands.”

Ditto for the mega-rich private oil companies from the USA, the UK, Japan and Canada.

After all, they have already successfully suckered the Clark government into granting them unbelievably irresponsible tax breaks, subsidies and taxpayer-backed giveaways, through the ill-conceived Petronas precedent. (See related stories in the Georgia Straight, here, here, here and here.)

If nothing else, the premier’s unqualified support for their projects, through long-term tax concessions, tax credits and environmental risk transfers, increases their leverage with other governments that are equally starry-eyed about the zero sum global game of LNG development.

Now they stand to gain from an updated provincial climate action plan that they hope and expect will be anything but that.

It will amount to a contradiction in terms, if the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline project, the Pacific Northwest LNG project, and the premier’s broader vision for export-driven fossil fuel development is allowed to proceed.

A Defeatist Strategy

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency’s Pacific NorthWest LNG Draft Environmental Assessment Report found that that project’s liquefaction plant alone would increase provincial greenhouse gas emissions by 8.5 per cent.

Upstream greenhouse gas emissions associated with the project would represent 10-14 per cent of provincial emissions, based on 2013 levels.

And that is only one of 20 proposed LNG projects on the drawing board in British Columbia, including 18 that have already been granted export licenses by the National Energy Board (NEB).

If only a handful of them ever come to fruition, it will not be long until B.C.’s LNG-related emissions are vying with Alberta’s oil sands emissions for the dubious title of being Canada’s worst king of carbon pollution.

As for the so-called Kinder Morgan project, the NEB did not even consider either the upstream (e.g. oil production) or downstream emissions (e.g. end use of the oil) associated with Trans Mountain’s plan to pipe oilsands bitumen from northern Alberta to Burnaby, for shipping to Asia and elsewhere from Metro Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet.

We have no idea what the added impact of those unquantified extra greenhouse gas emissions will be from the associated increased oilsands extraction and processing activities.

We haven’t a clue what the emissions impact will be from the seven-fold increase in supertanker traffic that that project will impose upon the Salish Sea; or from the shipping of that “liberated” dirty cargo across the world; or from the refining of that bitumen into useable energy in China, America or elsewhere; or from the reshipping of that refined oil to wherever it gets burned; or from the combustion and other end use of that product.

Some might call that progress. I say it’s insanity.

The NEB’s requirement that Trans Mountain must offset the direct GHG emissions generated from the project’s construction, without any consideration of the emission increases that will actually result from what will flow through that new pipeline, is hardly cause to celebrate.

It is rather a bad joke that makes us the punch line: Knock, knock. Who’s there? Kinder. Kinder who? Kinder surprise! We get to pollute, you get to pay, and we get to profit.

Who says the NEB doesn’t have a sense of humour?

Founding a new climate action plan on a prevailing vision to exponentially increase the very thing that we ostensibly hope to decrease — carbon emissions — is patently absurd.

It is tantamount to trying to bail ourselves out of a leaky life raft while poking new holes in its rapidly deflating life support system, and pretending it doesn’t matter.

It is a defeatist “strategy” that essentially assumes we are probably already sunk anyway, so we might as well drink ourselves drunk on the stuff that’s in the barrels and enjoy the ride while it lasts.

We can and must do better.

The High Cost of Low Standards

Those oil companies and consortiums essentially want us to abandon our climate action imperatives in exchange for the benefits they promise from the increased extraction, processing and shipping of natural gas and heavy oil across our precious, pristine and sensitive ecosystems.

Never mind that the main argument for exporting those non-renewable resources is supposedly to increase their value — meaning the oil industries’ profits — in ways that it must be admitted will also make those products more expensive for Canadian consumers.

They want us to further lower their taxes, cut their costs and reduce our environmental standards, to help them compete with their own companies and with each other, in other parts of the world that place no price on carbon and that see no problem with carbon pollution.

They want us to do all that, so that they can sell more Canadian fossil fuel to China and to other less developed countries, which are already literally choking to death on the combustion of those dirty energy resources.

Such is the “gift” to humanity being held out as a fleeting “opportunity” by the only dinosaurs left on Earth.

Their idea of “responsible” and “sustainable” development is Orwellian newspeak of the worst order.

They are trying to persuade us that the “responsible” choice is to act irresponsibly. That “sustainable” development is its opposite.

