All projects that pose a climate risk must receive a rigorous assessment, say environmental lawyers
OTTAWA – On Wednesday, the federal government released draft regulations that would exempt high-carbon projects from impact assessment under Bill C-69, a move environmental lawyers say will significantly undermine Canada’s ability to meet its climate change obligations.
VANCOUVER, BC, Coast Salish Territories – Environmental lawyers are delighted that City of Toronto staff will examine how the city’s massive climate change-related costs can be recovered from the fossil fuel industry.
Forty-nine years ago Earth Day was born. Millions of people are working on solutions to the Earth’s deep and intractable human-caused maladies. There is cause for despair at the real possibility of an uninhabitable earth, and there is reason for outrage at the state of the planet.
POWELL RIVER, BC – Tla’amin Territory – Local government officials meeting in Powell River this weekend will grapple with how taxpayers can afford to pay for a rising tide of climate change costs. Elected representatives will discuss a resolution exploring the idea of a class action lawsuit against global fossil fuel giants like Chevron and Shell to recover a share of those costs.
In January 2017, over 50 BC-based environmental groups asked the province’s local governments to consider a class action lawsuit to recover a share of their climate-related costs from global fossil fuel companies. Since then the State of Rhode Island, New York City, San Francisco and a dozen other local governments in the U.S. have launched such lawsuits, and in BC there is growing interest in ways to pay for rising costs of climate change and to press fossil fuel companies to pay a fair share of those costs.
Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, is about protecting a remote an ecologically important place from the introduction of a risk that does not currently exist there, namely the introduction of bulk crude oil tanker traffic. Crude oil tankers do not ply BC north coast waters because of a half-century of regular and impassioned efforts by Indigenous nations, northern communities and supporters throughout BC and Canada.
Prevention of environmental damage is always better than response and clean-up. This became very obvious to residents in Metro Vancouver in 2015, when a cargo ship, the MV Marathassa, spilled 2,700 litres of fuel into the waters of English Bay.
This submission contains West Coast Environmental Law’s comments on the BC government’s 2018 Policy Intentions Paper on spill preparedness and response in BC. The Intentions Paper was released as part of the second phase of BC’s consultation process regarding proposed spill response regulations, following concerns expressed by numerous British Columbians about the need to better protect lands, waterways and communities from spill risks.
School Strike for Climate
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the #fridays4future #schoostrike4climate in Vancouver. This event was one of over 2,000 events worldwide in 125 countries, involving 1.5 million people.
There are a number of recent developments on the Trans Mountain file – from the reconsideration (“redo”) of the environmental assessment to unanswered questions about the federal government’s purchase price for the pipeline, and another (much quieter) NEB decision regarding rates for the existing Trans Mountain pipeline. And all of these events have made it increasingly clear that Trans Mountain is a bad deal for Canadians.
The “redo”