The Striking Parallels Between British Columbia and California’s Climate Agenda

There is something in the water on the Pacific Coast that makes the governments of British Columbia and California uniquely susceptible to a particular strain of policy enthusiasm. Call it left-coast syndrome. It’s not partisan. That’s what makes life here so fascinating, so durable, and so unpredictable at times.

This is the part of the continent where ambitious climate policy doesn’t just find a home. It germinates. It takes root in the culture before it colonizes the statute books. It becomes the sort of thing that reasonable people at dinner parties agree is obviously necessary, which is always the most dangerous phase of any policy movement – the moment it stops being debated and starts being assumed.

California has been the laboratory. British Columbia has been the eager exchange student, taking meticulous notes and returning home to replicate the experiments with smaller beakers and a fraction of the GDP. The results, in both cases, are now arriving. And they are spectacular – in the way that a five-alarm fire is spectacular.

The Hydrogen Highway to Nowhere

If you want to understand the depth and bipartisan character of the Pacific Coast’s climate romance, cast your mind back two decades. It was 2005 or thereabouts, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger – Republican, action hero, owner of a Hummer collection that could have supplied a small battalion – stood alongside BC Premier Gordon Campbell – Liberal, free-enterprise champion, architect of BC’s original carbon tax – and together they announced the Hydrogen Highway. A gleaming corridor of hydrogen fuelling stations linking California to British Columbia. The future of transportation. Clean. Bold. Inevitable.

It completely fizzled. Utterly. The hydrogen highway today exists primarily as a cautionary Wikipedia entry and a punchline at energy conferences. The fuelling stations were never built. The vehicles never materialized at scale. The corridor connecting Sacramento to Vancouver remained, as it had always been, a stretch of Interstate 5 and Highway 99 serviced by the same gasoline and diesel that hydrogen was supposed to render obsolete.

But here’s the thing: nobody learned anything. The hydrogen highway didn’t fail because the ambition was wrong, the political class concluded. It failed because the ambition wasn’t ambitious enough. And so both jurisdictions doubled down – not on hydrogen specifically, but on the underlying conviction that the Pacific Coast’s role in North America is to lead the energy transition, whatever that transition happens to be this decade, and that the costs of leading are simply the price of moral seriousness.

A Republican governor and a Liberal premier launched it. Their successors – of every partisan stripe – continued it. This is not a left-right story. It is a story about a place, about a coastal culture that has convinced itself that economic gravity is a suggestion rather than a law.

The $28 billion Confession

Which brings us to CleanBC, the policy stack that may one day be remembered as the most expensive confession in Canadian political history.

The BC government’s own modelling showed that CleanBC would shrink the provincial economy by $28 billion. Not an opposition estimate. Not a Fraser Institute working paper. The government’s own numbers, later confirmed and amplified by the BC Business Council’s analysis. Twenty-eight billion dollars in foregone GDP – modelled, documented, and published. They looked at the number, and they pressed “send” anyway.

ICBA Economics subsequently calculated that CleanBC would inflict more than 2.5 times the economic damage on British Columbia than Donald Trump’s tariffs. Let that comparison marinate. The province’s own climate plan – conceived, designed, and implemented by British Columbians – is doing more harm to the BC economy than the punitive trade actions of a hostile foreign administration. We managed to out-tariff Trump. On ourselves.

The results are arriving with the grim punctuality of a tax assessment. BC’s real GDP grew a listless 1.2% in 2024 – dead last among provinces. Deloitte forecasts a feeble 1.6% for 2026. The Fraser Institute is openly asking whether BC is entering another “lost decade.” The deficit has exploded from $5 billion in 2023-24 to a projected $11.6 billion, with next year tracking toward $12.6 billion. Provincial debt now exceeds $155 billion.

Premier David Eby – who spent the 2024 election promising “declining deficits” – has pivoted to cutting 2,000 public service jobs and talking about “transitioning into the new economy that Canada is building right now,” which is the kind of sentence that sounds encouraging until you parse it and realize it contains no nouns anyone can define.