In what world is it either “responsible” or “sustainable” to blast the earth apart with chemically polluted water, sand and steam, to “free” its geologically trapped hydrocarbons, so that they can be burned at the expense of our warming planet, and by extension, the life it supports?

If that is our idea of “adding value,” we are indeed morally bankrupt.

In what perverse “sustainable” and “responsible” society could it ever make sense to intentionally so debase the environment?

And worse, to fuel its dependency on non-renewable, climate-polluting energy that also threatens its aquifers, aquatic life and human drinking water?

Least of all, when the world is already awash in those petrochemicals. When it is slowly suffocating from its use of them. And when it has so many other clean, renewable and economically rewarding options to meet its incremental energy needs, as the International Energy Agency has so extensively documented.

In B.C. premier Christy Clark’s brave new world, apparently.

She too has bought into the fallacy that we must aspire to compete with those who are already adding to the planet’s atmospheric burdens by sending more of our worst polluting forms of energy to China and elsewhere.

It is a logic that defies logic, except for those who hope to profit from increasing emissions that will escalate global warming.

It flies in the face of the commitment made by 95 countries in Paris last December to cut their emissions, so as to limit global warming to “well below 2°C.”

It makes a mockery of Canada’s lofty appeals to further restrict global warming to just 1.5 Celsius.

It makes the federal government’s improbable commitment to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 virtually impossible to achieve.

And it runs utterly counter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent agreement with U.S. President Barack Obama to reduce methane emissions by 40-45 per cent below 2012 levels by 2025 from the oil and gas sector.

As such, it is incumbent on B.C.’s provincial New Democratic Party to stand with the Green Party in fundamentally opposing the acceptance of the LNG pipe dream as a starting point for serious climate action.

In the first installment of this series, I suggested that an independent Auditor General for Climate Action should be appointed by the legislature to annually monitor the government’s progress on climate action.

That individual might also be asked to annually audit and report on the true cost of climate action subsidies and less obvious “tax expenditures” that are today completely invisible.

Taxpayers should know how much more they are being taxed through all manner of taxes, fees, utility rates and other hidden charges that directly relate to measures taken to reduce and offset the added emissions from each sector.

They should also know how much of their money is being devoted to investments and subsidies offered to businesses, to help them remain “competitive” in the new world of carbon pricing.

Indeed, government should be obliged to report on those costs in every provincial budget, just as it does today on its most obvious forms of tax expenditures (i.e. reductions in revenue from delivering government programs or benefits through the tax system, such as special tax rates, exemptions, or tax credits.)

And each year, the legislature should vote on all of those tax expenditures and newly identified “carbon pricing mitigation measures,” just as they do on each ministry’s annual Estimates appropriations for operating programs.

B.C. taxpayers and families should not be obliged to pay more than need be for cutting British Columbia’s carbon emissions. More on that subject in the next two installments of this series.

Martyn Brown was former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff and a key architect of B.C.’s climate action plan and clean energy plan. He was the top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia. A frequent contributor to the Georgia Straight, Brown is also the author of the ebook Towards a New Government in British Columbia. Contact Brown at towardsanewgovernment@gmail.com.

Image: Christy Clark/Flickr

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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.  

At the rate we are going, British Columbia’s annual emissions are projected to increase by about 39 per cent over 2014 levels by 2050, according to the Pembina Institute.

The federal government’s Second Biennial Report on Climate Change further suggests that B.C.’s per capita GHG emissions will increase, from 13.7 tonnes per capita in 2013, to 15.3 tonnes per capita by 2020.

In other words, we are headed decidedly in the wrong direction from what is required by the 2007 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act under our carbon-loving premier’s “climate leadership.”

To put it bluntly, British Columbia’s climate action imperatives have been sacrificed to the premier’s LNG pipe dreams and to the barons of Big Oil.

Enter the Climate Leadership Team (CLT).

It was comprised of 17 handpicked advisors, including its chair, B.C. Liberal MLA Jordan Sturdy, and the head of the government’s Climate Action Secretariat.

Other CLT members included three mayors (all supportive of the B.C. Liberals, including one who is running for the party’s nomination in Comox Valley); three industry representatives (from LNG and forestry, and a former B.C. Hydro executive); three First Nations chiefs; three academics and three environmentalists.

The CLT’s consensus report was submitted to the government last fall. It offered 32 recommendations to get B.C. “back on track” in meeting its legislated GHG reduction targets for 2050.

It is important to note the main difference between the province’s 2008 climate action plan and the Climate Leadership Team’s (CLT) proposed plan.

