Kivalina: A Climate Change Story-Rising Seas, Corporate Greed, and the Plight of an Alaskan Village

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Kivalina- A Climate Change Story, Media Cross ... mefeedia.com2011년 11월 26일 - 60분 The November 22, 2011, edition of Tell Somebody has an interview with Christine Shearer, author of Kivalina ...

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Kivalina

A Climate Change Story

   

Price: $16.00

ISBN: 9781608461288

Published: July, 2011

Type: Paperback

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Kivalina

A Climate Change Story

Environment & Science

By Christine Shearer

For the people of Kivalina, Alaska, the price of further climate change denial could be the complete devastation of their lives and culture. Their village must be relocated to survive, but neither the fossil fuel giants nor the U.S. government are willing to take full responsibility.

In this muckraking account of the peril faced by one small village, Christine Shearer unearths the toxic legacy of corporate denial, which stretches all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century. She reveals that Big Oil has hired the same legal firm previously responsible for limiting corporate culpability in the lawsuits that sought compensation for tobacco- and asbestos-related illnesses. Then, as now with the issue of climate change, their strategy revolved around consciously manipulating the scientific consensus and suppressing damaging discoveries. As the ocean slowly engulfs Kivalina, time is running out for the island’s inhabitants.

About the author

Christine Shearer is a researcher for CoalSwarm (part of SourceWatch) and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has previously worked at the KPFA Radio Evening News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Her work has appeared in academic and media publications including Race, Gender & Class, Conservation Letters, and Newsweek. She holds a PhD in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara.

Reviews

“This story is a tragedy, and not just because of what’s happening to the people of Kivalina. It’s a tragedy because it’s unnecessary, the product, as the author shows, of calculation, deception, manipulation, and greed in some of the biggest and richest companies on earth.”
—Bill McKibben, author Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“Christine Shearer’s Kivalina: A Climate Change Story is a fast and bumpy ride that begins with the history of outrageous corporate deceptions through public relations and legal campaigns, continuing with building of the coal-and-oil empire to fuel progress in the United States, leading to the horrendous politics of climate crisis, and finally arriving at its destination, a ground-zero of climate refugee, Kivalina — an Inupiat community along the Chukchi Sea coast of arctic Alaska. I was angry when I turned the last page. I urge you to get a copy, read it, share the story, and join the now global climate justice movement.”
—Subhankar Banerjee, photographer, writer, activist, and author of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land

"The climate catastrophe is real and growing, and this is the story of some of its first known victims, with many millions more to follow. This is an important tale of greed and propaganda, scientific corruption, and the bill coming due for our allowing a corporate elite to control and dictate our energy and environmental policies."
—John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy

“Melting glaciers and rising sea levels now threaten the very existence of indigenous homelands like the Arctic Inupiat community of Kivalina, Alaska. The Inupiat are not responsible for the greenhouse gases that cause climate change and they are determined not to be its victims either. They want climate justice and compensation for their relocation costs. Their story of trying to hold corporations and government accountable deserves the widest possible audience. They are fighting for our future.”
—Al Gedicks, author of Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations and professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

“With Kivalina Christine Shearer has managed to do something quite remarkable, which is to take the incredibly complex geo/economic/political process of global climate change, present it in a way that is both comprehensible and compelling and then directly link it to one of the first bellwether communities to be affected by the process. The book is beautifully written and the community of Kivalina is a harbinger of what our failure to control our technology and our greed will be bringing to coastal communities and cities across the planet.”
—Robert Gramling, co-author of Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America and professor of sociology at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette

“Kivalina, Shishmaref, Point Hope-- three of the first communities, in this case all in the Arctic of Alaska, that are casualties of global climate change. Household names? No. But they should be. Christine Shearer, in Kivalina: A Climate Change Story, presents the human and environmental evidence of frustration and devastation of one of these ancient Inupiat Eskimo villages in a detailed and compelling fashion. Citing the tobacco and asbestos examples of "profit at all costs" corporate obfuscation, she makes the case that climate change is the latest on this sorry list of the failure of our corporations and their supporters in the federal and state government to look past those profits to their dire consequences. Peter, Paul and Mary in their famous folk song, "When Will They Ever Learn," can add another verse. Christine Shearer will write it.”
—Harvard Ayers, senior author of Arctic Gardens: Voices from an Abundant Land and professor of anthropology at Appalachian State University

http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/kivalina

Kivalina: A Climate Change Story

Sunday, 20 May 2012 00:00 By Christine Shearer, Haymarket Books | Book Excerpt

Click here to support news free of corporate influence by donating to Truthout.

