EARTHFUTURE.COM by Guy Dauncey

Last year, I gather that three things happened to make Gordon Campbell wake up to the enormous scale of global climate change. He saw Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth; he read Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers; and he went to China in November, where he was shocked at the extent of China’s air pollution, and its vulnerability to sea level rise as a result of climate change.
He also received hundreds of letters from BC citizens imploring him to act on climate change and urging him to cancel the plans for the coal-fired power plants. Climate change, after all, is the second greatest collective threat that human civilization has ever faced, after nuclear war, and BC’s inaction has been unconscionable.
It was with the greatest delight, therefore, that I heard the commitments to tackle the challenge in the throne speech in February. Both coal-fired power plants are gone and we are to reduce our emissions by 33 percent below today’s level by 2020, or 10 percent below the 1990 level. Europe’s goal is 20 percent below 1990 by 2020, but it’s a good start.
In the weeks after the throne speech, and the energy plan that followed it, the critics had a field day. It’s true that if we want to poke holes in the new commitments, it is easy to do. The $4 billion Gateway program, with new roads and bridges that are guaranteed to increase traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, is still going ahead. In the budget, there was 10 times more money for oil and gas than for renewables. How can such a commitment be real if it contains such huge contradictions?
In my bones, however, I feel that the commitment is genuine. We all live with ironies and contradictions as we continue to use fossil fuels while knowing that we need to stop. The BC Liberal government is no exception.
So what should our agenda be now that the government has set these new goals? One of our focuses must be changing the Gateway program so that plans for new roads and bridges are scrapped, to be replaced with a toll on the Port Mann Bridge and other key points of entry into Vancouver.
Approximately 127,000 vehicles cross the Port Mann Bridge every day. If every driver had to pay a $10 toll on incoming trips, evidence from London, England, where the toll for entering the city centre is $18, shows that traffic would be reduced by around 20 percent. The toll would generate $500,000 per day that could be used to expand transit, cycling facilities and other trip reduction strategies.
A typical commuter coach costs $100 per hour to operate, so if a return trip from Vancouver to the suburbs takes two and a half hours, the cost is $250 per coach. With $500,000 a day in income, using simple back-of-the-napkin math, this would pay for 2,000 coaches. If each coach carries 40 commuters, sitting in comfort around a table for four with space for a laptop, newspaper and coffee, that’s 80,000 commuters a day. A coach uses 15 times less space than the same number of people driving on their own in cars. Give the coaches a dedicated lane, and hey presto, the road congestion is solved.
All the government needs to do is borrow the money to expand our transit system and create more cycling and ride-sharing programs in advance of the toll, and the need for new bridges and roads will disappear. Since a coach produces eight and a half times less CO2 per passenger than a car, the amount of greenhouse gases associated with commuting will also decline.
Let me be unhesitatingly clear. This crisis of global climate change is every bit as bad as you fear. The urgency is critical. Top global scientists warn of a possible four-metre sea level rise this century. The last time I looked, Richmond, Delta, New Westminster and the Vancouver International Airport were all less than four metres above sea level. We have no time to lose by being cynical.
Finally, BC’s premier has taken the lead and set the highest standards for greenhouse gas reduction in North America. Now, we all need to become engaged.

Guy Dauncey is president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association www.bcsea.org and author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change, New Society Publishers, 2001. www.earthfuture.com.