The former was a very specific, action-laden strategy.

It not only established targets for emissions reductions and recommended broad strategies for achieving those targets. It also identified dozens of concrete policies, partnerships and best practices that other jurisdictions had embraced, and in some cases implemented, that would make B.C. a global leader on climate action.

That tactical action plan touched upon almost every sector of the economy, to target the “low hanging fruit” that was ripe for relatively “easy picking” in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

The challenge now in getting to where we need to go in combating global warming is that so many of the most obvious climate action “solutions” have already been identified and acted upon, with the marked exception of properly pricing carbon pollution.

Fast forward to the CLT’s plan. This passage is especially telling.

“Generally speaking, the Climate Leadership Team has focused on strategic-level recommendations. It is recognized that successful implementation will require much more in the way of detailed specifics at the policy and program level.”

No kidding.

In fact, some 26 of the report’s 32 recommendations are fundamentally aimed at establishing targets and putting in place processes to develop future strategies, best practices, harmonized approaches and adaptation measures.

• Seven of the 32 recommendations are either entirely or largely fixated on setting or affirming targets that speak to desired goals, yet that are silent on how to achieve them. (#1-3, 12, 15, 19, 20)
• 13 recommendations call for policy reviews, for the development of best practices, and for new or updated strategies — none of which say much about what specifically, should be done. (#8, 13-18, 20-22, 28-29, 32)
• Two recommendations call for the creation of task forces to research and recommend strategies to stimulate the low-carbon economy and to review and update best practices in the agricultural sector. (#10, 18)
• Two recommendations speak to seeking “parity” and “alignment” with other jurisdictions on B.C.’s adopted climate actions and best practices — which makes sense, but does nothing in itself to further reduce B.C.’s GHGs. (#30, 31)
• Two recommendations are concerned with adaption, rather than with mitigation. (#24, 25)

That is not to diminish the recommended actions that are sometimes included in the CLT’s strategic vision. Rather, it is to point out how hard it will actually be to move beyond its wish list for GHG reductions, to a specific action plan that can be executed with hard policies. 

The CLT’s plan would replace the 2020 legislated emissions reduction target with a new target to reduce B.C.’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 2007 levels by 2030.

That is similar to the European Commission’s even more stringent target to achieve at a 40 percent cut in emissions below 1990 levels by 2030.

The CLT report also proposes to establish new sectoral greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2030, including cutting emission levels from buildings by 50 per cent and from the transportation and industrial sectors by 30 per cent, below 2015 levels.

British Columbians might be rightly skeptical that those new targets will ever be met by successive governments over the next 14 years. Especially without clear interim targets that at least notionally hold them to account.

Surely if we have learned anything from the Clark government’s essential dismissal of its legislated GHG targets for 2016 and 2020, it is that targets are a double-edged sword, if they can be cavalierly missed with political impunity.

On the one hand, they can and should be useful tools in prompting and scaling political actions to the magnitude of the task at hand and to the timelines that demand constant incremental improvement.

On the other hand, they can also be held up as legal commitments to reassure people that progress will and must be made. They can be held up as a shield to provide a convenient cover for politicians to ignore, delay or even reverse the hard actions that are actually required to meet those targets.

Over the last five years, Clark and her minions have basically thumbed their noses at the legislated GHG reduction targets and other laws that so many of them voted for under the Campbell administration.

That initial climate action plan, clean energy plan and bioenergy strategy did succeed in meeting the interim target of a six percent reduction in GHGs by 2012. But it has been all-downhill ever since.

Indeed, Clark has systematically dismantled much of her predecessor’s climate action and clean energy plans. 

Most significantly, she froze the globally lauded carbon tax in 2012 and vowed not to increase it again until at least 2018.

Smart politics, no doubt. But downright stupid climate leadership.

As the government itself noted in its own 2014 Climate Action Report, “Some policies lose effectiveness over time if they are not updated. For example, the carbon tax impact effectively diminishes if the rate remains unchanged, as inflation dampens the price signal.”

Exactly.

The eight-year freeze on the revenue-neutral carbon tax runs completely contrary to the logic of that initiative, which was always intended to gradually increase the price of carbon pollution and to return that carbon tax revenue to British Columbians through other new tax cuts.

It is a policy that at least one study suggested has been tremendously successful in reducing B.C.’s emissions.