Kivalina: A Climate Change Story

Haymarket Books, 2011

The [2000 U.S. National Assessment Synthesis Report] noted that climate change was already affecting life in Alaska Native villages. [55] In December 2003, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) went on to report that most of Alaska's more than two hundred native villages were affected to some degree by flooding and erosion, with thirty-one facing imminent threats "due in part to rising temperatures that cause protective shore ice to form later in the year, leaving the villages vulnerable to storms."[56]

As with the pollution from Red Dog Mine, the people of Kivalina had reported the effects of warming temperatures, but had not received any concrete assistance to mitigate risks to their safety from erosion. They had voted to relocate in 1992, petitioned various government bodies to begin a relocation process, and hit a dead end. Meanwhile the need to relocate grew more urgent as the effects of climate change accelerated the village's erosion and left residents increasingly in danger from storms.

Similar effects were impacting indigenous communities throughout the Arctic. In 2005, an Inuit petition was filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, created in 1959 to uphold and investigate violations of the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. The Inuit petition alleged the U.S. government was violating the human rights of Arctic people by refusing to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Seeking caps on U.S. emissions, the petition also called for the commission to produce plans to protect Inuit culture and resources through adaptation assistance. The petition was rejected one year later by the commission, which maintained that the charges outlined in the petition were insufficiently supported for making a determination.[57]

The same year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a report stating the situation in Kivalina was "dire" and that the entire town needed to be immediately relocated, [58] at an estimated cost ranging from $100 million to $400 million, according to various government estimates.[59] To counter the government stalling and corporate indifference, residents of the village began debating other options for protecting themselves. [Center for Race Poverty and the Environment lawyer Luke] Cole suggested a climate change lawsuit, positioning the situation within an environmental justice framework, as the only way to give the people of Kivalina a voice. "No one asked the people of Kivalina, y'know, 'Would you like to have your environment ruined?' A lawsuit is the only way they have of expressing themselves in the environmental justice process," Cole explained. "It's late in the day, it's inadequate, it's a blunt tool, it's the only tool they have left."[60]

Cole spoke to lawyer Heather Kendall-Miller of the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), which provides legal representation for Native Americans. Working in Anchorage, Kendall-Miller was acutely aware of the climate change issues facing native villages and interested in branching out legally in that area, but had not yet found a way. "My primary line of work is litigating subsistence and tribal sovereignty cases. Climate change is outside [NARF's] scope, but it became necessary when we saw how drastic the effects were on the people that we work with and serve," she said.[61] She noted that while the federal government has a trust relationship with Kivalina, it would be difficult to legally enforce federal assistance with the village's relocation, making her receptive to pursuing the case as a matter of environmental pollution and public nuisance.[62]

Kendall-Miller had already been approached about such a possibility by Matt Pawa, a lawyer at a small Boston firm that had filed the first federal global warming nuisance case with attorneys general in Connecticut v. AEP. Together Cole, Kendall-Miller, and Pawa considered filing a claim on behalf of Kivalina and discussed this option with the village. After several meetings, the Kivalina City and Tribal Councils agreed. Pawa then recruited Steve Berman and Steve Susman, both high-profile litigators involved in the state tobacco lawsuits - Berman on the side of states and Susman on the side of tobacco companies - as well as several other public rights lawyers.

