Every time we flick on the lights here in Colorado, we’re melting ice in the Arctic, and by now some of the Eskimos are getting swamped.
Last week, the native village of Kivalina, Alaska, 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle, filed a global- warming lawsuit against Xcel Energy and 23 other major utilities and oil companies.
These 390 Inupiat Eskimos live on a narrow barrier island that used to be protected by Arctic ice.
Now that the ice has melted, their tiny and impoverished village is vulnerable to the crashing waves of the frigid sea.
The Army Corps of Engineers and the General Accounting Office estimate that it’s going to cost between $95 million and $400 million to move their village.
The Eskimos want nine oil companies, 14 electric-power companies and one coal company to pay. The list of defendants is a who’s who of carbon-dioxide emitters, including ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, Exxon Mobil, BP and Chevron.
These companies have yet to respond to the allegations.
“We were on the list,” said Mark Stutz, spokesman for Xcel, which emits about 78 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the lawsuit. Beyond that, Xcel declined to comment.
It’s not like the company deliberately set out to melt igloos. It’s just, I guess, one of those things we didn’t think through. And as an Xcel customer, I just want to say, sorry about that.
The Inupiat subsist by hunting seals, walrus, whales and caribou. They have a tiny airstrip, a school and an infirmary. They get around on snowmobiles and small boats and planes. Many of their homes have 5-gallon buckets instead of toilets.
For $1 million apiece, we could move them to condos in Hawaii, but this would mark the end of their tribal ways of life going back, they say, “since time immemorial.” They’d rather move somewhere nearby, and it isn’t cheap building a new town from scratch in the Arctic, said Matt Pawa, a Boston- based attorney working on the case.
Global-warming lawsuits threaten to become the next Big Tobacco. Find an environmental calamity, calculate the damage, make a list of the biggest polluters, sue.
As a federally recognized tribe and a state-recognized municipality, the Inupiat have the same standing to sue as any government. They are no different than, say, the state of California suing automakers for the emissions of their products.
“Clearly, we’re not going to solve the global-warming problem by suing each other,” said Federico Cheever, a University of Denver law professor, who formerly served as an attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.
But over time, lawsuits can develop a factual record.
Remember when tobacco companies put up experts to debunk the notion that smoking caused cancer? Or that secondhand smoke was not hazardous?
Well, considering all the multibillion-dollar judgments, let’s just say those theories didn’t hold up all that well on cross-examination.
The Kivalina lawsuit accuses the energy industry of this same kind of deception that the tobacco industry deployed. It offers a litany of examples where it claims front organizations for the oil industry, and their paid experts, have deliberately clouded the debate with misinformation.
“The public has been misled,” Pawa said, “and there are consequences for misleading the public on issues of importance like this.”
Meanwhile, at least, it looks like there really will be opportunities selling ice to Eskimos.
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to him at , 303-954-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
