It seems Premier Christy Clark is still going around boasting about B.C.’s once-successful carbon tax.
The fact is, since she became premier, greenhouse gas emissions have gone up. No wonder. She froze the carbon tax in 2013 for at least five years.
Perhaps her more negative contributions toward emissions reductions have been:
• Canceling funding for the Live Smart program that helped people reduce their carbon emissions;
• Getting rid of funding for the Climate Action Secretariat;
• Refusing to do more to reduce the greenhouse gases from the upstream natural gas industry;
• Leaving the flagship carbon tax, created by her predecessor Gordon Campbell, frozen since 2013.
While emissions have gone up in B.C. by about 13 per cent, the European Union is already 19 per cent below its 1990 emissions levels in the same period.
While Clark plans her much-vaunted LNG export terminals and pipelines, her own Environment Minister, Mary Polak, warns that one of the three biggest polluters in the province is natural gas production.
“It’s not going to be easy by any means,” cleaning up after at least three LNG plants and new pipelines, Polak said in recent media reports.
Meanwhile, the targeted LNG export market in Asia is rapidly disappearing.
Wake up Clark. Why don’t you go get busy on your promised Climate Action Plan? Or were you planning to release that along with the 2017 election?
Stan GauthierParksville
