Climate and Energy

To the Canadian government: Consider all greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas projects

[Updated May 1, 2013 - Two separate people have suggested removing common terms from the word clouds so that words like "BC" and "government" don't overshadow the other words used.  We agree. We have updated the wordclouds, below, to remove "BC", "B.C.", "British Columbia", "government", and "Copyright" from the wordclouds.] 

The BC New Democratic Party released its election platform on Wednesday (April 24th), the last of the four main parties to release its platform. 

I’ve just posted “Is now the time to criminalize ecocide”, discussing Polly Higgins’ proposal to create a crime of ecocide - criminalizing large scale environmental destruction.  But it also seems appropriate to make some observations on the legal issues around recognizing ecocide in Canadian criminal law.  After all, the Alberta tarsands are identified by the website “This is Ecocide” as the top example of ecocide in

In a recent post, I wrote about the broad significance of the recent Dutch court decision ordering the Dutch government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Earlier this week (June 24th) a Dutch court ordered the Dutch government to ramp up its climate change plans – to achieve at least a 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions relative to 1990 levels by the end of 2020. It’s an incredible win – one that is being rightly celebrated by climate activists around the world. 

Thank you to Lori Waters for the following guest environmental law alert post. 

One Sunday morning, I received an intriguing link to the “Route Safety” animation videos for the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. As one of many British Columbians opposed to the pipeline  and to any lifting of the tanker ban along our coast, I watched Enbridge’s animations with interest.

Imagine that your local stream is being polluted by a corporation.  Imagine that corporation is one of the very small number of polluters actually charged with violating the Environmental Management Act. Imagine that they go to court and, after spending taxpayer dollars on a trial, are ordered to pay a fine (a fine could be up to a maximum of $1,000,000). That fine won’t restore the stream, but at least there’s a consequence for polluting your stream.

If you are an advocate for climate solutions, if you oppose tar sands pipelines and supertankers, or aspire to have a more balanced Canadian energy policy, you may have recently learned that the RCMP characterizes you as part of a harmful “anti-Canadian petroleum movement” made up of “peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists.” Like many other “peaceful activists”, West Coast Environmental Law* was shocked to see our name in

It might seem a bit odd for Environmental Law Alert (based in BC, Canada) to be reporting on developments in Kenyan environmental law, but Kenya’s new Climate Change Act, 2014, brought into force in May 2016, contains a provision that is worth talking about around the world – one which provides for lawsuits against greenhouse gas polluters.

According to pipeline supporters and cheerleaders, one of the primary rationales for building pipelines to tidewater – Canada’s east or west coast – is to maximize the price that Canadians can get for tar sands oil by reaching world markets. It has been repeated so many times that it has become something of dilbit dogma. The argument goes like this: we need a pipeline to tidewater because it will unlock new markets overseas (usually Asia) where we can get a better price for Canadian oil than we would without those pipelines.