Numbers for the B.C. government’s climate change plan

VANCOUVER, B.C. – The British Columbia government has released its plan to dramatically cut pollution as it builds a low-carbon economy.

Here are some of the goals in the government’s plan:

• The strategy will require an additional 4,000-gigawatt hours of electricity over current demand, equal to increasing BC Hydro’s current system-wide capacity by about eight percent, or about the demand by consumers in Vancouver.
• By 2032, new buildings will be 80 percent more efficient than homes built today. Emission from buildings will drop by 40 percent, the government says.
• Fossil fuel use for transportation will drop by 20 percent by 2030, spurred by 30 percent of sales of new light-duty cars and trucks being zero-emission vehicles.
• By 2025, methane emissions from the natural gas sector will drop by 45 percent.
• Ninety-five percent of organic waste from agriculture, industry and municipalities will be diverted from landfills and turned into other products by 2030.
• Seventy-five percent of landfill methane will be captured by 2030.
• The legislated target for 2030 is a reduction of 25.4 megatonnes of greenhouse gas from the 2007 baseline.
• The province set new targets for greenhouse gas emissions in May, committing to reductions of 40 percent by 2030, 60 percent by 2040 and 80 percent by 2050.
• B.C.’s price on carbon increased this year to $35 per tonne and will go up $5 per year until 2021 in an effort to encourage lower-emission alternatives.