Will parties be good stewards of our planet and adapt to climate change?

Last updated October 15, 2024

Climate change is the largest debt to be passed from one generation to the next in our history. Younger and future generations are poised to inherit the messes all of us have helped to make, but failed to clean up. It’s no wonder our kids are telling us that it’s urgent to do more: 78% know that climate change impacts their mental health, and almost half believe governments are betraying them and future generations.

British Columbians should be proud of our province’s historical leadership on responding to the risks and costs of a changing climate. In this election, however, our proud legacy is being toppled. Despite the lives and livelihoods that are in jeopardy, protecting our climate is not a leading issue on which parties are competing to offer ambitious, evidence-based solutions. To live up to the promise of being a good ancestor, this needs to change.

All political parties have a stake in solving the intergenerational climate tensions already before us. Here are the questions we're asking as we evaluate parties for our Good Ancestor Proficiency Report Card. Keep reading for our answers.

• Do parties ask our kids and future generations to pay dearly to clean up the pollution messes that we’re unwilling to pay for today?
• Do parties have a realistic plan to move BC towards a cleaner economy?

TL;DR?

Check out the report card

Do parties ask our kids and future generations to pay dearly to clean up the pollution messes that we’re unwilling to pay for today?

Good ancestors pay for our pollution so we pollute less, and clean up our mess. We betray our kids if we don’t.

Both the BC Conservatives and the BC NDP are campaigning on dropping the provincial carbon tax. For those concerned with the wellbeing of younger and future generations, it’s deeply disturbing that the two parties leading in the polls won’t stand by the principle: If you make a mess, clean it up.

If British Columbians follow the example set by Mr. Rustad and Mr. Eby, the next time a parent walks into their kids’ messy room, they’ll say: “You made this mess! Now… just clean up some of it, and only if it’s not too hard, and only if every other kid cleans her room too. Wait, is this mess even real? You know, even if it is, who cares – just leave it for the next kid who sleeps in this room to clean up.”

Every parent who skewered their foot on a toy this morning or tripped over a pile of dirty laundry knows that’s no way to run a household. And it’s no way to run our province.

The NDP platform suggests that we needn’t worry about the undeniable fact that we are all polluters. Whether we want to admit it or not, regular British Columbians pollute much more on average than most people in most other countries. Instead of grappling with this hard truth, the NDP let us off the hook, suggesting we can just tag industries with big profits and carbon footprints to “pay their share” and take “pressure off families” (p. 14).

Absolutely, we should make sure big polluters are stepping up so the rest of us don’t feel like chumps when we pay the consumer carbon price. Since Mr. Eby has had 7 years to ramp up efforts to do just that, it’s too bad the NDP platform doesn’t offer more detail on what exactly the party will do to recoup these pollution costs. But eliminating the carbon tax won’t substantially reduce the financial squeeze too many BC families are facing. For every dollar we spend on life’s basics, the price on pollution adds less than one cent. The pain of inflation is altogether too real – but the reason for this pain isn’t carbon pricing. This election, we should hold all party leaders responsible for coming up with realaffordability solutions.

Although it must be said that Mr. Eby doesn’t deny the risks of climate change nearly to the degree that the BC Conservative leader does, we nonetheless assign the BC NDP a grade of regressing to reflect the party’s retreat from evidence-based action to avoid condemning our kids to a future plagued by a growing number of unnatural disasters caused by our pollution.

If you’re relying on party platforms to inform your vote, it’s noteworthy that you won’t find much related to the risks and costs of climate change – or policy responses like the carbon tax – on the BC Conservatives’ website. Apparently for Mr. Rustad, this threat to the wellbeing of our kids doesn’t merit a specific heading or discussion. Ample media coverage confirms the Conservative leader’s anti-pollution pricing stance – notably his oft quoted remark that “taxing people into poverty is not going to change the weather.” Facts may not win the day in current political debate, but Mr. Rustad could brush up on growing evidence, informed by Nobel-prize winning scholarship, that taxing carbon pollution does effectively reduce the emissions that are ramping up extreme weather risks.