On February 26, 2008, Kivalina, in both capacities as a native village and city, filed a legal claim in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against twenty-four oil, electricity, and coal companies: ExxonMobil, BP, BP America, BP Products, Chevron Corporation, Chevron USA, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell Oil, Peabody Energy, AES Corporation, American Electric Power Company, American Electric Power Services Corporation, DTE Energy Company, Duke Energy, Dynegy Holdings, Edison International, MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, Mirant Corporation, NRG Energy, Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, Reliant Energy, Southern Company, and Xcel Energy. The claim alleges that the defendants are significant contributors of greenhouse gas emissions, exacerbating global warming and the erosion in Kivalina, constituting a public nuisance under federal and state common law. The suit seeks damages of up to $400 million, the estimated cost of relocating the village. In addition, there are secondary claims of conspiracy and concert of action against ExxonMobil, AEP, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Duke, Peabody, and Southern Company for conspiring to create a false scientific debate about climate change to deceive the public. The defendants in the first claim were selected for being among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, while those in the secondary claim were selected for, in the words of Luke Cole, "going above and beyond" in their efforts to deceive the public about global warming.[63]

The lawsuit cuts across many aspects of climate change, as illustrated by the different but interconnected motivations of the lawyers who filed the claim. Steve Susman, for example, is particularly focused on addressing climate change, and holding fossil fuel companies accountable, similar to the tobacco lawsuits. His involvement in the Kivalina case is notable both because he is a high-profile litigator who charges up to a thousand dollars an hour for his services, and because he was involved in the tobacco suits - on the side of tobacco. In interviews, Susman has attributed his interest in global warming to his wife who, during a May 2009 interview, was correcting him or adding tidbits in the background as he and I spoke. He briefly recapped his growing interest in climate change: "In the fall of 2005, I was with my wife and helping her organize a Yale conference on climate change. I went with her and didn't know anything about it and started reading materials on the plane and it sounded very interesting to me, it sounded a lot like tobacco had sounded, and so I just right then and there, and a bit at my wife's urging, decided it was something I was going to get interested in."[64] Shortly afterward, Susman worked pro bono to help thirty-seven Texas cities stop the construction of coal-burning electric utility plants in the state.

Susman saw many parallels with the tobacco suits in the form of the misinformation campaigns, but also recognized that such tactics can be hard to prosecute:

"It's very much a legal gray area. Companies enjoy a First Amendment right to petition the government and speak their minds, it's part of free speech. Even if they are saying it in conspiracy and collusion with one another, as long as they are saying things, expressing opinions, it is protected by the First Amendment. And that's clearly an argument [defendant companies] are making against us in this case, that we are just complaining about something that is protected by the First Amendment, the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, so I think it is very difficult under existing law to hold companies responsible for promulgating bad science. Laws can be passed but right now it is very difficult to hold people responsible for promulgating junk science. However, to the extent that there is a good faith belief on their part, they enjoy that right, so we could try to prove they knew the information they were spreading was false and being used to deliberately influence public opinion- that would override their First Amendment rights."[65]

This is why, Susman said, lawyers prosecuting such cases strive to reach the discovery phase of a lawsuit in order to demonstrate industry knowledge of the falsity of their claims. Indeed, public health historians Barry Castleman, David Rosner, Gerald Markowitz, and David Michaels all affirm such documents have been crucial to their research. Without documentation, allegations that corporations know they are misrepresenting science remain in the realm of speculation, in both the court of law and, in many ways, the court of public opinion.

Steve Berman, who helped gain the release of the internal documents of tobacco manufacturer Liggett and secure the industry's settlement of the state suits leading up to the master national settlement, [66] believes concrete evidence of industry knowledge is an important factor but not in itself sufficient to bring about successful liability: "The first forty years of tobacco, they won every case, despite evidence of harm."[67] The first step to a successful claim, he said, was having a case reach the discovery and trial stage, which was being prevented by judges invoking the political question doctrine [in the previous climate change public nuisance lawsuits]: "What is or isn't a nuisance is something that courts have struggled with for over a hundred years. If you want to point to a particular law in effect, that is a preemption issue, but I don't think a proper analysis is the political question. With a political question, everything gets knocked out, you don't have to deal with the other issues."[68]

Defendant companies, in their response, split up into three groups: power, oil, and coal. Each group filed multiple motions to dismiss, employing similar arguments, most of them common to the prior global warming lawsuits: the claims were barred by preemption, the political question doctrine, and lack of legal standing. Although none of the defendant lawyers agreed to an interview or to be quoted, some spoke to me to help clarify the specifics of the legal arguments in the motions. If the judge were to accept the defendant motions for dismissal, Kivalina's lawsuit would be thrown out before going to the discovery and trial phase.

