The impact of the climate crisis has hit close to home for New West resident Tim Takaro.
Takaro, a physician-scientist and professor at Simon Fraser University, appeared before city council on Monday night to urge the city to sign on to Sue Big Oil class action lawsuit. A resident of New Westminster since 2005, Takaro grew up in Asheville, North Carolina – a community that has been devastated by Hurricane Helene.
“This is the poster child today for the clanging bell of our climate emergency,” he said. “Asheville, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, got just shy of a metre of rain in three days. The extreme event devastated my hometown.”
Takaro, a longtime climate activist, said the planet is in “uncharted territory” due to climate change. He said models don't show events like the one that just occurred in Asheville, which is located about 400 kilometres from where Hurricane Helene came to shore, or the atmospheric rivers that hit British Columbia three years ago.
Takaro said the “death and destruction” attributable to fossil fuel-driven climate change are real.
“Unfortunately, we struggle with record-breaking extreme weather events and record-breaking fires,” he said. “We have to keep in mind that, as we say, down south, ‘We ain't seen nothing yet.’ What our children and their children will face will be much worse.”
Takaro said Big Oil has long known of the harms being caused by its products. He said a 1982 memo from one of the world’s largest oil companies showed what temperatures would be forecast in future years if it continued with oil production.
“These predictions, 42 years later, were remarkably on target. Big Oil knew what harms their product was causing,” he said. “Like big tobacco and the asbestos industry, they built a mountain of disinformation over the past 40 years.”
Several residents attended Monday’s council meeting urging the city to support Coun. Tasha Henderson’s motion related to a Sue Big Oil class action lawsuit. In a 4-2 vote, city council supported the motion to have staff:
- Report back on the opportunity and costs for New Westminster to join the Sue Big Oil class action lawsuit and present potential cost and staff resource needs as part of the draft 2025 operating budget.
- Assess the cost of joining the Sue Big Oil class action lawsuit via the city’s climate action decision-making framework to determine the appropriate funding source.
Mayor Johnstone and councillors Ruby Campbell and Nadine Nakagawa supported the motion, which was opposed by councillors Daniel Fontaine and Paul Minhas.
The motion’s preamble states that the City of New Westminster manages, maintains and prepares municipal infrastructure to protect residents from future heat waves, wildfires, flooding and other climate impacts, thereby safeguarding the health and safety of residents and their properties, and as a result faces massive costs due to climate change, which are expected to increase.
Henderson’s motion states that more than 20 local government in the United States and around the world, including nine local governments in B.C., have filed lawsuits to recover a share of their climate costs, such as for loss and damage, adaptation, and climate preparedness, from fossil fuel companies.
Death and destruction
Three students belonging to the Monkey Rebels advocacy group at Glenbrook Middle School asked council to “put yourself in our shoes” when considering the Sue Big Oil motion.
“I want you to understand the fear that we carry on our shoulders every day. I want you to feel the responsibility that we feel for our planet and the fear that we have that what we do will not be enough,” said one of the students. “The decision to start caring for our planet is not a question of life – it is a question of life or death. By passing this motion … you are choosing a future filled with prosperity over a future of death and destruction.”
Fiona Koza, who works for West Coast Environmental Law, said New Westminster is “at serious risk” of flooding. She said the cost of upgrading the city’s dikes is more than $154 million.
Koza said the Sue Bill Oil class action is looking for municipalities to pledge an amount equal to $1 per resident, which is “just a tiny fraction” of the amount that many municipalities already pay on climate change costs. She said 70 cities in the United States area already suing oil companies for costs related to past and future climate impacts, including flash floods and heat domes.
“Right now, our communities are paying the full cost of climate damage and adaptation. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry, which is the largest driver of climate change and makes billions of dollars every day in profit, is currently paying nothing for the cost of climate damage and community adaptation costs,” she said. “We're saying that the world's largest polluters should therefore pay a fair share of the climate change impacts that they're causing.”
New West resident Hugh Brown said the 2021 heat dome killed 33 New West citizens and hundreds of B.C. residents, but they will not be the last people to die because of the climate crisis. Despite warnings from their scientists about the impacts oil production would have on the climate, he said those companies acted to preserve their profits, to deny the science, to fund disinformation campaigns, and to delay action.
“New Westminster and other cities are paying the price,” he said. “This includes everything from emergency response to increasing infrastructure costs, higher taxes, straining already strained city resources and staff.”
Liam Mackay supported having New Westminster follow the lead of other B.C. municipalities, including Burnaby and Port Moody, in getting involved in the Sue Big Oil class action.
Mackay said he knows people whose farms were destroyed by the atmospheric rivers that pummeled B.C. in November of 2021 and caused massive flooding in Fraser Valley, Merritt, and Spences Bridge communities. He said Queensborough, the downtown and the Braid industrial area in New West are all the risk of flooding.
“It is prudent, financially prudent, to be part of the movement to ensure that Big Oil is responsible for helping for these costs,” he said.
Council divided
Henderson said the financial and human cost of managing and mitigating the impacts of climate change are “enormous and overwhelming” and include flood protection and extreme heat management. She said oil and gas companies make billions of dollars in profits each year – and spend millions of dollars lobbying governments to expand resource extraction.
“They can absolutely afford to pay for the massive costs associated with climate change; we can't,” she said. “But we can likely afford to pay $1 per resident to sue Big Oil.”
Fontaine said he could not support having the city contribute $90,000 toward a class action lawsuit when “taxpayers are facing 23 per cent tax increases” in three years.
“The $90,000 that we're about to blow on this tonight – just imagine what it would mean for community grants, for arts, for culture, for various block parties,” he said. “The list goes on and on what you could do in New Westminster for $90,000.”
Coun. Ruby Campbell said the city’s facilities asset management plan provides details about the city’s assets and their condition, prioritizes the work to be done, and discusses the funding of those works.
“If we want to talk about massive tax increases, if we don't fund our facility asset management plan, if we don't get ahead of climate emergency, we are not being fiscally responsible, and we are going to have bigger problems down the road,” she said.
Nakagawa said the class action lawsuit aims to “make the polluter pay” and pick up the costs that are impacting the community as a result of extracting oil and gas.
“People in our community have already died,” she said. “There are areas of our community that are particularly vulnerable, and many our community that are particularly vulnerable. This allows us to do right by them and do everything that we need to protect them from the impacts of climate crisis that we're already feeling.”
Johnstone said the city is facing “huge costs” to infrastructure and emergency response related to the climate emergency and does not have the power to tax Big Oil. He supports joining with other municipalities in an effort to try and recover some of the costs of addressing local climate impacts and holding oil companies accountable for their actions.
“This is one tool that we have as a local government to make the polluter pay,” he said.
