Figures in a B.C. greenhouse gas inventory released quietly before Christmas show emissions have risen for four of the last five years.

Previously the province released a full public report on emissions, including inventory methodology, every two years but in December the government released a excel spreadsheet simply listing emissions figures for the second year in a row. The spreadsheet was published without any formal announcement or news release.

By law the province is required to reduce emissions 80 per cent from 2007 levels by 2050. In 2008 the province created a benchmark within that reduction, committing to get to 33 per cent reductions by 2020.

But the new figures show B.C. is not on course to meet that 2020 target. Instead emissions are only 2.1 per cent lower than the baseline year of 2007 and are on the rise.

The government needs to take drastic steps if there is any hope of meeting targets designed to keep global warming below two degrees, Jens Wieting of Sierra Club B.C. told DeSmog Canada, adding it is distressing the emissions inventory was updated without a public announcement.

"Why is it an environmental organization that has to put out a press release telling the public this information is now available?" Wieting said.

Wieting said robust reports are needed to help decision makers effectively work to reduce the province's emissions adding this was the first time in 10 years the government has released only excel files. 

"We should be informed by more detailed not more superficial information," he said. “What we have seen in B.C. for years is noble rhetoric about the need to confront climate change, but a lack of meaningful action.”

“We have not heard from the B.C. government how serious this is and that we are not close to meeting our reduction targets,” Wieting told DeSmog Canada.

A decade after B.C. committed to its 2020 target the province is essentially in the same place, Wieting said.

The government is planning to introduce a legislated target of a 40 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, a spokesperson from the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy told DeSmog Canada. The province will introduce targets and plans for the industry and transportation sectors, including helping emissions-intensive industries reduce emissions while remaining competitive.

“Underscoring these actions is the appointment of the new Climate Solutions and Clean Growth Advisory Council, which is advising government on how to achieve our climate objectives efficiently and effectively while growing our clean economy,” the spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.

“What we have seen in B.C. for years is noble rhetoric about the need to confront climate change, but a lack of meaningful action.” https://t.co/zMvjpcZ8QE

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) January 12, 2018

Natural Gas Industry, Fracking Under Emissions Scrutiny

Sierra Club B.C. is calling for decisive changes in the way the province deals with greenhouse gas emissions, including a public inquiry into the impacts of hydraulic fracturing — often referred to as fracking — which annually releases 118,000 tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The province has promised a review of fracking, a process used to extract natural gas, but a coalition of community, First Nations and environmental groups wants it broadened to a full public inquiry.

“If we increase fracking we can’t make any further progress,” said Wieting, who is concerned that Premier John Horgan is heading to Asia on a trade mission later this month without committing to delivering a clear message that new liquefied natural gas (LNG) and other fossil fuel projects would compromise B.C.’s efforts to meet emissions targets.

“People are making changes in their lives. There are bike lanes and public transit, but all that will be overshadowed by new industrial development,” Wieting said.

B.C. has a history of considering projects, like the Pacific Northwest LNG facility, that would make it impossible to meet climate targets. The climate impacts of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline project were not considered by the provincial or federal governments during the project’s environmental assessment.

Sierra Club B.C. is recommending that all major industrial projects undergo a climate test, including a carbon footprint breakdown, as part of the environmental assessment process.

B.C. Emissions Reporting in Need of Overhaul

There should also be changes to the way in which the province releases emissions data, Wieting said.

Previously, a detailed report was released every second year, but, for the last two years, the information has come through a spreadsheet that no longer shows emissions related to logging.

Emissions from slash burning — a process used to eliminate wood debris in logging operations — are shown as being ‘under review’ and not available. Slash burning would have accounted for 13 per cent of B.C.’s total emissions in 2013, according to previous government inventories. That’s the equivalent of over 1.7 million cars on the road for one year.

However, despite their significance, forest emissions are not included in the official provincial count.

