B.C. Green Leader Andrew Weaver believes the province needs to allow existing fossil-fuel infrastructure burn itself out and invest in renewable energy.

Last year, the Greens agreed to support the NDP’s minority government on a number of conditions, which included the New Democrats doing everything they can to halt the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which Weaver said would triple oilsands emissions in Alberta and is inconsistent with Canada’s commitment to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

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Weaver’s own research, however, has shown a different fossil fuel poses a much bigger threat.

As a University of Victoria professor in 2012, Weaver and colleague Neil Stewart found that if all the hydrocarbons in the oilsands were mined and consumed, the carbon dioxide released would raise global temperatures by about .36 C — approximately half the total amount of warming over the last century. In contrast, their research concluded that burning all the globe's vast coal deposits would create a 15-degree increase in global temperatures.

Vancouver is home to the largest single coal-export facility in North America, with 36.8-million tonnes of coal exported from various coal facilities in 2017, according to the Vancouver Port Authority.

Speaking to KTW on Friday night, ahead of his speech at the 2018 Green convention at Thompson Rivers University, Weaver said that with Canada as a signatory to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the Greens know that means there can be no new investment in fossil-fuel infrastructure that will last for decades to come.

“People can pretend that it doesn’t, but it does,” Weaver said.

Central to the Paris accord is a commitment to keep global temperatures below two degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels.

Weaver said the world is already on track to warm by about 1.9 C even if emission levels remain fixed.

He told KTW that while he has “a problem with the coal exports,” he is less concerned with metallurgical coal, which is used for steelmaking, than he is with thermal coal, which is used to generate electricity.

In 2017, 11.3-million tonnes of Vancouver’s 36.8-million tonnes of coal exports could be called non-metallurgical, but that was an increase from 4.4-million tonnes in 2008, according to an article in the National Post.

“The market for thermal coal is drying up and you’ll find pretty soon, probably in a couple of decades, there’ll be no need for metallurgical coal either,” Weaver said, noting it is needed now due to the current technology in the steel-making process.

However, he added, that technology is improving.

In Canada, 10 per cent of electricity is generated with coal, according to the Government of Canada. The country has also pledged to phase out coal-fired electricity by 2030, though coal will continue to be used for metallurgical processes.

Weaver said Canada needs to be committed to investing in renewable energy.

“It’s about where we are today and where we want to get to tomorrow,” he said. “We have an existing coal facility, we have an existing natural-gas sector, we have an existing pipeline — no one’s saying shut them down.”

“We should be using the wealth of today to transform and transition our energy systems from those that pollute to those that don’t,” Weaver told delegates at the convention.

Weaver told KTW he couldn’t believe the federal Liberal government “would be so reckless with taxpayer money” when it decided to purchase Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion.

“What they have bought is a 60-year-old leaking pipeline that needs continual upgrading and the potential rights to build something in the future that I don’t think will be built because there’s no market for diluted bitumen,” he said.

— with files from Canadian Press and National Post