Section 7.1 of the Climate Change Accountability Act obliges the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy to “make public no later than the end of June” the provincial government’s Climate Change Accountability Report.
As I write this (July 13, 2024), the relevant ministry web page hasn’t been updated since November 30, 2023, and shows the 2023 report as the most recent edition.
Where is the 2024 report?
Spoiler alert
The government of Canada has already published its 2024 report on GHG emissions, giving us the 2022 data that the provincial government will be reporting (it seems to take over a year to collect and published the data).
The news isn’t good – BC’s GHG emissions in 2022 went up slightly, to 64 megatons of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e). This means that despite all the efforts of CleanBC, we are exactly where we started in 2007, when BC produced 63.8 MtCO2e of GHG emissions.
No doubt the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy is busy drafting an explanation, but we already have hints of what they might say. The Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation’s latest Energy Strategy refers to the “increases in population and a growing economy” that have occurred in recent years, without which electricity demand might actually have fallen. We will probably see these themes picked up and expanded upon in the 2024 accountability report.
We can’t have it all
But the energy strategy document unwittingly highlights the government’s climate dilemma. No matter how much we might wish it, it seems to be almost impossible for BC to have both GHG emission reductions and economic growth, at least in the short term.
As political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. has noted, the iron law of climate policy is that “When policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time.”
As I’ve already written, I expect the government to abandon its 16 percent GHG emission reduction target for 2025. The 2030 target of a 40 percent reduction might charitably be considered aspirational, but to expect to reduce today’s GHG emissions by 16 percent as quickly as 2025 is probably delusional.