A practical solution would be to protect old-growth tracts of forest that store large amounts of carbon while ending the practice of slash burning, Wieting said.

Image: B.C. Premier John Horgan. Photo: Province of B.C. via Flickr

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The B.C. government is being taken to court for giving BC Hydro permission to move amphibian species along the banks of the Peace River during construction of the Site C dam.

The legal challenge, recently filed by Josette Weir and Sierra Club BC, asks for a judicial review of the government’s actions in June when a regional manager with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) granted BC Hydro permission to perform amphibian salvage without proper permits issued in accordance with the Wildlife Act.

The emergency permits, first revealed by DeSmog Canada, raise questions about the relationship between government ministries and BC Hydro, which is under pressure to keep to Premier Christy Clark's word to get the dam "past the point of no return" before the May 2017 provincial election.

“There is a lot of pressure to get this project built amid controversy,” Weir, who lives in Smithers, B.C., told DeSmog Canada. “But it’s very important that the people who are in charge apply the law.”

Documents released to DeSmog Canada, including a request from BC Hydro for last-minute permits and several e-mails between a FLNRO official and local First Nations, show ministry bureaucrat, Chris Addison, issued permission for emergency amphibian salvage without due process.

In the e-mail exchange Addison suggested he had the legal authority to do so although Jocelyn Stacey, assistant professor at the UBC Allard School of Law and expert in environmental and administrative law, told DeSmog Canada Addison violated the law when he granted BC Hydro exemption from the permitting process.

“The Wildlife Act and its regulations do not allow for exemptions from the ordinary permitting process,” Stacey said. “This means that FLNRO acted without legal authority when it issued the exemption to BC Hydro.”

Weir said she was deeply troubled by this apparently blatant circumvention of the law.

“What is shocking is that [Addison] did it knowingly,” she said. “One can only wonder about the political hierarchy that is overseeing his ability to issue exemptions or not.”

“There must be a lot of political pressure and we as members of the public must be vigilant.”

Weir and the Sierra Club BC brought the case to the provincial Supreme Court through the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation (CELL).

“I’m very thankful for that newly formed group,” Weir said. “It’s going to be their first case and I’m so grateful the lawyers would look into this. Otherwise it would have just fallen under the radar.”

B.C. Faces Lawsuit Over Rushed #SiteC Permits https://t.co/BVRP7zl45g @StopSiteC #bcpoli #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/84CIYFYRhZ

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 29, 2016

Chris Tollefson, co-founder of the centre and experienced environmental litigator, said this issue is troubling from a rule of law perspective.

“This is the kind of situation that desperately needs to be brought to the courts for adjudication,” Tollefson said. “The evidence here suggests that a government official not only didn’t follow the rule of law but was actively assisting BC Hydro in breaking the law. If that’s true, that should concern all British Columbians regardless of how they feel about Site C."

Bob Peart, executive director of Sierra Club BC, said he sees the issuing of illegal permits as part of a larger government status quo, where environmental and First Nations rights are violated with impunity. 

The responsibility is left with individuals, First Nations or environmental organizations to bring legal challenges to the courts, Peart said, which is time-consuming and expensive.

"Industry and government have much thicker wallets than we have and to do these cases ourselves — we just don’t have that kind of funding, nor do First Nations," he said, adding the government appears to bet on the fact no one will challenge them when they misstep.

"It's a spin of the dice, risk analysis on their part," he said. "It's a part of the pattern of this government."

David Conway, BC Hydro’s community relations manager for the Site C project, did not respond to DeSmog Canada’s request for comment.

The Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations told CTV they were acting in the public interest.

"Given the extenuating circumstances, the regional manager…decided to communicate his comfort with the amphibian removal proceeding on a limited scope and in advance of a broader permit which has now been issued," the statement read. "The alternative would be to allow the amphibians to die."

In 2011, Weir won a legal challenge that forced Health Canada to review the impacts of Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup on amphibian species.

