Sometimes, it's hard to take the B.C. Liberals seriously when it comes to environmental issues.

With the exception of their support for the Great Bear Rainforest, their record on green issues under Christy Clark was fairly atrocious. Even that landmark agreement seemed to be timed for the Coquitlam-Burke Mountain by-election, which the B.C. Liberals lost anyway.

Her government also approved the Site C dam, which is looking like an unnecessary financial albatross that will flood farmland and dog B.C. Hydro ratepayers for decades to come.

Meanwhile, Clark made little progress in launching a liquefied natural gas industry. That's mainly because she and her colleagues misread the durability of a price spike in Asia following the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in March 2011.

After that calamity, Japan shut down all of its nuclear reactors and scrambled to meet its energy needs.

LNG prices subsequently crashed and have only recently staged a recovery.

Contract-based LNG in Japan topped US$10 per million British thermal units in December, marking a three-year high. But that's still not nearly at a level that would make this a profitable B.C. industry.

But it was the B.C. Liberals' support for Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, more than any other issue, that drove hordes of its former voters into the arms of the B.C. Greens.

Since the election, the Greens' support has sharply increased, according to a recent poll by Mainstreet Research.

Yet when you listen to B.C. Liberal leadership candidates, they rarely acknowledge that their support for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers' agenda will severely hurt their party over the long term.

Astoundingly, some B.C. Liberal leadership candidates who were in Clark's cabinet convey an impression that they were part of the greatest government in provincial history. 

Of course occasionally, a B.C. Liberal leadership candidate will say something as a sop to environmentally alarmed younger voters, for whom climate change is a voting issue.

For example, Michael Lee promises to eliminate plastic bags. While that's a worthwhile policy plank, it does little to negate his vocal support for the Site C dam, which some see as fuel for the carbon-spewing LNG industry or the Alberta oilsands.

Similarly, Sam Sullivan talks up "ecodensity". This implies that our housing problems can be solved by the market through more and more towers in urban areas.

But even if that were true, that's not going to address the carbon problems created by LNG or pipeline projects.

Other B.C. Liberal leadership candidates brag about Gordon Campbell's carbon tax, which is ancient history, or measly measures to increase the number of electric-charging stations for motor vehicles.

Last week, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that 2017 was the hottest year without an El Niño since climate records have been kept.

The five warmest years have all happened since 2010. 

Voters who worry about abrupt climate change can sense in their mind and in their gut that this isn't an overly compelling issue for this crop of B.C. leadership candidates. So all of these wannabes will be written off by this segment of the population.

You can tell that climate change is not their central issue simply by looking at their websites, reviewing their keen support for the LNG industry, and noting the number of fossil-fuel-industry advocates and lobbyists who are backing their campaigns.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a column suggesting that B.C.'s political axis is shifting from a traditional right-left divide to one in which the key split is over where politicians stand on the future of the planet.

It's pretty clear where the B.C. Liberal leadership candidates' sympathies lie. They're not among those who appear to seriously fret over the future of humanity on Earth, given the paltry amount of time that they've focused on this issue during their leadership campaign.

The B.C. Greens, on the other hand, give this subject enormous weight.

New Democrats are somewhere in the middle.

Sometimes, it appears to be a top-of-mind NDP concern, such as when Attorney General David Eby and Environment and Climate Change Strategy Minister George Heyman announced the hiring of lawyer Tom Berger to review legal issues around the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

But there was also a great deal of cynicism when this same NDP government ordered the completion of the Site C dam. That's because it's seen as a stalking horse for LNG development, more fracking of natural gas, and fuelling the expansion of the Alberta oilsands.

If Premier John Horgan uses his current trip to Asia to try to flog LNG to the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, it's not going to sit well with highly climate-conscious voters who supported his party in the last election.

That's because they'll perceive that the premier is, in the end, on the same side of B.C.'s new political axis as the B.C. Liberals.

Over the long term, that could prove toxic with millennial voters.

That's because for many of them, climate change is a crushing burden that they'll have to contend with for the rest of their lives. And as they demonstrated in the last federal election when they voted out Stephen Harper, they don't have a lot of patience for politicians who give this issue short shrift through their actions.