Climate change & energy policy

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Getting to Net-Zero in Canada: Summary

Feb 8, 2024
Scale of the problem, government projections and daunting challenges The urgency of mitigating climate change through significant emission reductions is globally recognized—most recently with the call to transition away from fossil fuels at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28). Canada has long accepted this challenge: its latest pledge… View Article

Knives out for Clean BC

Jan 25, 2024
It’s taken sixteen years of incremental policy change in BC but you might have noticed that climate policies are starting to take hold.  Electric vehicles are widespread, new building standards with much higher energy efficiency are being introduced and heat pump sales have surged as people replace home heating equipment.  Nonetheless, the long knives are… View Article

Fires and farmworkers: Climate justice means improving protections for migrant farmworkers

Sep 15, 2023
The impacts of the climate crisis are socially and geographically uneven: the wealthiest regions contribute disproportionately to the destruction of the planet while the poorest regions suffer the heaviest consequences. In this context, migrant farmworkers find themselves doubly displaced, facing droughts and inundations in their home countries, then heatwaves, fires and floods where they come… View Article

Failure to act means failing dikes

Sep 13, 2023
  Province must take responsibility for flood protection infrastructure Provincial and municipal officials were warned repeatedly that the dikes in one of the cities hit hardest by the floods that paralyzed southern British Columbia in 2021 were structurally unsound and could fail should water levels in local rivers rise quickly. For years preceding the disaster,… View Article

The Energy Action Framework and BC’s carbon crossroads revisited

Jul 25, 2023
Since first starting down the pathway of climate action in 2007, the BC government has both developed policies to reduce carbon emissions domestically while simultaneously promoting a growing oil and gas export industry. These contradictions are evident in the March 2023 announcement of a new Energy Action Framework, which tries to balance the interests of… View Article
Aerial photo of Smithers mill surrounded by piles of logs

Promises of cleaner air up in smoke

Apr 28, 2023
Calls for BC environment minister to suspend pellet mill permit Every year, the air in the Bulkley Valley community of Smithers becomes hazardous to human health as thousands of fires known as slash burns are deliberately set at logging sites. The contaminated air can stay trapped in the valley’s airshed for extended periods as the… View Article