Vancouver moves to sue oil companies for costs of climate change

[All Along The Watchtower]

Vancouver’s City Council took preliminary steps in July toward suing major oil companies, seeking damages for the local costs of climate change.

The move, in a city that has been a leader of the environmental movement in Canada and was the birthplace of Greenpeace, would be the first lawsuit of its kind in the country against the fossil fuel industry, whose carbon emissions contribute to global warming.


snip...

The council’s move to lay the groundwork for a lawsuit came shortly after local environmental groups launched a “Sue Big Oil” campaign, urging local governments to file a class-action lawsuit against global oil companies.

“We cannot make the types of dramatic shifts that society needs to deal with climate change while the global fossil fuel industry makes hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, of profit from selling the same products that are causing the problem,” said Andrew Gage, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, a leader of the campaign.

NYT

[No War, but the War on Christmas]

Based move from one of my favorite North American cities. Now crack down on foreigners buying up all the housing and pricing out locals and I may actually considering moving there with my Aunt whose a local.

[Schiff for Senate]

Based.

Hopefully the oil companies have to pay truckloads of money. No amount of money paid is enough.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Based move from one of my favorite North American cities. Now crack down on foreigners buying up all the housing and pricing out locals and I may actually considering moving there with my Aunt whose a local.

Imagine thinking you can solve a housing crisis without building more homes.

[No War, but the War on Christmas]

Based move from one of my favorite North American cities. Now crack down on foreigners buying up all the housing and pricing out locals and I may actually considering moving there with my Aunt whose a local.

Imagine thinking you can solve a housing crisis without building more homes.

Lol I don't know how you got that from what I said but OK.

[dead0man]

Based move from one of my favorite North American cities. Now crack down on foreigners buying up all the housing and pricing out locals and I may actually considering moving there with my Aunt whose a local.

did you see the irony and ignore it, or are you just not seeing it?

[No War, but the War on Christmas]

Based move from one of my favorite North American cities. Now crack down on foreigners buying up all the housing and pricing out locals and I may actually considering moving there with my Aunt whose a local.

did you see the irony and ignore it, or are you just not seeing it?

I do see it, but I didn't really phrase myself correctly. There is a difference between people who want to move somewhere to build a life and contribute and simply purchasing residency and housing for citizenship purposes while leaving it empty 95% of the time. The latter is what Vancouver is of course experiencing on a massive level along with many other major urban cities these days, though in Vancouver the problem seems particularly egregious and concentrated from one locale.

[dead0man]

there is a law lets someone claim residency while only spending 5% of their time there?  Is it a Vancouver law, BC, or Canada in general?  Whatever it is, that sh**t is broken.

[Benjamin Frank]

Based move from one of my favorite North American cities. Now crack down on foreigners buying up all the housing and pricing out locals and I may actually considering moving there with my Aunt whose a local.

Vancouver and British Columbia already have a speculation and vacancy tax that addresses this issue quite a bit. Unfortunately, there are many people who want to move to Vancouver and area which keeps pushing the housing costs up.

https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-tax.aspx

There is no question there is a problem with NIMBYISM in Vancouver and some of the suburbs, but from 2016 to 2021 the population of Vancouver proper increased by about 30,000 from around 635,000 to around 665,000. Keep in mind, that Vancouver is a peninsula, so has a definite finite amount of space.

The mainstream right wing media here in Vancouver (The Vancouver Sun, radio station CKNW) have gone after both.

The Vancouver Sun published a complaint from somebody that it took them 15 minutes to fill out the 'confusing' online Speculation and Vacancy tax form, but received a whole host of replies stating "it took me two minutes and wasn't confusing at all."

I no longer subscribe to the Vancouve Sun, but radio station CKNW has tried to refer to this litigation as 'out of touch politicians' not focussing on their jobs, as if climate change isn't going to add enormous expenses to city maintenance costs. The right wing grandstanders on CKNW,  Mike Smyth, Jill Bennett and Jaz Johal have always been out of touch with reality.

Prominent lawyer before his untimely death, Joseph Arvay, was representing some of the litigants in this case (there is no question as to the non suspicious nature of Arvay's death) and provided the legal base of the case to The Vancouver Sun:

“There is nothing unfair in a municipality suing the fossil fuel companies to recover the costs associated with climate change even though the municipality, like all of us, have and continue to contribute to climate change in one way or the other,” Arvay said Wednesday. “The courts would be called upon to determine proportionate responsibility and liability, not sole responsibility. And there can be little question that it is the fossil fuel companies who bear significant responsibility for GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions.”

“There are some parallels with similar lawsuits against Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. The fossil fuel companies have created our addiction to oil and at the same time knew how damaging that oil was to our planet and yet concealed that danger from us for a long time,” Arvay said. “The ‘polluter pay’ principle is pretty basic in our law. And the companies that caused or contributed to that pollution, and from which they profited greatly, ought to pay their fair share to help remediate the damage it has caused and will continue to do so.”

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/dan-fumano-vancouver-councillor-seeks-climate-emergency-declaration

[If my soul was made of stone]

Walking through a park in suburban Brussels yesterday and staring with dead and weary eyes at all the grass turned a sickly Prufrockian yellow by the brutal European heat waves of this summer, I wondered if there was really anything left here worth saving.

[CumbrianLefty]

Walking through a park in suburban Brussels yesterday and staring with dead and weary eyes at all the grass turned a sickly Prufrockian yellow by the brutal European heat waves of this summer, I wondered if there was really anything left here worth saving.

Of course there is, such defeatism just plays into the hands of the evil doers.

[Santander]

Do these morons not realize they live in one of the great natural resource economies of the world, which is what allows them to have a beautiful sizeable city with no real economy?

[MaxQue]

Do these morons not realize they live in one of the great natural resource economies of the world, which is what allows them to have a beautiful sizeable city with no real economy?

The oil is in Alberta, the neighbour they hate.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Do these morons not realize they live in one of the great natural resource economies of the world, which is what allows them to have a beautiful sizeable city with no real economy?

Bro it’s reached 107 degrees Fahrenheit here in the SF Bay Area for the past three days in a row, California is in yet another drought just like we were for many years a few years ago, the West is on fire, crop failures are happening all over the world, and the glaciers are breaking off of Alaska and Antarctica.

This ain’t normal.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Do these morons not realize they live in one of the great natural resource economies of the world, which is what allows them to have a beautiful sizeable city with no real economy?

The oil is in Alberta, the neighbour they hate.

Canadian Texas.