“It opened me up to amphibians. I have no claim that I have a special relationship with amphibians aside from being French,” she said with a laugh.

“But I do understand that they are a part of the natural web that we are eroding all the time. As members of the public we should be extremely vigilant about the health of the planet.”

Weir added Site C is a unique issue because of the political pressure to complete the project.

“There is this sense in the north that no one is looking,” Weir said. “That’s why it’s very important to follow the rules. That’s why we have laws and regulations.”

Image: Site C construction along the banks of the Peace River. Photo: Jayce Hawkins

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This is a guest post by Jens Wieting, forest and climate campaigner with Sierra Club B.C.

The wildfires currently raging uncontrolled in Alberta are not within the range of what’s normal.

As of May 29, 854,984 hectares have burned this year in Canada, mostly Alberta — almost 10 times the 25-year-average amount of forest lost by this date (89,391 hectares).

And summer hasn't even started.

Warm temperatures and low humidity mean that, for the time being, there is no end in sight. A similar situation is taking shape in British Columbia.

The correlation between higher average temperatures and wildfires in Canada has been well-researched, but the extremes now underway still come as a shock. Leading climate scientists have compared the urgent need to prevent further overheating of our planet to a person with a dangerously high fever. Our body temperature is normally about 37 degrees. If it increases by two degrees to 39, you have fever. If it goes over 41, you might die.

The life support systems of our planet are fairly resilient, but almost all of them have thresholds and tipping points. Cross them and we face severe danger, such as extreme wildfires. These fires are just one example of increasingly unmanageable impacts of human-caused climate change. In B.C. snow cover is at record lows and drought is becoming the rule rather than the exception in many parts of the province.

These events emphasize what the majority of the world’s scientists and policy-makers have already acknowledged: it is time to end the fossil fuel era. It’s also time to embrace the post carbon economy and increase protection of ecosystems and their environmental services offer us a path towards a liveable future. 

This means that our governments must accept that new major fossil fuel development — like liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects or new oil pipelines from Alberta — will undermine any realistic path to stabilize the climate. Real solutions,including renewable energy systems, improved resource and energy efficiency, mass transit, recycling and new service models like the sharing economy, exist and need our full support.

British Columbia is aggressively pursing the development of fracked gas and the creation of an LNG export industry. Investment in major fossil fuel projects like this harmful in several ways,by exacerbating the climate problem,  by degrading, fragmenting and polluting the natural environment, and at the same time taking time, energy and resources away from clean, alternative solutions like small-scale hydro, wind, solar and geothermal.

Sierra Club B.C. recently released a vision paper for B.C. called The Future is Here that identifies three areas of action and 10 critical steps we must take to change course in the face of threats to our natural environment, our economy and climate.

B.C. has, for a long time, paid lip service to environmental concerns while actively pursuing unsustainable extraction of fossil fuels and natural resources that threaten local tourism economies, sources of drinking water, conservation efforts and indigenous rights.

But true climate solutions are also economic solutions that don’t degrade our natural environment. As the illustration above shows, reducing climate pollution, creating a clean economy and saving nature must go hand in hand.

Our current economic model is becoming increasingly out of date as we realize a healthy environment is the basis of the new economy. In B.C. in particular, protection of ecosystems on land and sea is vital to our agriculture, seafood harvest, recreation, tourism and First Nations cultures.

Protecting the land and sea also increases the chances of our iconic species like caribou, wolves, grizzlies and salmon surviving the changes to their habitat brought about by industrialization and climate change.

Taking steps to move to a clean economy, protect the environment and battle climate change are all interrelated. The sooner we realize that the quicker we can protect society and our natural resources from the worst impacts of climate change and business-as-usual practices — like raging wildfires or oil spills.

As many studies have shown, the longer we wait to act on climate change the harder and more expensive it will become.