The BC Conservatives also get a grade of regressing.

There is only one party proposing to act as good ancestors, stewarding the planet’s health for our kids and grandchildren: the BC Greens.

We award the Green’s an extending grade for standing up for the hard truth that we all pollute, and that we all have a stake and a responsibility to do more – not less – to leave a healthy and safe province for our kids.

It’s worth noting that alongside retaining the consumer carbon tax, the BC Greens share the BC NDP’s principle of making sure big polluters pay their fair share. To meet this commitment, the platform proposes measures that include increasing the industrial carbon tax, introducing a windfall profits tax on oil and gas, and ending fossil fuel subsidies (p. 39).

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Do parties have a realistic plan to move BC towards a cleaner economy?

Good ancestors adapt by design, not in response to disaster.

The NDP’s CleanBC plan is recognized as one of the best in North America for transitioning the economy so that our daily and industrial activities don’t blow past the planetary boundaries on which human beings depend for our health and livelihoods. The government commissioned some modeling research to estimate about how this plan could influence some economic outcomes in the years ahead. In the spirit of transparency, these estimates were shared with the public.

The Business Council of BC raised some concerns about the results of this modeling exercise. The Council points to data that can be interpreted to signal that while the provincial economy will continue to grow under the CleanBC plan, it won’t grow as quickly as it might under policies that permit ongoing reliance on energy sources that are compromising planetary health.

In response, the BC Conservatives have promised as part of their costed election commitments (p. 2) to discard the province’s climate-action policies.

Here are four reasons why the BC Conservatives should reconsider this risky position.

First, the model was not designed to provide a comprehensive analysis. Most notably, it does not include any of the adverse impacts of climate change that hurt the economy, nor the ways that CleanBC policies will stimulate other sectors of the economy with more jobs, better incomes, investment, etc.

Second, the model was asked to simulate reductions in greenhouse gasses (GHGs) by 2030 from the transportation sector as well as from other sectors. To do so, the model relied on a specific placeholder assumption to represent a component of the yet-to-be-implemented clean transportation action plan: a cap on vehicle kilometres traveled. Nearly two-thirds of the inferred lower-level of economic growth can be attributed to this assumption.

The fact that this assumption is highly unlikely raises questions about the scale of forecasted negative impacts on economic growth. The model could have relied on assumptions grounded in other, more likely scenarios – for example, that vehicles continue to drive without releasing GHGs, because of increased reliance on EVs and other renewable vehicle fuels. This alternate assumption would likely dramatically change the GDP growth projections produced by the model.

Third, the model does not engage with predictions from many experts which show that demand for BC fossil fuels is likely to be lower than assumed in the model. If demand drops, the BC economy would be left with stranded, outdated fossil fuel “assets.” By not factoring in the potential for declining fossil fuel demand, the model may over-estimate the baseline level of economic growth BC is likely to achieve with a status-quo approach. 

Fourth, and more generally, economies are always changing. Continuing with the status quo will not prepare us for a net zero world. Planning for net-zero emissions is the only way to adapt by design, rather than in response to disaster.

For more information about how the three party platforms compare in their commitments to planetary health, you may find helpful a new analysis from Clean Energy Canada – a think tank based at Simon Fraser University. It analyzes the energy plans of the three parties, finding:

• The BC Conservative “plan’s details are undermined by a number of false assumptions.”
• The BC Green plan includes many “component parts [that] are aligned with meaningfully advancing climate action,” but require more detail to better compare how the Green proposals would stack up relative to the NDP plan.
• “[I]f the NDP chooses to eliminate BC’s longstanding consumer carbon tax at a future date, we would emphasize the importance of continuing to implement its CleanBC policies, including finalizing the province’s forthcoming oil and gas emissions cap.”

In light of all this information, we award the parties the following grades for their commitment to adapt our economy by design, not in response to disaster:

• Conservatives: regressing
• Greens: proficient
• NDP: proficient

*Thanks to economists Nancy Oleweiler and Dave Sawyer for their consultations on the CleanBC modeling.

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