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Alaskan Village Sues Over Global Warming

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Feb 27, 2008 01:30 PM
from the quit-pissin-in-our-pool dept.
Earth Government The Courts News
hightower_40 writes to mention that a small Alaskan village has sued two dozen oil, power, and coal companies, blaming them for contributing to global warming. "Sea ice traditionally protected the community, whose economy is based in part on salmon fishing plus subsistence hunting of whale, seal, walrus, and caribou. But sea ice that forms later and melts sooner because of higher temperatures has left the community unprotected from fall and winter storm waves and surges that lash coastal areas."
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Submission: Eskimo Village Sues Over Global Warming by hightower_40 (1167627)
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  • Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrLang21 (900992) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:32PM (#22576372)
    IANAL. It would seem to me that if you are going to sue someone for causing you harm, you would need to sue everyone involved. In this case, that would mean sueing almost everyone in the world. It's not fair to target one small group just because they have money. IANAL.

    • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by KublaiKhan (522918) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:38PM (#22576472) Homepage Journal
      True, but bear in mind that lawsuits like this seem mostly intended not as an actual reparation of damages but to make a large public statement.

      Attention whoring, in a way.

      So they've already won what they wanted: to get attention for the difficulties that they and their neighbors have been having.

      IANAL myself, so take this comment cum grano salis.

    • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MyNymWasTaken (879908) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:41PM (#22576530)
      This parallels the "Big Tobacco" cases. The oil companies are the ones who have profited and lied about the side effects of their product.

      • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by snarfer (168723) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:49PM (#22576662) Homepage
        In fact they're even using some of the same people and organizations that the tobacco compa nies used. "Doubt is our product" is the famous quote from a tobacco memo about their front-groups. They managed to put off a reckoning for decades by making people think that the science about cigarettes causing cancer was not clear.

          • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Informative)

            by brian0918 (638904) <brian0918@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday February 27 2008, @03:38PM (#22578208) Homepage
            "The term "cancer sticks" was first used in the 1800's."

            What is your source for this? The first source listed in OED for "cancer stick" is from 1959. Cassell's Dictionary of Slang [google.com] says it's from the 1950s. Google Books shows nothing to support your claim either.

            • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Informative)

              by Chris Mattern (191822) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @04:02PM (#22578638)
              He's probably confusing it with "coffin nails", which *is* documented back to the late 1800s. Cassell's claims it's only based on a resemblance, but I don't think so. While the linking of tobacco and cancer only goes back to the 1950s and 60s, there's always been a widespread perception that it's only common sense that breathing burning smoke on a regular basis *can't* be good for your lungs. Autopsies of smoker's lungs blackened by tobacco smoke go back that far.

      • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Geoffrey.landis (926948) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:05PM (#22576878) Homepage

        This parallels the "Big Tobacco" cases. The oil companies are the ones who have profited and lied about the side effects of their product.
        In fact, it is burning coal, not oil, that is the main cause of the CO2 emissions that contribute to the anthropogenic component of global warming.

      • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by zippthorne (748122) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:42PM (#22577420) Journal
        The main difference is that smoking tobacco doesn't really benefit anybody wheras burning coal and oil has literally driven the engines of production creating tremendous wealth for the whole world. We still have some distribution problems resulting in a number of people not being able to take full advantage of this wealth, but that number is decreasing all the time.

        Even if coal and oil use is causing noticeable and net deleterious effects, there is some argument that they should be forgiven past liability and even protected from some amount of current liability, as long as they are taking reasonable steps to mitigate deleterious effects, now.

        The earth can support 6 billion modern people. It already does. It cannot support 6 billion cave-men.

          • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Penguinisto (415985) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @04:51PM (#22579452) Journal

            My question: Why not?

            Sibling caught the first one: Food.

            #2 would be living space. Cities exist today because transportation can support them. Cities are also where the vast majority of people happen to live overall.

            Put it this way - if the laws of electricity were somehow revoked tomorrow morning at 9am sharp, within a year at least 1/2 of humanity would be dead, even if everyone knew up-front how to live like a caveman. Starvation, Disease (no medicines anymore), exposure (wanna live in a cave up in North Dakota? Me Neither, but all the ones in southern California are taken), dehydration (places like Las Vegas and Phoenix only exist because we can send a whole lot of water there), predation (from both animals and from really hungry humans), etc etc.

            I'm not even counting the wars that would immediately generate because of new scarcities like food, salt, firewood, and the like.

            By the by, the resource demands would certainly drop for things like petroleum, but they would rocket for things like plants (for food, clothing and fuel), animals (food and clothing), clean water (no modern sewage treatment anymore, and everybody taking a dump outside will eventually affect the local water table)... Also clean air would be hard to come by. Nobody wants to die of hypothermia, so everyone's gonna burn whatever wood and plants are handy come winter... this means way less trees to go around once everyone gets done stripping the forests for whatever they can lay hands on.

