B.C. climate news: EPA to scrap landmark U.S. emissions policy in major rollback | China's emissions start to fall
Here’s the latest news concerning climate change and biodiversity loss in B.C. and around the world, from the steps leaders are taking to address the problems, to all the up-to-date science.
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In climate news this week:
• B.C. environmental groups sue federal government over alleged failure to protect southern mountain caribou
• EPA to scrap landmark U.S. emissions policy in major rollback
• As Trump shreds climate rules, China’s emissions start to fall
Human activities like burning fossil fuels and farming livestock are the main drivers of climate change, according to the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change. This causes heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, increasing the planet’s surface temperature.
The panel, which is made up of scientists from around the world, including researchers from B.C., has warned for decades that wildfires and severe weather, such as the province’s deadly heat dome and catastrophic flooding in 2021, would become more frequent and intense because of the climate emergency. It has issued a code red for humanity and warns the window to limit warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times is closing.
According to NASA climate scientists, human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 per cent in less than 200 years, and “there is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.”
As of Feb. 5, 2026, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 428.62 parts per million, up from 427.49 ppm last month and 426.46 in December, according to the latest available data from the NOAA measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory, a global atmosphere monitoring lab in Hawaii. The NOAA notes there has been a steady rise in CO2 from under 320 ppm in 1960.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet, causing climate change. Human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50% in less than 200 years, according to NASA.
Quick facts:
• The global average temperature in 2023 reached 1.48 C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. In 2024, it breached the 1.5 C threshold at 1.55 C.
• 2025 was the third warmest on record after 2024 and 2023, capping the 11th consecutive warmest years.
• Human activities have raised atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by nearly 49 per cent above pre-industrial levels starting in 1850.
• The world is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global temperature from exceeding 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, the upper limit to avoid the worst fallout from climate change including sea level rise, and more intense drought, heat waves and wildfires.
• UNEP’s 2025 Emissions Gap Report, released in early December, shows that even if countries meet emissions targets, global temperatures could still rise by 2.3 C to 2.5 C this century.
• In June 2025, global concentrations of carbon dioxide exceeded 430 parts per million, a record high.
• There is global scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that humans are the cause.
(Sources: United Nations IPCC, World Meteorological Organization, UNEP’s 2025 emissions gap report, NASA, Copernicus Climate Change Service, climatedata.ca)
Source: NASA
Latest News
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans this week to repeal a policy that provides the legal foundation for a raft of rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions, marking President Donald Trump’s most consequential retreat from the fight against climate change.
A move to scrap the Obama-era endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific determination that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare, is expected as early as Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the details. The policy underpins rules including federal emissions standards for cars and trucks.
“This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin was quoted as telling the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the planned timing.
The EPA sent a proposal to the Office of Management and Budget last month and a “final rule will be published once it has completed interagency review,” the agency said in a statement, referring to the endangerment finding as “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history.” The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A decision to repeal the finding has been anticipated for months after the EPA first proposed doing so in July, and is seen as laying the groundwork for a further unwinding of climate protections in the US. Trump’s White House last month completed a new withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and exited several prominent United Nations bodies working on the issue, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
—Bloomberg News
Storm Nils is battering Western Europe, cutting power to 900,000 households in France and forcing flood evacuations as the region endures another round of extreme weather.
The storm system is forecast to bring torrential rain and winds topping 150 kilometres per hour to southern France, the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane. Authorities have issued red weather warnings for Northern Spain, southwest France and Sardinia, while avalanche risks are at their highest level in parts of the French Alps.
Following a series of storms in late-January, a southerly jet stream is funnelling warm, moist air from the Atlantic, feeding an unusually relentless string of atmospheric rivers into Iberia and the mid-continent. That’s putting increasing stress on power and transport networks from Portugal to France.
At least 16 people have died in Portugal since the storms began, pushing several of the country’s biggest rivers to critical levels.
—Bloomberg News
This week’s major climate news played out on a split screen with the world’s two superpowers signalling different paths for the future.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency walked back its own authority to set regulations curbing greenhouse gases from major sources. Meanwhile, in China, initial analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air for Carbon Brief showed that carbon emissions fell 0.3 per cent last year — the first dip to occur since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The decline in China’s emissions, while small, may mark a turning point for the world’s largest polluter. It was driven by factors including strong electric vehicle sales and clean power generation — the result of a decade of increasingly stronger policies aimed at protecting the environment and developing green industries.
In contrast, U.S. emissions increased last year after a two-year decline, according to an estimate released last month by the research firm Rhodium Group. This increase comes as the Trump administration is systematically and aggressively moving to dismantle not only many of former president Joe Biden’s most impactful climate policies, including cutting key pieces of the Inflation Reduction Act, but also decades-old climate rules.
—Bloomberg News
This photo shows B.C.’s endangered southern mountain caribou with a logging truck in the background.
Several B.C. environmental groups are suing the federal government over delays in protecting southern mountain caribou, which have been listed as a threatened species for more than two decades.
Ecojustice — representing Stand.earth, Wildsight and the Wilderness Committee — filed a lawsuit in Federal Court on Monday against Canada’s Environment Department, alleging it has delayed mapping the animal’s critical habitat for more than 11 years.
The groups say habitat mapping is a necessary first step under the Species at Risk Act to protect and recover caribou and other threatened and endangered species.
The department released a recovery strategy in 2014 for the animals that included partial habitat mapping by the end of that year. But more than a decade later, the groups say nothing has been done.
More than 11 years have passed since the Dec. 31, 2014, deadline and the minister has not yet published an amended recovery strategy or one or more plans “that fully map and otherwise fully identify critical habitat” for southern mountain caribou, the lawsuit states.
Caribou are now disappearing because of habitat loss from logging and other industrial development in southern and central B.C. Eight of 18 herds are already extinct.
—Tiffany Crawford
Snowpack hits 39 per cent of normal on Vancouver Island
B.C.’s snowpack report for February shows that the snowpack levels for B.C.’s South Coast are 61 per cent of normal, with a shocking 39 per cent of normal for Vancouver Island.
The report says areas with below normal snowpack show early concerns for drought conditions amplifying in the spring and summer.
Overall for the province, the provincial mountain snowpack is averaging 96 of normal.
Regions with normal to well above normal snowpack levels have an increased hazard for spring snowmelt related flooding, especially if effects from La Niña conditions linger into spring, the provincial report said.
—Tiffany Crawford
A warmer-than-normal winter and no snowfall for Metro Vancouver has left some wondering whether to pack away their skis and get our their paddle boards and mountain bikes.
A record snow drought with unprecedented heat is hitting most of the American West, depleting future water supplies, making it more vulnerable to wildfires and hurting winter tourism and recreation, according to an Associated Press report.
Scientists say snow cover and snow depth are both at the lowest levels they’ve seen in decades, while at least 67 Western weather stations have measured their warmest December through early February on record, the report said.
Normal snow cover this time of year should be about 1.2 million square kilometres — about the size of California, Utah, Idaho and Montana — but this year it’s only about one-third of that, about 401,448 square kilometres (155,000 square miles), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the AP reported.
I’m a breaking news reporter but I’m also interested in writing stories about health, the environment, climate change and sustainable living, including zero-waste goals. If you have a story idea related to any of these topics please send an email to ticrawford@postmedia.com