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So who’s going to pay for this? Don Fodor is among a growing number of residents asking that question.

Worried about how his three grandchildren will fare in a world where both land and sea temperatures are rising, devastating storms are becoming more frequent and coastal communities like his are at risk because of sea-level rise, he started reading and asking questions.

“The fact is most of us don’t have a clue,” Fodor said in a phone interview from his Powell River home. “I find it really, really sad to imagine young people becoming aware of the imminence of the crisis and the scale of it.”

But Fodor got excited when he read about the Oregon-based Our Children’s Trust that leads legal campaigns to push for emissions reductions and climate-recovery policies at all levels.

With the help of West Coast Environmental Law, Fodor and the local climate action group pushed Powell River to join five other B.C. municipalities in demanding that the world’s largest oil companies pay their share of climate change-related costs.

The letters are polite. Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, for example, closed her three-page letter to Chevron’s CEO asking: “Will you confirm that you are willing to pay 3.34 per cent of Victoria’s climate-related costs going forward?”

(That specific percentage is based on a 2013 peer-reviewed analysis of more than 150 years’ worth of oil companies’ production records. The conclusion was that 90 companies and government-run industries account for two-thirds of the anthropogenic carbon emissions, compared to Canada’s 1.5 per cent of global emissions. The author, Richard Heede, then divided the emissions by each companies’ individual production to come up with their percentage of blame/costs.)