10x the 25-year-average annual amount of fires burned this year in Canada, mostly AB https://t.co/3jYdurSwAB #ableg pic.twitter.com/d0RbEZkwv9

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 30, 2016

From the Maya to the Easter Island cultures history shows that climate change and ecosystem breakdown can lead to collapse if civilizations fail to undertake the required reforms while stable conditions prevail. Neither government nor society will be able to plan and implement the scope of change required once the consequences and costs of environmental crisis and climate impacts become unmanageable. 

Wealthy industrialized countries with high per capita emissions like Canada have much greater flexibility when it comes to pursing alternative economic and energy systems. For other countries struggling to provide basic access to education and clean water to its citizens, the climate challenge is much more stark.

That, in part, is why countries like Canada have promised to help less-developed nations transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy as part of the Paris Agreement. Thanks to its size, vast resources and relatively small population British Columbia is well positioned to make a successful transition from boom and bust cycles to long term prosperity — if we act before we lose manoeuvring room to respond to the climate crisis.

Image: B.C. Wildfire Service/Facebook

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Richard Kinder, Houston-based billionaire and CEO of Kinder Morgan Inc., told an industry audience last week the TransMountain pipeline expansion project “will go forward” if granted approval at the federal level, despite growing and very vocal opposition to the project in British Columbia.

Kinder said pipeline opponents are using “spurious arguments” to purposely strangle pipeline projects across North America as a means of fighting development in the Alberta oilsands.

“I am sure there are legitimate concerns about any mega infrastructure development, but a lot of this is [about] the pipeline as a choke point to get at production of the oilsands, which there are people in Canada and the U.S. who want to strangle that altogether,” Kinder said.

Kinder’s comments seem to affirm criticism that the company is refusing to take local opposition seriously.

“Rich Kinder's optimism shows he really does not understand B.C.,” Tzeporah Berman, adjunct professor of environmental studies at York University, told DeSmog Canada. “British Columbians love this coast,” she added, noting the recent bunker fuel spill in Vancouver’s English Bay “was a real wake up call.”

“Rich Kinder's confidence is surprising given Enbridge's Northern Gateway fiasco, the looming Supreme Court challenges to the National Energy Board’s pipeline review, the First Nations court cases and the polling showing that the vast majority of British Columbians are opposed to his project.”

The TransMountain review process has been fraught with tensions between the National Energy Board (NEB) and municipal authorities, environmental organizations and local First Nations.

Several major environmental organizations along with two opposition parties are calling on Premier Christy Clark to pull out of the federal review process. The call for withdrawal is supported by the Union of B.C. Municipalities, the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities and coastal First Nations.

Frustration with the review process has grown steadily in recent months, led in part by Kinder Morgan’s refusal to disclose information to intervenors. In addition, the NEB process prevented many members of the public — including climate scientists and other experts — from participating due to new exclusive rules.

“If the NEB really wanted to hear from British Columbians, why didn’t they design a process where our voices could be heard?” Caitlyn Vernon from the Sierra Club B.C. asked. “That’s why the B.C. government needs to step in and create a review that includes local voices, respects municipalities and First Nations, and considers the full impacts of Kinder Morgan’s proposal — especially its contribution to climate change.”

Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Canada, said Kinder’s recent claim points to a sense of entitlement prominent within industry.

"It is indicative of the hubris of the oil industry that CEOs assume that they have a right to build what they want and where they want,” Stewart said.

“Mr. Kinder is not only underestimating the depth of opposition to his new pipeline, but he also doesn't seem to understand that concern over climate change isn't going to go away." 

Eoin Madden from the Wilderness Committee said Kinder’s strong position is purely a matter of corporate posturing.

“To be honest, I don't think Rich Kinder lacks respect for the seriousness of pipeline opposition here in B.C.,” Madden said. “His role at Kinder Morgan demands that he publicly appear confident and supportive of the TransMountain pipeline project regardless of whether or not his moral and business sense screams that it’s a dead project."

He added the conversation around Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline played out in a similar way.