            The Gaia worshippers can talk a good game, but the stark fact is, you'd have to reduce the population to roughly 10% of what it is now in order to have any sort of sustainable hunter-gatherer type of lifestyle. This means 90% of everyone else has to go.

            (personally, I'd like to see that 90% eventually living in space colonies w/ Earth as one gigantic recreational park, but that's going to take some time...)

            /P

    • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pyat (303115) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:55PM (#22576752) Journal
      I'm not a lawyer either, but I had some law lectures during engineering school and one particular comment by the lecturer stuck with me and is quite apposite to your remark.

      He said "always follow the money". If someone doesn't have money, or at least insurance, don't waste your time and lawyers' fees suing them. Instead look for the richest parties who can be held responsible for the damage and sue them.

      I cannot comment myself on how valid my teacher's comments were, but he at least was a lawyer.

        • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Informative)

          by snarfer (168723) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:50PM (#22577528) Homepage
          Gore's house is entirely solar and wind now, FYI.
                    • Ok, so, a 15 kW fan will cost about $30,000. This includes the tower. If you place it properly, you'll get full-power for ~10 hours per day, so 150 kW/h. It will do so for the next twenty years with little if any maintenance. That's 1,095,000 kW/h for $30,000. That's $0.0274 per kW/h. Less than three cents.

                      All this, and NO TOXIC WASTE.

                      Go, propaganda.
                    • 1: A wind turbine needs space--air free of foliage or other debris that could damage it.
                      It goes up about 80 feet, so... check.

                      2: A wind turbine needs to be situated on real estate that actually gets wind.
                      It goes up about 80 feet, so... check.

                      3: You need to spend time (and by extension money) maintaining the conditions of my first point.
                      Right... once a year, trim some branches. Oh, the humanity.

                      4: The environmental cost of manufacturing & erecting the turbine.
                      Some aluminum tubes, some plexiglass vanes, and a simple motor. Check.

                      5: The environmental cost of disposing of the turbine at the end of its lifespan.
                      Less than toxic waste, heavy water, and radioactive gasses. Check.

                      6: The environmental cost on wildlife due to lost habitat.

                      Sixty four square feet. Check.

                      Seems fairly simple to me.

          • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by SacredByte (1122105) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @03:08PM (#22577772)
            Offsetting one's "carbon footprint" is just about the stupidest thing I've heard in awhile. Its called riding a bicycle. I do it (durring the summer, anyway). I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in a comfortable home (4 bedroom, 2.5 bath). Mr. Gore's home is several times the size of mine, and uses more electricity in a month than my home uses in a year.

            My comment was not meant to say "Gore does no good" but was meant to say "Gore says there are things you should do, like using fuel-efficient vehicles, and he doesn't even follow his own advice."

            I have absolutely no problem with someone telling me that they think I should so something--Like drive a fuel efficient car (I do BTW: 1994 Corola)--just as long as they follow their own advice. Mr. Gore does not but, as you say: Why let the facts get in the way?

          • Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Informative)

            by jejones (115979) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @03:09PM (#22577784) Journal
            Gore is chairman of Generation Investment Management, the company that he buys carbon offsets from (see here [billhobbs.com] for details), so he is paying himself.

      • Re:But they are targeting everyone! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Impy the Impiuos Imp (442658) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @03:14PM (#22577864) Journal
        See also: Brilliant plan by Democrats, announced today, to tax the profits of the evil oil companies.

        Quite frankly, if I were an oil company, and had politicians getting elected promising to ram a pitchfork up my ass, all the while they claim they're gonna decimate oil with alternative fuels, I'd be dragging ass too in constructing new oil pipelines, infrastructure, refineries, and the like, when, if said politicians have their way, much of that new stuff'll be useless in a few years as oil use decreases and thus you cannot recoup your billions.

        Screw that government and the people that elect it. Raise prices!

        Do not mark this flamebait. This is a serious analysis. That it upsets you, well, read my .sig.
  • ... coastal what?

  • The funny thing... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otter (3800) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:39PM (#22576482) Journal
    The funny thing is that villagers like these use enormous amounts of fuel and create tremendous pollution (per-capita, anyway) with their snowmobiles and poorly insulated houses. And how many times do you figure the lawyer pushing them into this suit has flown in from Boston?

    I do love the part where they're complaining that global warming is keeping them from hunting "whale, seal, walrus, and caribou". Maybe Leonardo diCaprio should make a movie about that!

