Kelowna and the premier: Burning issues of the day
Premier Christy Clark, preoccupied of late with ushering in the Age of Liquefied Natural Gas, which will make us all rich, took time out of her busy schedule to visit her Kelowna constituency this week. Her constituency was on fire.
There were photos and footage of the premier looking very concerned at the charred ground, and of her speaking with the firefighters who had manned the front lines. She announced sombrely, as if to reflect her resolve, that her government would do all it could to provide help for and supply relief to her constituents. Given that they provided her the parachute that landed her safely in the legislature, it was the least she could do. These were her people, after all, if only by adoption.
Kelowna has ignited at least three times in the last dozen years — in 2003, 2009 and now in 2015 — regularly enough to wonder if Mother Nature has set her alarm clock to go off at sixyear intervals.
The most spectacular of these was the Okanagan Mountain Park fire of 2003, which destroyed 239 homes on the southern edge of the city and forced the evacuation of 27,000 people. I remember walking through one of the ruined subdivisions with a man who had lost his home: The above-ground pool he had put up in his backyard for his daughter’s eighth birthday had collapsed into a lump of molten plastic. They held the birthday party at a neighbour’s house that, miraculously, had not been touched by the flames, and in the middle of the festivities the birthday girl broke into sobs.
A freakishly hot spring and summer, low run-off and fish kills, water restrictions from here to the Mexican border, a record number of fires across the province — a climate-change future is either imminent, as our scientific community has warned us, or it’s already arrived.
“Our projections,” said University of B.C. associate professor of the department of forests, Lori Daniels, “show that beginning in 2050 and going to 2080, the kind of fire seasons we are seeing today are going to become the average.”
Where in the past a fire season like this year’s was the exception, Daniels said it will become the rule for our children and grandchildren.
If so, B.C. is in a mortal bind and at a crossroads in its history.
There is no better and ironyladen illustration of that than the premier’s rally-the-troops visit to Kelowna.
Clark is, at the moment, determined to remake B.C. into a major exporter of hydrocarbons, from promoting come-hither LNG deals to opening up the Fraser River and port of Vancouver to increased shipments of coal and oil.
She has insisted exports of LNG will actually help reduce GHG emissions by reducing the reliance of Asian countries on coal for energy production. But there’s no evidence of that, and it ignores the fact that countries like China and India are moving much quicker toward renewable energy production than we are. In that case, LNG exports won’t effect a reduction of greenhouse gas production, but a prolongation of it.
Meanwhile, out of political expediency, the premier foisted on the public a transit plebiscite designed to fail, while offering only token support for it. Rather than take the lead on transit that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Metro Vancouver, she threw the problem back on local governments and refused to devote any revenue from the carbon tax to go toward building transit infrastructure. Even as a symbolic gesture, it was an opportunity lost.
Not so long ago, B.C. was a leader in Canada when it came to GHG emission reduction. From 2000 to 2010, levels fell annually. The province pioneered the carbon tax.
But in 2011, levels rose and they continued to rise every year thereafter. The government’s goal of reducing its GHG emissions to 33 per cent below 2007 levels — made during Gordon Campbell’s term as premier — is now shot to hell.
Even the federal government scolded B.C. recently for failing to meet its targets, and you know you have a problem when the Harper government gets all righteous about climate change.
In May, federal environment minister Leona Aglukkaq noted in a letter to her provincial counterpart, Mary Polak, that the province’s emissions were on course to increase from 2005 levels by 11 per cent to 2020.
“I think B.C. had made a lot of progress over the years,” said Ian Bruce, science and policy manager of the David Suzuki Foundation. “But our targets have stalled. The latest inventory report on emissions found that they are projected to increase unless we take further action. And a lot of that increase revolves around LNG production.”
Bruce, by the way, is a geological engineer who once worked for one of the largest oil and gas conglomerates in the world. He spent time hunting for deposits in the Gulf of Mexico. He had his epiphany there, and changed jobs, and his vision. Of the conflicting messages and lack of resolve coming out of Victoria these days, he said:
“I think B.C. right now is in a sort of identity crisis when it comes to climate change.”
I’d go farther than that: I would say that the province has completely lost its way. An LNGfuelled future and increases in oil and coal exports and greater congestion on our roads is not rational thinking. It’s insanity.
And the premier isn’t bringing aid to her Kelowna constituents to help fight the fires.
She’s bringing fuel.
An LNG-fuelled future and increases in oil and coal exports and greater congestion on our roads is n ot rational thinking. It’s insanity.