The 2024 Report was due in June last year. What could be holding it up?
As I reported in July last year, the government still owes us the Climate Change Accountability Report for 2024. The Climate Change Accountability Act says that the minister “must” publish the 2024 Report by June 30, 2024. Even today, the latest version of the report on the government’s web site is from 2023.
The minister who has the legal responsibility to produce this report has changed. On June 30 last year that would have been the Minister of the Environment; since November, the Minister of Energy has inherited the task.
There is progress though, of a sort. It appears that on December 30 last year, the government quietly slipped onto its web site BC’s latest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory. This includes the provincial GHG emissions data for 2022, the data that should be explained in the missing 2024 Report. You won’t find any announcement of this on the ministry of energy’s web site.
The updated inventory shows that GHG emissions in 2022 rose to 65.6 megatons equivalent of carbon dioxide (MtCO2e), from 63.8 MtCO2e in 2021. This is a smidgeon higher than the 65.5 MtCO2 figure from 2007 when climate change accountability reporting started. It’s also higher than the 65.4 MtCO2 figure from 2017, when the NDP party took power in the province.
The new figure should come as no surprise. The federal government reported its version of BC’s 2022 figures long ago (May 2024 or before). While these numbers differ slightly from the newly-released provincial version, the story was the same – a rise in GHG emissions in 2022 from 2021, and no reduction at all since 2005.
I can see why the government might be struggling with the wording of the 2024 Report. For all the money spent on the CleanBC program, it has completely failed to reduce our GHG emissions since 2017. And, as has been reported by the BC Business Council, the government’s own analysis shows that CleanBC will shrink the province’s economy by almost $30 billion by 2030.
Perhaps the provincial government squeezes a little more accuracy out of the numbers by waiting almost a year after they were available to the federal government, who knows? But it doesn’t change the fact that the law required publication of the 2024 Report by June last year, and it still isn’t available.
And the 16 percent reduction in GHG emissions that the government still, to this day, says it is “committed to” as its target for 2025 remains as delusional as ever.
The Minister of Energy isn’t personally responsible for the failure to reduce GHG emissions up to 2022 (although he will be in future). But he is responsible now for the missing 2024 Report. Let’s see it.