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Money must be spent now to avoid larger, future, climate-change impacts. For example, the B.C. government estimates that Metro Vancouver municipalities will need to spend an average of more than $100 million annually between now and 2100 to prepare for rising sea levels. Where will that money come from?

It’s scary stuff — but if we ignore it and hope it goes away, we’re not going to be prepared when things get really bad.

That’s why more than 50 B.C.-based organizations are calling on the B.C. government to enact a Liability for Climate-related Harm Act — a law that will clarify the liability of companies that extract, refine and sell fossil fuels for their share of climate-change harm suffered in B.C.

When a similar bill was debated in Ontario’s Legislature, supporters pointed out that it’s fiscally irresponsible for governments to assume that taxpayers will pay for the rising costs of climate change without recovering some costs from the industry that helped create them.

The fossil-fuel industry, like the tobacco industry, needs to pay its fair share of the costs caused by its products. Chevron, Exxon and other oil, gas and coal companies have made hundreds of billions of dollars selling products that they knew (at least since the 1960s) would cause climate change. Believing that they wouldn’t be required to pay for the harm caused by their products, these companies funded public misinformation about climate science and lobbied against rules that would have reduced our dependence on fossil fuels.