VANCOUVER—More than 50 B.C. organizations are calling for climate liability legislation that could smooth the way for lawsuits similar to the ones brought by major U.S. cities in an effort to force fossil fuel companies to cover their share of climate costs.

On Friday, Baltimore became the latest American city to file a lawsuit that asked the courts to hold oil companies financially responsible for climate impacts, the day after a U.S. judge dismissed a similar suit filed by New York City.

That decision followed a dismissal last month of a suit brought by San Francisco and Oakland.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted Thursday that the city plans to appeal the decision.

“Big Oil must be held accountable for their contributions to climate change and the damage it will cause our city, out country and our planet,” he said.

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Andrew Gage, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, said similar cases could be fought in Canada now, but there would be a lot of complicated legal questions to answer, and he expects oil companies would appeal them all.

It would be less expensive and more transparent for the government to develop legislation that clarifies responsibility for climate change, he said.

“At some point we have to ask whether tax payers alone should be paying for those costs or whether there should be some way to recover them from an industry that has made hundreds of billions of dollars in profits selling the products that gave rise to many of these problems,” Gage said — especially as the costs of climate change continue to rise.

The B.C. government estimates municipalities in Metro Vancouver alone will have to spend $9.5 billion between now and 2100 to deal with rising sea level, he said. Then there are the rising costs of wildfires, raging now and expected to worsen with climate change.

The fossil fuel industry has known since the 1960s that its products were going to cause these types of impacts, but it’s had no economic incentive to change its business model because it didn’t expect to have to take responsibility for its product, he said.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, meanwhile, said global action is required to address climate change.

“No single person, country, company or group of companies can achieve the goal. In that context, the basis for individual legal liability for global warming doesn’t exist. The definition of individual in this case includes a person, a corporation or a government,” said Killeen Kelly, a media relations consultant for CAPP, in a statement.

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Kelly added that from CAPP’s perspective climate change isn’t an issue for the courts and instead should be addressed through “focused collaboration between industry and governments.”

Gage said he’s not arguing that fossil fuel companies should pay 100 per cent of climate change costs, but with the burden now falling largely to taxpayers or individuals harmed by climate change, a new balance is needed that makes companies responsible for the impact of their products — just like tobacco companies are now liable for the health costs of cigarettes.

StarMetro asked B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change whether it would consider climate liability legislation but did not receive a response by publication.

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