55. National Assessment Synthesis Team, U.S. Global Change Research Program. Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. Overview: Alaska.Washington, DC: U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2000.

56. Government Accountability Office. Alaska Native Villages: Most Are Affected by Flooding and Erosion, but Few Qualify for Federal Assistance. Report GAO-04-142. Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 2003.

57. Gordon, J. "Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to Hold Hearing after Rejecting Inuit Climate Change Petition." Sustainable Development Law & Policy 7 (2006): 55.58.

58. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "Alaska Village Erosion Technical Assistance Program: An Examination of Erosion Issues in the Communities of Bethel, Dillingham, Kaktovik, Kivalina, Newtok, Shishmaref, and Unalakleet." Army Corps of Engineers Report, April 2006. www.housemajority.org/coms/cli/AVETA_Report.pdf.

59. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "Kivalina Relocation Master Plan Final Report." Army Corps of Engineers Report, June 2006. www.poa.usace.army.mil/en/cw/Kivalina/Kivalina.html.

60. Interview by author, July 25, 2008.

61. Interview by author, August 26, 2008.

62. Interview by author, August 18, 2009.

63. Interview by author, July 25, 2008.

64. Interview by author, May 2, 2009.

65. Ibid.

66. Mollenkamp, Carrick. The People vs. Big Tobacco: How the States Took On the Cigarette Giants. New York: Bloomberg Press, 1998.

67. Interview by author, August 4, 2009.

68. Ibid.

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 http://truth-out.org/news/item/2187-kivalina-a-climate-change-story

Weekend Edition December 14-16, 2012

A Climate Change Story

Alaska Natives Take on Fossil Fuel Disinformation in Kivalina

by CHRISTINE SHEARER

For the Inupiat peoples of Kivalina in the  Arctic of Alaska, the price of further climate change denial could be the complete devastation of their lives and culture. Their crumbling village must be relocated to survive. But neither the government, nor the fossil fuel giants who have helped speed up the destruction of their village seem to willing to take responsibility.

In her compelling new book Kivalina: A Climate Change Story, published by Haymarket Books, Christine Shearer traces the history of corporate greed and government compitulation and connects it to the plight of this ancient Eskimo community by the Chukchi Sea coast. A grim forewarning of what could soon be the plight of coastal communities across the world if we don’t act now.

We are proud to publish the introduction to her book for you here. – Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank

***

In February 2008, a tiny Alaska Native village named Kivalina filed suit against twenty-four fossil fuel companies for contributing to the village’s erosion through large greenhouse gas emissions, and for creating a false debate around climate change. The lawsuit was filed in conjunction with environmental justice and indigenous rights organizations as one of several steps in a broader push for climate justice, aiming to help Kivalina residents draw attention to their situation and call for action from government and corporate officials that had so far largely ignored them.

The media gave the lawsuit brief attention that quickly faded, and the judge’s ruling was issued with little discussion or notice outside of certain legal circles. Meanwhile, the people of Kivalina are still in danger from the effects of climate change, in a situation that is going to become more common throughout the world.

For roughly the past ten thousand years we have enjoyed a relatively stable climate that has allowed for the development of agriculture and civilization. Such stability is the exception, not the norm, when it comes to the earth’s 4.54 billion-year history. The Earth has oscillated between long periods of cooling (glaciations) and shorter periods of warming (interglacials), sometimes undergoing radical climate variations within the span of a century or even a decade. Evidence suggests that later glaciations correspond with periodic shifts in the earth’s orbit, tilt, and precession (movement of the axis), which can reduce the amount of energy received at the poles. This small temperature perturbation, in turn, can kickstart a glaciation through feedbacks: as ice builds, greenhouse concentrations within the oceans are sequestered and reduced in the atmosphere, and the ice reflects a greater amount of sunlight back to space (the “albedo effect”). These processes maintain the cooling, and can create the conditions for layer upon layer of cumulative ice sheets.

