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The Globe's Mark Hume writes today in his article Can B.C. make a U-turn to green? "For the past decade, British Columbia has been an energy pig, with greenhouse-gas emissions soaring.
"Now [Premier Gordon] Campbell is promising to apply the brakes and reduce those emissions to 10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. That ambitious target would outpace even California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger aims to cap that state's greenhouse-gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2020.
"The question is, can Mr. Campbell deliver?
"B.C., birthplace of Greenpeace, a province where people embrace nature so fervently even loggers call themselves environmentalists, might already seem to be the greenest place in Canada.
Globe reporter Mark Hume
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"But the statistics tell a different story, a story about how a booming economy and a growing population has put B.C. on what the Suzuki Foundation calls 'a torrid pace to catch up' to the worst greenhouse-gas offenders in the country."
Mr. Hume's article is the first in a week-long Globe series and he was online Monday to answer your questions on his provocative question: Can B.C. make a U-turn to green?
Mr. Hume has been covering environmental and political issues in British Columbia for more than 20 years. He has written four natural history books about B.C. Before joining The Globe, as a national correspondent in the Vancouver bureau, he worked at the National Post and The Vancouver Sun, where he won a National Newspaper Award for leading a special project that examined the environmental fate of Georgia Straight.
Mr. Hume's answers appear at the bottom of this page.
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Sasha Nagy, Business Features Editor, globeandmail.com: Hi Mark. Thanks for answering reader questions about B.C.'s new commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When I lived in B.C. back in the 80s, the environmental debate was focused very much on forestry. It was mainly, to cut or not to cut. After reading your article today, I found it interesting how global warming has made the focus on forestry much more complicated. There's the emergence of the Pine Beetle problem, the concept of carbon sinks, clean energy and the notion of carbon offsets. How will the forest industry in B.C. respond to these new measures?
Mark Hume: There is a limited shelf life to the millions of trees killed by the pine beetle infestation and the B.C. government has already launched a major effort to harvest as many as them as possible, before they deteriorate and lose their value. So-called salvage logging operations are now under way all over the province, and a huge re-planting effort will follow. There are several problems, however. First, replanting will not replace the forests for 30 years. Second, a recent study by the government found that if the pine beetle killed forests are fully harvested, it will greatly contribute to flooding. So B.C. has to figure out which trees to leave, even though they are dead. The other issue, which has yet to be resolved, is whether or not the province will be able to claim the newly planted trees as carbon sinks. That international debate has not yet been resolved and although Premier Gordon Campbell has expressed the hope that B.C.'s new forests will generate revenue as carbon sinks, there is some real doubt about that.
Philip Polutnik from Calgary writes: Mr. Hume. B.C. is not an energy hog like Alberta and doesn't use coal to make electricity or burn natural gas to make upgrade bitumen and it doesn't have that many smoke stack industries. Probably 75 per cent of its population lives in the Fraser Valley. After changing light bulbs and adding more insulation, how is B.C. going to be able to get the kind of reductions it says it will to be able to achieve these ambitious targets?
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