It’s stuff like this that makes me proud to be both Canadian and from British Columbia.

The premier of British Columbia wanted to bring coal-burning plants and offshore oil rigs to this lush province, so environmental groups were ready for a fight as he prepared his government’s annual policy speech last month.

They were stunned when Premier Gordon Campbell delivered a list of green promises that surpassed their most ambitious dreams.

He would not only stop the growth in greenhouse gases in the province, he said, but also slash them by one-third. He would gut the coal-plant plans. Embrace wind power. Lease hybrid cars for the government. Squelch environmental pollution by the powerful oil and gas industry. Toughen car-emission regulations.

His plans would make British Columbia what The Globe and Mail newspaper called “the continent’s greenest spot.” Campbell also proposed an enterprising alliance with California to create a Pacific Coast bloc of states and provinces to tackle climate change without waiting for action from their federal governments.

“If you wait for a whole continent to come together, sometimes it takes too long,” Campbell said Friday in Santa Monica, Calif., where he met with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to plot joint action.

The premier’s embrace of global-warming action reflects the growing political potency of the issue and illustrates how some local governments are shunning the go-slow approach of federal administrations in Washington and Ottawa.

We were in disbelief. This seemed to come right out of the blue,” said Lisa Matthaus, a campaign director for the Sierra Club’s British Columbia chapter. Not only were Campbell’s greenhouse-gas pledges ambitious with concrete goals, she said, but “they have been made in a very public way. B.C. is leading North America right now.”