Glaciations then give way to warmer interglacial periods, which have been correlated to increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—trace gases like carbon dioxide and methane that capture heat and can amplify the initial orbital forcings. The sun’s light rays that are absorbed by oceans, land, and vegetation are eventually given off as infrared radiation, or heat energy. Due to their molecular structure (having three or more atoms), greenhouse gases vibrate at frequencies that allow them to absorb and emit this infrared radiation, sending a portion of that energy back to the Earth’s surface. During certain periods this increased heat can hasten the melting of glaciers, with the newly exposed landscape absorbing more heat and releasing more greenhouse gases, potentially leading to an interglacial period. The most recent warming shift occurred 11,700 years ago, the beginning of a relatively long and mild interglacial period known as the Holocene.

Some have argued that the Holocene epoch has been supplanted by an Anthropocene, or human-influenced climate, beginning with large-scale agriculture and accelerating rapidly with the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of fossil fuels. For the past two centuries we have been digging up and burning fossilized carbon from earlier eras — coal, oil, and natural gas — at an accelerating rate, and greatly increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. While we need greenhouse gases to absorb heat and sustain life, their increasing concentration is steadily turning the furnace up on our lower atmosphere and altering our climate. Scientists are concerned not only because the effects are already apparent, such as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and increased water vapor in the atmosphere, but because the ultimate consequences are so disturbing. What the historic evidence suggests is that the earth has certain feedback mechanisms that can tip the planet toward extreme cooling as well as extreme heating, and that those mechanisms can be very hard if not impossible to reverse once they hit a certain threshold.

As of 2011, carbon dioxide levels are about 390 parts per million (ppm), substantially higher and more rapidly built up than at any time in the eight hundred thousand years’ worth of records from air bubbles trapped in ice cores. And there is a potential warning on the horizon: numerous glaciers are melting faster than many had predicted, and the thawing permafrost—the frozen subsoil beneath the ice—can release stores of carbon dioxide and also methane, a greenhouse gas with a high and rapid heat absorption much stronger than that of carbon dioxide. The most pressing question is what large amounts of greenhouse gases will do to an already warm interglacial period, with some scientists predicting events such as the melting of glaciers and the resulting steady release of methane could bring about a “tipping point,” setting off a cascade of warming feedbacks over which we would no longer have any control. Other scientists believe we are already at or very near that tipping point, and need to begin clamping down on greenhouse gas emissions immediately.

Sandbags — a stopgap measure to keep this Kivalina house from sinking. Photo by Christine Shearer.

Despite the vocal concerns of scientists, pockets of the U.S. population remain unconvinced of the existence of human-caused (anthropogenic) warming, its potential severity, and the need for action. This includes people who believe climate change is a hoax; fossil fuel company executives reluctant to alter their business practices; members of think tanks, media, and other organizations that are actively trying to distort the science on climate change; and representatives of the U.S. federal government resistant to addressing climate change, particularly the George W. Bush Administration and certain members of Congress, who have been complicit in downplaying the reality and severity of climate change.

Meanwhile, some are already feeling the daily effects of global warming. Among them are Alaska Natives living in the now steadily melting Arctic, such as the village of Kivalina. Perched on a thin strip of land between a sea and a lagoon, sea ice no longer adequately forms on their coastline, leaving the tiny island vulnerable to storms and erosion and requiring relocation. In the midst of government inaction on climate change, the village filed suit against fossil fuel companies for their relocation costs, and for creating a false debate around global warming: Kivalina v. ExxonMobil et al.

In taking a close look at the dynamics surrounding the lawsuit, this book will lay out the development of an entire industry designed to help large industries stave off regulations and laws, known as the product defense industry (PDI). It will then explore how the PDI, fused with the fossil fuel industry’s strong and innate position within the U.S. and world economy, has helped prevent U.S. action on climate change. The result is a political environment in which it has been incredibly difficult to adequately address what is increasingly a clear and present danger, particularly for those already being affected, like the residents of Kivalina. While individuals can scale back on the amount and type of energy they consume, such options are limited without broader societal change. How to initiate effective action? People around the world are working on the answers right now. And for people like those in Kivalina, the clock is ticking.

Christine Shearer is a postdoctoral scholar in science, technology, and society studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch. Her work has appeared in Race Gender & Class, Conservation Letters, the Huffington Post, and Truthout. This is her first book.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/14/rising-seas-corporate-greed-and-the-plight-of-an-alaskan-village/