An BC environmental team has launched a judicial review against the provincial government, claiming it failed to fulfill its legal duty to reveal detailed emission reduction plans to combat climate change. In court documents filed March 30, 2022, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Sierra Club BC targeted the CleanBC County Roadmap to 2030, released last year as part of the Department of the Environment and Climate Change Strategy plan for mitigation emissions by 40 percent by 2030. As an intermediate step, the province says it will cut emissions by 16 percent below 2007 levels by 2025. By failing to provide details on how to do so, the Sierra Club claims the ministry has violated its own climate change accountability law. The documents also state that detailed plans are missing showing how the province hopes to meet its emission reduction targets in 2040 and 2050. “We are trying to get the BC government to come up with a credible climate plan,” said Alan Andrews, director of climate program for Ecojustice Canada, whose lawyers are taking over the case. “It claims to be a climate leader, but it does not comply with its own climate laws, it has no plans to achieve any of its oil and gas targets for 2025, 2040, 2050 and without them. plans, we are left completely in the dark about whether they achieve their goals. And so we can not hold them accountable. “ The biggest blind spots, according to Sierra Club BC CEO Jens Wieting, are in the oil and gas sector. In the most extreme example, Wieting cites the lack of details on how the province will represent emissions from a liquefied natural gas plant at Kitimat, which, as the largest in BC, is scheduled to be completed in 2025. “This project alone would significantly increase emissions in the same year that we would have to achieve this first intermediate goal,” Wieting said. “There is simply no plan in the accountability report that shows how this is still possible.” By law, the minister must set greenhouse gas emission targets for individual sectors of the economy, including oil and gas, transportation, industry, and buildings and communities. All this is intended to add a reduction of up to 40 percent below the levels of 2007 to 2030. However, a progress review should be completed by 2025 – when BC has ordered emissions to be reduced by at least 16 per cent lower than in 2007 – again once every five years. By 2040, greenhouse gas reductions are expected to reach 60 percent and by 2050 to 80 percent. If BC fails to meet any of these intermediate targets, it risks blowing up the entire emission reduction roadmap by the middle of the century. “Obviously, these goals are built on top of each other,” Wieting said. “Without these goals, we can not consistently reduce emissions, which is what science needs.” From the United Nations to the International Energy Agency, leading scientists and energy experts around the world have come to the conclusion that the world economy must drastically reduce emissions if the planet hopes to keep global warming below zero. 1.5 C – the limit beyond which scientists say the world can not avoid the catastrophic effects of overheating. “We are proud of the leading CleanBC project on our continent,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy said in an email. “We are not in a position to comment on the specifics of this issue as the matter may be before the courts,” the spokesman added. To date, BC has never achieved its emission reduction targets. The first of its kind in BC, judicial review is not expected to reach a courtroom for several months. None of the allegations have been tested in court.