The Clark government’s record of failure and pandering to its party paymasters on the climate action plan, including the carbon tax, has significantly compounded the challenge of meeting B.C.’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.

What do targets matter if they can be deliberately neglected and missed without any political repercussions?

If they can be abused by politicians to defend their inaction on climate change?

If they have no political relationship to any particular government’s term in office?

If we must wait 14 years to determine if we are “on track” to meet other targets set for 34 years away?

What do GHG targets matter if they can be neglected & missed without political repercussion? https://t.co/Mu958vBAIq @christyclarkbc #bcpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 14, 2016

What is the point of having targets at all, if the response to missing them is to simply change the goalposts and set distant new targets that are even more toothless in holding governments to account than the ones that were missed and abandoned?

Instilling real political accountability for meeting GHG reduction targets must be Job One if they are to be remotely credible.

The Climate Leadership Team missed that critical point.

Progress to any new targets for 2030 must be annually measured against annual targets that point to interim legislated targets, which in turn, entail tangible penalties for those who fail to meet them as legally required.

The lesson from the first failed experience with meeting B.C.’s legislated GHG reduction target for 2020 is clear.

We need to legislate hard caps on absolute emission levels, in addition to mandating continually declining emission intensity levels.

The latter reduce the allowable amount of carbon that is released per unit from any particular activity; but they might also inadvertently allow net emissions to rise, if those regulated industrial and consumer activities also increase in volume.

Regulated industries should be obliged to limit their overall emissions in absolute terms, encouraged by an escalating carbon tax that makes carbon pollution ever less profitable.

But relying on a carbon tax that can be frozen by decree for years on end by any government that considers it political opportune to do so, is not sufficient.

It must be complemented by laws that impose hard caps on B.C.’s largest GHG emitters and that make them fully pay the costs of offsetting any emissions in excess of their allowable declining caps, with an added premium that ensures that simply paying to over-pollute doesn’t, in fact, pay.

By the same token, cabinet should be held truly accountable for ensuring that B.C. meets its interim emissions reduction targets.

Once those interim GHG reduction targets are passed by the legislature, they should not be amended without all-party support.

That could be assured through either a simple majority vote in the legislature, upon the unanimous recommendation of an all-party legislative standing committee.

Or it might perhaps be achieved via a requirement that any changes in B.C.’s legislated emissions targets are supported by at least two-thirds of all voting MLAs.

At least every four years, in the final year of its mandate, every government should be obliged to answer for its GHG reduction performance, before the election.

A small portion of cabinet ministers’ paycheques is already withheld to ensure they meet their individual and collective annual budget obligations. An additional portion of their remuneration should be withheld that will only get paid back if they meet their collective duty to ensure B.C.’s climate plan stays on track.

An independent Auditor General for Climate Action should be appointed by the legislature to annually monitor the government’s progress on climate action and its due diligence in meeting provincial GHG reduction targets with appropriate policy responses.

If any government’s efforts are found by that Auditor General for Climate Action to be woefully negligent and indirectly responsible for failing to meet the interim four-year targets for reducing provincial GHGs, those cabinet ministers should be legally precluded from running again for at least the next election.

That would sure make climate action a real priority for future governments.

It would put real teeth in GHG reduction targets that would serve to drive appropriate policy responses, to ensure those targets are met, however politically tough those required climate actions might be.

Martyn Brown was former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s long-serving chief of staff and a key architect of B.C.’s climate action plan and clean energy plan. He was the top strategic advisor to three provincial party leaders, and a former deputy minister of tourism, trade, and investment in British Columbia. A frequent contributor to the Georgia Straight, Brown is also the author of the ebook Towards a New Government in British Columbia. Contact Brown at towardsanewgovernment@gmail.com.

Image: Christy Clark/Flickr

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Seven members of Christy Clark’s hand-picked, blue-ribbon Climate Leadership Team are going public with their disappointment in the province’s lack of climate action in an open letter released Monday.

Signatories include noted environmental leader Tzeporah Berman, hereditary chief of the Squamish Nation, Chief Ian Campbell, professor of oceanography at the University of Victoria, Tom Pederson, B.C. associate director of the Pembina Institute, Matt Horne, Cayoose Creek Band chief, Michelle Edwards, professor Nancy Olewiler and executive director of Clean Energy Canada, Merran Smith.

The letter, addressed to Clark, states B.C. is in no position to shrug off the 32 recommendations made by the team last November in advance of the UN Paris Climate Talks. At the talks, Clark used the Climate Leadership Team’s work to bolster the province’s environmental credibility.