    • re: The funny thing - Eskimo cars (Score:5, Funny)

      by z80kid (711852) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:25PM (#22577184)
      An Eskimo is driving when his car starts to make a noise. He takes it to the garage and the mechanic looks at it. "Hmm, looks like you've blown a seal."

      "No," says the Eskimo, "it's just frost on my mustache."

      ~~~
      (What the hell, I've got some karma to burn.)

  • More about money grubbing lawyers... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bagboy (630125) <neo AT arctic DOT net> on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:39PM (#22576498)
    than anything else. I live in Alaska and can tell you the driving force behind this is actually "The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment and the Native American Rights Fund -- plus six law firms." The natives in the village use gas-powered vehicles for transportation and (generator) electricity for their homes, suing the people who provide the source for those items.

    Shoot, why don't we all climb on board. Oh, wait - I drive a car to work and use natural gas to heat my home, plus electricity to power my net activities...
  • I've been working so hard to warm the planet up, with my CO2 belching truck, but the lack of sunspots has made this year the coldest and snowiest winter since the 1960s....

  • Enjoin the Sun (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Migraineman (632203) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:41PM (#22576540)
    I hope they enjoined the Sun as a co-defendant.

    The lawsuit invokes the federal common law of public nuisance, and every entity that contributes to the pollution problem harming Kivalina is liable
    If anything is substantially responsible for increasing the earth's temperature, it's that nuclear-reactor-in-the-sky.

  • "Alaskan Village" (Score:5, Informative)

    by ajs (35943) <ajsNO@SPAMajs.com> on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:42PM (#22576552) Homepage Journal
    The term might mislead some Slashdot readers. Please see:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Native_Claims_Settlement_Act [wikipedia.org]

    which established:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Native_Regional_Corporations [wikipedia.org]

    We're talking about the established tribal "village," which is a legal entity representing a group of natives for purposes of interacting with the Regional Corporations, not the traditional meaning of the word. The easiest comparison would be if you took recognized Native American tribes from the lower 48 and segmented them up into "villages" of roughly the size of a rural town.

  • How far back? (Score:4, Funny)

    by jamesl (106902) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:57PM (#22576778)
    Are they going to sue us back to the last ice age?

  • In other news... Exxon trying to nor pay damages (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Nexus7 (2919) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:05PM (#22576884)
    Exxon is presently trying to get the SCOTUS to overturn $2.5B punitive damages awarded to fishermen and other interests affected adversely by the Valdez spill (interesting story... drunk driver, I mean captain). Anyhow, it is related because punitive damages are weird.. they got $2.5B earlier, the court may reduce it, to what $1.25B? And Exxon wants to pay $0. How much is appropriate?

    At least in the oil spill, one defendant is involved, Exxon. In global warming, who is culpable, and to what extent? Who suffered, and what dollar amounts? And what is an appropriate punitive damages number? Adn think of the endless appeals.

  • speaking as an Alaskan (Score:4, Funny)

    by element-o.p. (939033) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:22PM (#22577122) Homepage
    I hope there IS global warming. This winter was frikken cold!

  • Climate Change. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MaWeiTao (908546) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @04:01PM (#22578624)
    The big push for at least a decade was that we were being threatened by global warming. The ice caps were going to melt, the seas were going to rise and who knows what else was going to come with that. All we hear about is some impending doom initiated by humanity. Except that it never actually arrives; it's always going to happen some day soon.

    On now that evidence is arising that discredits the notion of global warming the terms get switched around on us. So now it's climate change. The nice thing about this term is that it's so all-encompassing. Any time we get weather a bit out of the ordinary it's chalked up to be due to climate change, specifically man-made climate change.

    Last month is snowed lightly in Baghdad for the first time anyone can recall. You'd think so impressive an event would be covered more than it was. I eventually found a brief Agence France-Presse story about it. Predictably they stick a bit in there about how this was due to climate change. Like there's a set temperature for any spot on Earth.

    I guess the implication is that the Earth's climate has always been static. I can't help but think that Creationists should be the most ardent believers of man-made climate change given that they're convinced the Earth is only 6000 years old.

    Forecasters can barely predict the weather into next week and I'm supposed to accept has fact incomplete computer models that predict the weather in the next 50 or 100 years. More importantly, I'm supposed to subscribe to the belief that a global temperature increase is inherently a bad thing.

    A while ago I was reading about the history of Japan, specifically the Jomon period. It turns out that between 4000BC and 2000BC temperatures tended to be several degrees Celsius higher then they are today and the seas are believed to have been 5m higher. The fascinating part was that the people living in Japan at the time thrived during this era, having developed rice-paddy farming and government control. When the climate cooled the population of these people declined dramatically. This trend is reflected around the world. Europe endured famines in the 1300s during periods of cooling and glacial expansion.

