Alaska village alleges climate change cover up by Exxon and other energy companies

The battle between some of the world's most powerful energy companies and an Alaska village that's losing ground to climate change heads to federal appeals court on Monday.

Nine Kivalina residents, having survived the recent mega-storm that walloped western Alaska, will be at the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to watch their lawyers argue that ExxonMobil Corp., BP, ConocoPhillips and other corporate Goliaths owe the village at least $95 million in damages.

A key Kivalina argument charges that the energy companies are engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the link between their emissions and the earth's warming temperatures. A similar argument proved pivotal decades ago in helping smokers prevail in court against tobacco giants.

The Northwest Alaska village lost the first round of its lawsuit in 2009, when a U.S. District Court dismissed it, saying climate-change pollution needs to be regulated by Congress and the administration, not courts. The village lacked standing, the court said, because it could not show the companies' emissions caused the erosion threatening the village.

But Kivalina is optimistic this time around.

"What we have going for us is the science is changing by the day," and the causal connection between greenhouse-gas emissions and the climate is clarifying, said Heather Kendall-Miller, an attorney for Kivalina and head of the Alaska office of the Native American Rights Fund.

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Finding a new home

The quarter-mile-long rock revetment, installed in 2009 by the Army Corps, will buy the village an estimated 10 to 15 years before it must move.

But in 2019, what then?
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The village is trying to find a new site where it can rebuild, out of harm's way. But when it does, how will it pay to build a school, homes and other facilities, and to scrape roads and an airstrip on the tundra?

That's where the lawsuit comes in. Moving could cost between $95 million and $400 million, according to figures from the Army Corps of Engineers and the General Accountability Office. That's at least $350,000 to $1.4 million for each village resident.

The city and tribe hope their lawsuit -- Kivalina v. ExxonMobil -- forces about 20 of the world's largest oil, power and coal companies to cough up the cash.

The village has prevailed against industry before. In 2008, with legal help from the San Francisco-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, Kivalina forced mining giant Teck-Cominco to settle a lawsuit and spend $120 million on a pipeline to protect drinking water.

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