A review of CleanBC released in November 2025 concluded that, “for the most part,” the plan is working. I’m not sure, since the reviewers were the actual individuals who came up with policy in the first place. In point of fact, we do not have data showing that emissions are on a realistic trajectory to meet the targets set down.

Deliberately shrinking your economy does not qualify as “working”. If your partner announced that their new diet was “working” because they’d lost 40 pounds and could no longer climb stairs, you might want a second opinion.

Finance Minister Brenda Bailey delivered this fiscal catastrophe under the convenient cover of Trump’s tariff threats, even though, as Business in Vancouver’s Rob Shaw helpfully documented, the bulk of the province’s fiscal pressures predated the tariff dispute by years. CleanBC wasn’t a response to economic headwinds. It was the headwind. The tariffs were just the storm that hit a building whose foundation was already cracked.

California: The Future BC Ordered

The great value of having a role model is that you can see where you’re headed before you get there. For British Columbia, that role model has always been California. And what California is showing us right now should terrify anyone who owns a car, heats a home, or eats food that arrives by truck – which is to say, everyone.

Doomberg, the anonymous energy analyst whose green-chicken avatar has become one of the sharpest voices in the energy space (and a two-time guest at my Power Struggle podcast), published a devastating assessment last week of California’s fuel supply crisis. The picture is not pretty. It is, in fact, the energy-policy equivalent of a highway pileup in slow motion – with every driver insisting the road design is fine.

California is now effectively two fuel islands – one around San Francisco, one around Los Angeles – neither connected by inbound oil or refined product pipelines to the outside world. Northern California has lost most of its refining capacity. The Valero Benicia refinery closure triggered the shutdown of the San Pablo Bay Pipeline – the last crude artery connecting the Kern County oil fields to the Bay Area – forcing roughly 100 trucks a day onto roads to replace what a buried pipeline used to handle silently and efficiently. The two remaining Bay Area refineries can supply about half the region’s needs.

The rest must come from seaborne imports of specialty fuel blends that most of the world’s refineries aren’t configured to produce. And here the irony becomes so thick you could refine it: California’s largest source of imported refined products in 2025 was India, almost certainly processing Russian crude that the United States is simultaneously trying to sanction off global markets.

California’s climate regulators have, with admirable efficiency, replaced domestic energy production with dependency on precisely the petrostates whose behaviour they claim to find most objectionable.

And fuel demand isn’t falling. The electric vehicle revolution that was supposed to obliterate gasoline consumption has produced – according to California’s own tax data – practically no decline in retail gasoline demand in the 2025 fiscal year. The central planners planned. The consumers drove.

This is the future CleanBC ordered for British Columbia. We’re just a few chapters behind in the same book.

The Pipeline We Have (And They Don’t)

Now, in fairness – and I try to be fair, even when the province’s government makes it a Herculean exercise – British Columbia does possess one asset that California can only dream of: the Trans Mountain pipeline.

TMX came online in May 2024 after years of delays, cost overruns, and protest campaigns so lavishly funded they could have financed a small country’s healthcare system. The expansion nearly tripled capacity to 890,000 barrels per day and increased western Canada’s tidewater export capacity by roughly 700%. By November 2025, waterborne exports from Vancouver hit a record 547,000 barrels per day. Canada exported nearly 400,000 barrels per day to non-US markets in early 2025, up from about 80,000 a year earlier.

China became the top buyer of Canadian crude via Trans Mountain. Asian buyers now take over three-quarters of the heavy crude exported from Vancouver. The Western Canadian Select discount – the spread that used to punish Canadian producers for being a captive supplier to a single customer – has narrowed dramatically. Canada is no longer a price-taker with no exit. Canada is a global energy trader.

But before we celebrate, let us pause to savour the irony. Because when we do irony on the west coast, it’s rarely entrusted to a single note. It’s a symphony, one that deserves to be heard in full.