But the team itself is saying the B.C. Liberals have failed to implement the recommendations made by the group of experts. B.C has consistently pushed back the release date of a provincial climate plan.

The province, once an international leader in carbon pricing, has stalled action on climate by imposing a restriction on carbon pricing, creating loopholes for large industrial emitters and agressively advancing the creation of an LNG export industry. Compared to provinces like Ontario, which just announced $7 billion in funding for an ambitious climate plan, and Alberta, which announced an ambitious plan to phase out all coal-fired power plants last fall, B.C. is quickly falling behind.

Between 2011 and 2013, B.C.'s emissions climbed by 1.7 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That's the same as adding 440,000 cars to B.C. roads, according to Clean Energy Canada. According to Canada’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change those emissions are forecast to grow by 32 per cent between 2013 and 2030.

“B.C. can’t be a climate leader if carbon pollution is rising,” the letter states.

Read the full text of the letter here:

Dear Premier,

One year ago, you asked us to serve on the Climate Leadership Team and provide your government with advice on how to advance B.C.’s climate change plan. The motivation for the new plan was clear: while B.C. had been a leader on developing climate policy in Canada, and in fact around the world, the province’s carbon pollution was rising and stronger policy would be needed to get the province on track to meet our legislated emissions reduction targets.

You asked us for recommendations that would enable the province to meet its 2020 and 2050 climate targets, maintain a strong economy, and provide support to the British Columbians most in need. You asked us to reach consensus across a group that included leaders from First Nations, business, academia, local government, the provincial government and environmental organizations.

The process we worked through last year was difficult, but it was also successful. We managed to deliver in six months. Our work resulted in 32 recommendations that we provided to your government last November. The package of recommendations represents a mix of innovative thinking and compromise that fulfills our mandate and respects the different perspectives represented on the team. The recommendations provide a blueprint to help get the province back on track for our climate targets, stimulate innovation, create jobs, protect B.C. businesses and support rural communities.

We advised your government to commit to the package of recommendations this year so that British Columbians and B.C. businesses have time to plan. This is particularly true of our recommendations to strengthen the carbon tax, which were central to the overall package. Committing to a next schedule of increases, closing gaps in its coverage and explaining how the revenue will be used will help reduce uncertainty, ease the transition to a low-carbon economy for emissions-intensive and trade-exposed sectors and families, and support investments in clean energy across the province.

The reasons to move forward with this plan are stronger than ever. Climate change threatens our economy, our communities and our environment. To confront those threats, we need to increase our efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and better prepare ourselves for a changing climate. And as the world increasingly begins to act, the demand for clean energy is accelerating. The actions we take to increasingly shift to clean energy in the province will also help position B.C. businesses to provide the solutions the world needs.

We want to see the province reach its climate targets; delay only increases the costs and makes it harder to succeed. We are thus concerned about the shifts in deadlines. You initially committed to having a draft plan in advance of the Paris climate talks last December and a final plan by this March. The draft plan was cancelled and the deadline for the final plan was pushed to June.

B.C. is in no position to delay or scale back its efforts. The rest of Canada and the rest of the world have been taking action since B.C.’s initial climate plan in 2008, and B.C.’s increasing carbon pollution is taking us in the wrong direction.

B.C. can’t be a climate leader if its carbon pollution is rising. As the federal government places a renewed emphasis on climate action, now is the time for B.C. to be articulating its next steps. The new federal-provincial relationship on climate change will be defined by the jurisdictions taking actions to significantly reduce their carbon pollution and B.C. should be among them.

The Climate Leadership Team recommendations, implemented in their entirety, provide the blueprint for a B.C. climate plan to put the province back on track for the 2050 and interim 2030 targets.

Anything less is not climate leadership.

Sincerely,

Chief Ian Campbell, hereditary chief, Squamish Nation Chief Michelle Edwards, Cayoose Creek Band Tom Pedersen, professor of oceanography, University of Victoria Matt Horne, B.C. associate director, Pembina Institute Merran Smith, executive director, Clean Energy Canada Tzeporah Berman, adjunct professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University Nancy Olewiler, professor, School of Public Policy, Simon Fraser University

CC:

Honourable Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Honourable James Carr, Minister of Natural Resources Mr. Jonathan Wilkinson, Parliamentary Secretary Honourable Mary Polak, Minister of Environment Honourable Bill Bennett, Minister of Energy and Mines Honourable Shirley Bond, Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training Honourable Rich Coleman, Minister of Natural Gas Development Honourable Mike de Jong, Minister of Finance Honourable Peter Fassbender, Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development Honourable Todd Stone, Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Mr. Jordan Sturdy, Parliamentary Secretary

Image: Province of B.C.

