According to community organizer Carmen Mills, the popular support needed to stop the province’s planned highway expansion and twinning of the Port Mann Bridge is building to a crescendo.

And Mills told the Georgia Straight she thinks awareness of the human impact on the environment is causing this rethink. On February 1, the summary remarks for the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

To Mills, also known through her organization of the annual Commercial Drive Car-Free Day, this is a rallying cry. She has launched Gatewaysucks.org, and on February 10 at the Waldorf Hotel, a party will take place in celebration of opposition hopes that the $4-billion Gateway Program can still be stopped.

“The fabric of denial around climate change is stretched so thin now,” she said. “The truth is popping through all the holes. It just feels like people are desperate to know what to do. Now, without suggestion, people are jumping to the local connection of ”˜Stop that highway [expansion], it’s ridiculous.’ ”

The IPCC report summary noted that humans have already caused so much damage that the effects will last 1,000 years. The human impact, it noted, is now evident “from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level”.

B.C. Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon did not return calls from the Georgia Straight, although he touched on environmental concerns in comments recorded in Hansard on October 27, 2005.

“One of our great goals as government is to make sure that we do have the most exceptional environmental outcomes that we can possibly have in the province, and I take that very seriously,” Falcon told NDP transportation critic David Chudnovsky. “Everything that we do in this ministry—whether it’s our environmental fund, whether it’s the cycling initiatives that we have underway, whether it’s the Port Mann Bridge and the restoration of public transit along that corridor—is consistent with that.”

Opponents of Gateway are not convinced by this. The Livable Region Coalition—formed in 2005—consists of groups like Better Environmentally Sound Transportation and the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation. They have always maintained that communities cannot build their way out of congestion through more roads and bridges.

Darcy Rezac, managing director of the Vancouver Board of Trade, told the Straight his board supports Gateway and that there is a “huge imperative to get on with Gateway”.

Langley Township Coun. Kim Richter told the Straight she had not heard of the anti-Gateway movement. She said she believes the twinning of the Port Mann Bridge is “absolutely necessary”, but she was only partially in agreement with Rezac.

“It has not been explained to me why we are twinning the highway west of the bridge,” she said. “If you take a look at the traffic patterns, the bridge definitely needs twinning, but I’m not sure we need all those lanes going into Vancouver. I can understand their [ www.Gatewaysucks.org ] concerns and their position with regard to that.”

Mills said the “high-energy” Waldorf party is to be coproduced by the Work Less Party and headlined by funkadelic band All Purpose and DJ Timothy Wisdom. There will be Polynesian ambiance and “make-your-own superhero capes”.

David Fields, a campaigner with the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, told the Straight that SPEC has released a report, Cooking the Books, Cooking the Planet, to show that Gateway has information on greenhouse-gas impacts that is misleading.

Do they hope to persuade Falcon that Gateway is not a done deal?

“I hope that happens,” Fields said.

Mills said she has already done much to stop Falcon’s plans. For her, it is also a global-climate-change message whose time has come.

“I have to believe we can turn this around,” Mills said. “Otherwise, I couldn’t sleep with myself at night.”