Act One: California Funds the Opposition to its Own Lifeline

The ferocious, years-long campaign to stop the Trans Mountain expansion was not, for the most part, an organic expression of British Columbian anxiety. It was financed. Lavishly. And the money came overwhelmingly from the United States – and specifically from California.

The Tides Foundation, headquartered in San Francisco, has for years bankrolled virtually anything in British Columbia that might impede economic growth with a hydrocarbon footprint. Tides and its network of allied foundations poured tens of millions into anti-pipeline campaigns, funding the legal challenges, the protest infrastructure, the communications strategies, and the NGO ecosystem that turned Trans Mountain into a cause célèbre. San Francisco philanthropists, sipping locally roasted coffee within smelling distance of the Bay Area’s last functioning refineries, wrote cheques to ensure that Canadian oil could never reach tidewater – oil that California’s own refineries would eventually need to survive.

And the celebrity deployments. One cannot discuss the campaign against Canadian energy without acknowledging the airlifted talent. Jane Fonda was flown to Vancouver to stand on the beach at Jericho and declare her solidarity with the cause of keeping Canadian oil in the ground. Leonardo DiCaprio was dispatched to Alberta to decry the oil sands before the world’s cameras, only to reportedly express alarm that Calgary was unseasonably warm in January – apparently unfamiliar with the chinook, a meteorological phenomenon that has been making southern Alberta balmy at unpredictable intervals since long before the internal combustion engine was invented.

The carbon footprint of the private jets required to deliver these environmental sermons remains, so far as I know, unaudited.

So let us state this plainly: California-based foundations spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to prevent the construction of a pipeline that now supplies California with the crude oil it can no longer produce for itself. The Tides Foundation fought to block Canadian oil from reaching the Pacific Coast. California’s remaining refineries are now scrambling to buy Canadian oil from the Pacific Coast. The call, as they say, was coming from inside the house.

Act Two: The Premier Who Cried “Empty”

Throughout the latter half of 2025, the Trans Mountain expansion was doing precisely what any competent observer of infrastructure would expect – ramping up throughput in an orderly and predictable manner toward nameplate capacity. Pipeline ramp-ups are not like flipping a light switch. Shippers sign contracts, logistics chains adjust, marine terminal scheduling sequences, and throughput builds methodically toward capacity. This is how every major pipeline in the history of the industry has worked.

By November 2025, Trans Mountain waterborne exports hit an all-time record. The pipeline system was operating at effectively full capacity. The expansion project has transformed Canada into a global energy trader, narrowed the WCS discount, opened Asian markets, and given Ottawa a geopolitical bargaining chip it had never possessed.

Act Three: California Pays full freight

And here is where the story gets truly delicious for anyone with a taste for irony – which, living in British Columbia, you’d better have, because sometimes there isn’t much else on offer.

California needs our oil. In 2024, Canada supplied about 9.3% of California’s foreign crude imports, and that share is growing as California’s domestic production collapses and traditional import sources prove more expensive or more geopolitically complicated. US West Coast refiners – including those in Washington State and, yes, California – have been scrambling to secure Canadian barrels from Vancouver.

But they no longer get the neighbourhood discount. Because China wants those barrels too. And India. And South Korea. And Japan. The market has spoken, and what it has said, in the polite but firm tones of a commodities trading desk, is: the price is the price.

One can imagine the conversations in Sacramento. “You mean we have to compete for Canadian oil? Against China? Wasn’t Canada supposed to be our quiet, reliable, slightly apologetic supplier of last resort?”

Sorry, Governor. Those days ended when the last tanker left Westridge Marine Terminal bound for Ningbo. You’re welcome to buy our oil at the same price as everyone else. We’ll even throw in some polite customer service, because we’re Canadian and we can’t help ourselves.

So to summarize: California-based foundations spent millions trying to kill the pipeline. The pipeline got built anyway. And now California has to compete on the open global market for the very barrels it tried to keep in the ground – at prices set not by neighbourly goodwill but by the same Asian demand that the pipeline’s opponents swore would never materialize.

