Demand climate accountability!

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TAKE ACTION! Ask your local government to demand climate accountability!

BC is still burning. 2018 is now the second worst fire season on record after 2017. Nearly 10,000 square kilometres have burned since April 1st. More than 550 fires are still burning across the Province. Nearly 5,000 people have been forced from their homes and another 22,000 are on evacuation alert.

BC taxpayers cannot afford to continue to pay 100% of the costs of preparing for and dealing with wildfires, flooding, drought, sea-level rise, and other impacts made worse by climate change. Fossil fuel companies are not paying their fair share – and that has to end.

Local governments have an opportunity for climate advocacy, to demand that the largest twenty fossil fuel companies (like Chevron and Exxon) pay their fair share of climate change related costs facing BC communities at the upcoming Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM). Please take a moment to write to your Mayor and Council and ask them to support the UBCM Climate Accountability for Fossil Fuel Companies Resolution (B128).

You can send a letter using the sample text provided, but please take a moment to personalize it - personal letters are much more powerful.

Example talking points:

How is climate change impacting you? How is it affecting your community?
Your concerns about how your community will deal with the current and coming impacts of climate change. Talk about the particular climate impacts (such as wildfires or flooding) that face your community and that you worry about.
The injustice of taxpayers alone bearing the costs of climate change, while the companies that made billions of dollars selling the products that cause climate change pocket the profits.
The fossil fuel industry has known since the 1960s that their products cause climate change, but funded misinformation campaigns, lobbied against climate action and sat on renewable energy patents, delaying the development of cleaner technology.
As long as fossil fuel companies believe that they will not pay any of the costs of climate change, they have no financial incentive to start making the major changes that are needed in the energy business to solve the climate crisis.
Communities in the U.S. and Peru are suing many of these fossil fuel companies for climate impacts, and voting for the UBCM to send a Climate Accountability Letter is the least that BC local governments can do.

This campaign is being coordinated in partnership with West Coast Environmental Law, AWARE, Georgia Strait Alliance, and many other community groups across the Province.

Click here for more information on why the UBCM (and individual local governments) should send climate accountability letters.

Dear Mayor and Council, I write to ask you to support Resolution B128 – Climate Accountability for Fossil Fuel Companies at this year’s Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) Conference. This resolution asks the UBCM to send a Climate Accountability Letter to twenty of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, asking that Chevron, Exxon and the rest of these companies pay their fair share of the climate costs that BC communities are increasingly incurring – such as the costs of wildfires and flooding. Similar letters have been sent by the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities and by several communities across BC. Climate change is one of the major threats facing our community. As residents we are already experiencing its impacts, and as taxpayers we are starting to pay for the costs of dealing with and preparing for those impacts. As long as the fossil fuel industry makes billions of dollars on the assumption that we alone will pay for the costs of climate change, big oil companies like Chevron and Exxon Mobil will have every incentive to continue to stand in the way of real action on climate change. I urge you to support UBCM Resolution B128.
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