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British Columbia Aligns With California to Create a Green Bloc Along Pacific
"If you wait for a whole continent to come together, sometimes it takes too long," said British Columbia's Gordon Campbell, who met last week with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to plot action.
(By Reed Saxon -- Associated Press)
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"We were in disbelief. This seemed to come right out of the blue," said Lisa Matthaus, a campaign director for the Sierra Club's British Columbia chapter. Not only were Campbell's greenhouse gas pledges ambitious with concrete goals, she said, but "they have been made in a very public way. B.C. is leading North America right now."
Campbell denied that his was a recent conversion; he had put forward environmental goals since he was elected in 2001, he said. But "there is no question that both the public and the government are seized by the urgency of this issue," he acknowledged.
Working together to create a unified regional attack on the problem can create "continental momentum," he said.
"California has a population of 36 million. British Columbia has a population of 4 million," Campbell said. "If we looked at tailpipe emission [regulations] by ourselves in British Columbia, we wouldn't get very far. But when you start to create a marketplace with our two jurisdictions, add other states and some of the western provinces . . . you are up to 60 million people driving this agenda forward."
Campbell is "a very smart politician. He's reading the tea leaves very carefully," said Michael Magee, a veteran political consultant in Vancouver. "There is a huge, green tidal wave in public opinion. No one wants to be swept away by that. They want to be on the crest of it."
Magee noted that Campbell's party receives substantial contributions from the mining and oil and gas industries and said that taking a strident environmental position is "perilous" for him.
The provincial budget that followed Campbell's throne speech devoted only $4 million to the environmental agenda he had outlined, which disappointed some. "We called it the 'inconsistent truth,' " Matthaus said.
A major energy plan that followed stuck to the ambitious goals for promoting clean production of electricity but also continued government subsidies to the oil and gas industry and a major highway construction plan.
"The throne speech laid out an exciting new direction for B.C. But it was just a speech," said Bruce, the environmental group analyst. "We have had politicians before talk about taking action on global warming, but when it comes to setting out a concrete plan, it hasn't happened."
Some of Campbell's plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions 33 percent by 2020 count on still-uncertain technology, such as burying carbon underground, critics say.
Still, "the genie is out of the bottle. It can't be put back," Matthaus said. "The debate over the science of whether or not there is global warming is over. Now the debate is what we do about it."