You truly cannot make this up. But you can, apparently, fund it with a tax receipt.

The Left-Coast Playbook

The parallels between BC and California are not coincidental. They are the inevitable product of a shared culture – a Pacific Coast temperament that treats climate ambition as a form of regional identity rather than a policy choice subject to cost-benefit analysis.

In both jurisdictions, the pattern is the same. It transcends party lines. Campbell brought in the carbon tax. Schwarzenegger launched the hydrogen highway and signed AB 32. Their successors – NDP, Democrat, it hardly matters – took the foundation and built it upward with the enthusiasm of architects who never have to live in the buildings they design.

The playbook runs like this:

Step 1: Announce ambitious climate targets with great fanfare and genuine conviction.

Step 2: Implement a regulatory stack that systematically penalizes domestic energy production.

Step 3: Model the economic costs. Discover they’re enormous. Publish them anyway, because the political class has confused economic contraction with moral progress.

Step 4: Watch as the industry responds rationally to the incentive structure you’ve created – by leaving, shrinking, or dying.

Step 5: Act surprised.

Step 6: Blame someone else. Trump. Tariffs. Global headwinds. Big Oil. Mercury in retrograde.

California is at about Step 4.5 – refineries shutting, pipelines going dormant, fuel imports arriving from countries that would fail every environmental and human rights standard California claims to champion. British Columbia is somewhere around Step 3.5 – economy flatlining, deficit exploding, government still insisting that CleanBC is “working.”

But we’re catching up fast. The left-coast syndrome is remarkably resistant to evidence. It has to be experienced to be overcome, and even then, the instinct is to conclude that the real problem was insufficient ambition.

What California Would Give for What We Have

Step back for a moment and consider the absurdity of British Columbia’s position.

We sit atop one of the largest hydrocarbon reserves on the planet, the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. We have a functioning pipeline to tidewater that has transformed Canada into a global energy trader. We have LNG projects moving forward with unprecedented Indigenous ownership. We have a natural gas sector that could power Asia’s energy transition while generating royalties and jobs that should make a finance minister weep with gratitude.

California would kill for any one of these assets. California, which is watching its last inland crude pipeline go dark. California, which is importing Russian-origin refined products through Indian intermediaries because it has regulated its own refining industry into hospice care. California, which hosts dozens of major military installations that may soon struggle to source the jet fuel and naval diesel required to project American power into the Indo-Pacific.

In British Columbia, we have at times been fortunate to see leadership that understood the tension between climate ambition and the lived reality of earning a paycheque, heating a home, and keeping communities viable. It rarely comes perfectly tuned on the first pass.

Premier Gordon Campbell did much of the foundational work to position northeastern B.C.’s natural gas sector for long-term success, and his early hydrogen vision – once seen as aspirational – may yet find its moment. It was Premier Christy Clark, however, who forcefully reframed LNG as a generational economic opportunity, placing it at the centre of the province’s growth narrative.

When political change came, that opportunity passed to a government initially cautious, even ambivalent, about the file. Over time, confronted by fiscal pressures, global energy demand, and geopolitical realities, it has evolved into a far more determined advocate. In 2026, the effort is no longer rhetorical – it is an active push to convert potential into projects, jobs, and revenue.

The tragedy of the west coast debate is not that people care about the environment. It is that we keep treating trade-offs as heresy. We set targets as if they were physics, then act surprised when physics returns the favour.

British Columbia is not California. It does not have to become California. But the similarities are now too remarkable to ignore, and the warning lights are bright enough to read from across the border.

The Road From Here

British Columbia has something California doesn’t: time. Not much of it, but some. California’s energy crisis is no longer theoretical. It is structural, unfolding, and probably irreversible within any politically meaningful timeframe. British Columbia’s crisis is still largely fiscal and economic – painful, accelerating, but not yet past the point of no return.

Stewart Muir is the CEO of Resource Works. He can be reached at [email protected]