For a Canadian province, gas boom presents a conundrum

SAN FRANCISCO — As nations rush to ship vast new stores of natural gas across oceans, the climate change implications of the fuel are coming under increased scrutiny. Perhaps nowhere is the debate so intense as in British Columbia, a province in western Canada where there are plans to export large quantities of natural gas to Asia. Environmentalists fear that the production and processing of the gas for export could upend the province’s aggressive climate change policies, which include an emissions-reduction goal and an unusual carbon tax system.