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Clean power projects, such as run-of-river, thermal, solar and wind operations, are providing about 14 per cent of BC Hydro’s domestic supply of electricity and account for $8.6 billion in capital investment in the province, according to a new report commissioned by Clean Energy BC.   The report by MNP, a chartered accountancy and business advisory firm, finds investments have been made throughout the province, including in First Nations communities and areas hit by the recent collapse in global commodity markets.   “Clean Energy Projects can help diversify the economies of local communities by providing another source of employment in communities that may have traditionally relied on mining or forestry to provide the majority of local employment,” the report states.   Many of the 101 independent power projects currently in operation are owned by First Nations or have benefit or revenue-sharing agreements with local First Nations.

“Over the course of a decade, clean power producers have forged deep relationships with indigenous leaders, innovated made-in-B.C. solutions to protect ecosystems and breathed new life into struggling communities all over the province,” Paul Kariya, Clean Energy B.C. executive director, said in a press release. 

Those spearheading the construction of renewable power projects also tend to spend locally, researchers found.   “Approximately 25 per cent of pre-planning and planning spending, approximately 40 to 55 per cent of construction spending and approximately 70 per cent of operational spending occurs within local communities,” according to the report.   The largest investment was in northern B.C., with $2.3-billion worth of projects in operation and another $1-billion in development.   Clean Energy to Grow Despite Site C Dam 

In an interview with DeSmog Canada, Kariya said power projected to come from Site C is unlikely to affect the growth of small renewable energy projects.   “If B.C. is to aggressively electrify, which we must do, we will need as much electricity as we can find,” he said, pointing to recommendations made to the B.C. government from the Climate Leadership Team that are now under consideration.   Currently, B.C. Hydro appears to be in an over-supply situation and Site C will add to that, but it should be offset by a provincial move to clean power, said Kariya, who believes the clean power sector will continue to grow.   In 2014 Clean Energy B.C. proposed to government that they choose a series of incremental power projects to meet provincial needs instead of the Site C dam.   “We gave it our best shot,” Kariya said.   However, when government chose Site C, it did not mean smaller projects would not go ahead, he said.   “There is still room for both.”   The recent decision by the Canadian Wind Energy Association, however, might indicate something different.   The wind industry group publicly announced in February that it was closing up shop in B.C., saying they saw more room for opportunity in Alberta and Saskatchewan.   “We obviously have limited resources, and we’re going to focus our efforts on those markets which provide the greatest opportunities in the short term to see more wind energy deployed in the country,” association president Robert Hornung told Business in Vancouver.

Hornung added: “While B.C. has tremendous untapped potential for wind energy … it’s also true that, at this time, there’s no vision of short-term opportunities emerging in B.C.”   BC Hydro does not anticipate making any new calls for power until 2030. 

George Heyman, the NDP critic for the green economy, told the Georgia Straight that the government is failing to support renewable energy.

“That's a problem for development of jobs and industry in every corner of B.C.,” Heyman said. 

“And it's a problem for British Columbians who think we should be taking advantage of dropping tech prices and advancing technology in both wind and solar and other forms of energy production — instead of throwing all of our eggs into the basket of one big dam in Northeast B.C. with a price tag that's likely to go up steeply in the coming years.”

Clean Energy Development Numbers On the Rise

Despite B.C.’s focus on the development of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry and Site C, there has been a notable increase in clean energy development.   Clean energy projects have created a total of 15,970 years of construction employment, with another 4,543 years of employment expected to come with projects in the planning stages, the Clean Energy B.C. report notes.   Renewable power companies now employ 641 people, with projects under construction expected to create another 165 jobs.   “We’re proud of that work, but our members are now ready to create a new legacy by powering the green economy of the future,” Kariya said.   “If the provincial government heeds the advice of its own Climate Leadership Team, then we’re going to need plenty of clean electricity. We’re ready to deliver the goods,” he said.   Clean Energy B.C. has 160 members who develop renewable energy projects in cooperation with BC Hydro.

Image: Tommy Clark/Flickr.

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