However, Madden said, “I do think Kinder is purposely blind to the public interest in this issue. Why? Because he is paid large amounts of money to be.”

But things may be different after the English Bay spill, Madden said. 

“One thing remains crystal clear in its aftermath: folks in this part of the world care deeply about the Salish Sea, and seeing those waters sullied really hurt.”

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This week the federal government was legally obligated to establish protected habitat for threatened North Pacific humpback whales. Instead the Harper government suddenly moved to take the humpback off the “threatened species” list. That would eliminate the legal requirement under Canada’s Species At Risk Act for protecting habitat along the British Columbia coast.

The government based the downgrade on a recommendation made by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), the independent scientific body that designates which wildlife species are in trouble, in 2011.

Critics have noted the decision eliminates a major obstacle to both the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. After the conditional approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline by the National Energy Board's joint review panel, the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre launched a legal complaint on behalf of B.C. Nature requesting the government's recovery strategy for humpback whales be taken into consideration.

A federal recovery strategy for humpback whales on the B.C. coast released in October cited potential increased oil tanker traffic as a danger to dwindling populations. The recovery strategy, released after a five-year delay, also noted the danger toxic spills posed to critical habitat.

If built, the two pipeline projects would increase oil tanker traffic from eight to 28 per month, increasing the risks of collisions with whales, potential spills in vital habitat and excessive noise.

The good news is that the North Pacific humpbacks are recovering after nearly being wiped out by whale hunting, Marty Leonard, chair of COSEWIC, told DeSmog Canada.

The whales were listed as a species of “special concern” back in 2011, Leonard said. “Their numbers are increasing which is good to see. But they still face threats.”

Those threats include oil spills, collisions with ships, entanglement in fishing gear and overfishing of their food sources.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest feature on the planet — bigger than all land areas combined. After 250 years of whaling, an estimated 1,400 humpbacks remained in the North Pacific. They’re among the largest marine mammals reaching 14 metres in length and weighing up to 40 tonnes. Hunting was banned in 1965 and today there are about 20,000 in the entire region. Perhaps 3,000 are found seasonally in B.C. waters.

The Species At Risk Act took affect in 2003, prior to which Canada had little endangered species protection.

In 2005, COSEWIC listed North Pacific humpbacks as a “threatened” species. COSEWIC defines “threatened” as a species likely to become endangered if nothing is done. “Endangered” means about to go extinct. The government’s move will demote the status of humpbacks to “species of special concern.”

The federal government is required to produce an official “recovery strategy” for all species on the endangered and threatened lists, including legal protection of essential habitat.

Despite its legal obligation, the Harper government has persistently failed to do so for humpbacks and another 170 species.

In September 2012, Ecojustice lawyers filed a lawsuit in response to the Harper government’s delay on behalf of five environmental groups, the David Suzuki Foundation, Greenpeace Canada, Sierra Club BC, Wilderness Committee and Wildsight.

In February 2014, the Federal Court ruled the Harper government was breaking the law and was very critical of the government’s delay.

“We took the federal government to court and won,” said Caitlyn Vernon of the Sierra Club BC. 

“There is clearly an enormous systemic problem within the relevant Ministries,” Justice Anne L. Mactavish wrote in her judgment.

Justice Mactavish also noted that when it comes to protecting species, delay can lead to extinction.

The lawsuit prompted the Federal government to develop a recovery strategy for North Pacific humpbacks in September 2013, eight years after being listed as threatened.

The recovery strategy required legal protection of designated feeding grounds to be in place by this week, Vernon told DeSmog.

But rather than implement such protections, the government moved to downgrade the status of the whales to eliminate the need for legal protection of habitat.

“It’s good news humpback numbers are increasing, but their recovery is fragile. The science is clear that increased tanker traffic from the proposed pipelines will affect that recovery,” said Vernon.

“One oil spill and they’re back on the endangered species list.”

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