    Unfortunately, it seems to be taboo to argue against man-made climate change. Any evidence critics put forward is dismissed off-hand. The double-standards are laughable. A believer will use a localized event as evidence of climate change. A critic does the same and their argument is discredited for being based on local weather.

    So now we have these eskimo pulling what is essentially a publicity stunt. Well, it's worse than that. Behind them are a pack of scumbag lawyers looking to line their pockets.

    • Re:Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bunratty (545641) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:39PM (#22576508)
      Of course. I always value the scientific opinion of the founder of The Weather Channel over the consensus of hundreds of climate scientists [wikipedia.org].

      • Re:Yes but... (Score:5, Informative)

        by ArcherB (796902) * on Wednesday February 27 2008, @01:46PM (#22576616) Journal

        Of course. I always value the scientific opinion of the founder of The Weather Channel over the consensus of hundreds of climate scientists.
        Would believe raw data?

        Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

        No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
        That's from HERE [dailytech.com]. They provide a nifty graph to go with it HERE [dailytech.com]

        It appears to me that those who said that the SUN was causing global warming due to increased sunspot activity, that has recently subsided, were correct. And all those scientist that claimed it was solely man made were wrong.

        Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

        • Re:Yes but... (Score:5, Informative)

          by jonnythan (79727) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:03PM (#22576854) Homepage
          NASA's GISS just said that 2007 was tied with 1998 for the second-warmest year in the past century.

          Their data also shows that I think 8 months of 2007 were warmer than the corresponding months in 2006 - and all months of 2007 were at least as warm as the corresponding months in 2000.

          • Re: Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by ArcherB (796902) * on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:19PM (#22577084) Journal
            I asked if you would believe raw data.
            You answered:

            Not in the absence of competence to interpret it.
            Then you say:

            Meanwhile both poles are melting faster than anyone feared.
            What TFA I linked says:

            Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
            What the Goddard Space Flight Center [nasa.gov] shows:

            While recent studies have shown that on the whole Arctic sea ice has decreased since the late 1970s, satellite records of sea ice around Antarctica reveal an overall increase in the southern hemisphere ice over the same period.
            Of course, it wouldn't be fair to bring up the opposing argument [guardian.co.uk] (from 2003):

            Australian scientists yesterday revealed new evidence of global warming, suggesting that sea ice around Antarctica had shrunk 20% in the past 50 years.
            So if decreasing sea ice proves global warming, wouldn't increasing sea ice DISprove global warming? I mean, I am not a climatologist and all, but I am a thinker.

            I'm not saying that the climate didn't change or isn't changing. It is always changing. I'm saying that it is natural, not man made and that the "hockey stick" predictions of future climate models were dead wrong.

              • Re: Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)

                by ncc74656 (45571) * <slashdot@alfterCOFFEE.us minus caffeine> on Wednesday February 27 2008, @03:11PM (#22577826) Homepage Journal

                "Climate change" means that we will see more extreme weather, including more regional snowfall in some places. So yes, more snowfall in North America actually shows that global warming IS occurring.

                ...and now we get to the core of the Grünsturmabteilung's argument: the unfalsifiable hypothesis. It's the intellectual equivalent of "heads we win, tails you lose." What's next? Are you going to tell us that anthropogenic global warming turned you into a newt, but that you got better?

      • Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by RobertM1968 (951074) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @02:24PM (#22577162) Homepage Journal

        The simple facts that elude everyone on each side of this argument (regardless of which side is correct) are:

        • As a species, we should be trying to make our technology be as harmonious with nature (and it's built in checks and balances) as possible to avoid creating these or similar issues (thus, drastically or even not so drastically but still noticeably changing the composition of our atmosphere is "probably" not a good idea).
        • Humans live better, longer and with less health issues when breathing a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere - unpolluted with CO emissions and such other byproducts (regardless of which are possible causes of global warming)
        • While trees may thrive in an atmosphere with higher CO2 levels, humans don't. And with the amount of deforestation we do, increasing CO2 levels for the sake of plants is not the solution... keeping them at a balanced level to support animal and plant life would be far more wiser (in conjunction with proper care of our plant kingdon).

        It does baffle me that instead of looking at the other valid reasons (and I listed only a few that quickly came to mind) people dismiss this "issue" because it is possibly targeting the wrong problem created by the issue. Lowering emissions is still just as relevant simply to maintain a clean, properly balanced atmosphere... anyone remember SanFran a few decades ago? It is obvious we can make a difference in our environment - negative or positive - but it is up to us to choose - and pretending CO2 and CO emissions aren't a problem simply because they may not cause global warming; when we know they do cause various other health and environmental problems is not the step in the right direction.

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