The lawyers are trying to do to carbon what they did to asbestos, silicone, lead and tobacco: bankrupt every single corporation that was ever involved with it. Asbestos and lead were gold mines for these people because the stuff was ubiquitous. Carbon, the basis for all life on this planet, will make those early attempts at enrichment look amateurish. And just wait until the EPA files its own regulations on CO2 – the pounding of pig hooves rushing to the trough will drown out all voices of reason.
Kivalina, an Inupiat Eskimo village of 400 perched on a barrier island north of the Arctic Circle, is accusing two dozen fuel and utility companies of helping to cause the climate change that it says is accelerating the island’s erosion.
Blocks of sea ice used to protect the town’s fragile coast from October on, but “we don’t have buildup right now, and it is January,” said Janet Mitchell, Kivalina’s administrator. “We live in anxiety during high-winds seasons.”
The village wants the companies, including ExxonMobil,Shell Oil, and many others, to pay the costs of relocating to the mainland, which could amount to as much as $400 million.
The case is one of three major lawsuits filed by environmental groups, private lawyers and state officials around the nation against big producers of heat-trapping gases. And though the village faces a difficult battle, the cases are gathering steam.
In recent months, two federal appeals courts reversed decisions by federal district courts to dismiss climate-change lawsuits, allowing the cases to go forward. InConnecticut, environmental lawyers joined forces with attorneys general of eight states and the City of New York seeking a court order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In Mississippi, Gulf Coast property owners claim that industry-produced emissions that contribute to climate change increased the potency of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
And although a federal judge in Oakland, Calif., dismissed the Kivalina suit in October, the village is appealing the decision.
Tracy D. Hester, who has taught a course in climate lawsuits at the University of Houstonlaw school, said that with the issues “very much in play” in three circuits of the federal court system, “the game pieces are being set for eventual Supreme Court review.”
The cases need not even get that far to have an impact, said James E. Tierney, the director of the National State Attorneys General program at Columbia Law School. Kivalina alleged in its complaint that the industry conspired “to suppress the awareness of the link” between emissions and climate change through “front groups, fake citizens organizations and bogus scientific bodies.”
It’s notable that the Eskimos bringing this Alaskan suit live on a barrier island, by definition a temporary, always moving geological structure. If they can win damages for the result of living on earth, who can’t?
and the worst are filled with a clamoring intensity or something like that…call joan didion
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/meanwhile-back-at-the-madoff-ponzi-scheme/
There is a limit to what Magical Thinking can pay for. The oil companies must pick up the tab for the rest.
What was done to asbestos was a good thing. Too many good men died because it killed them. And at least one town, Libby, MT, is about to become significantly less populated due to the vermiculite mine in town.
Asbestos bad – yes. What happened though was the lawyers went out and sued, and bankrupted every corporation that ever owned (in one case, for two seconds as a company bought a conglomerate and immediately sold the branch that had asbestos in its past) or had any part in the industry. Then they phoneyed up claims (some asbestos lawyers are in jail for that, long after the fact), etc. My point is not that some asbestos victims aren’t worthy of compensation but rather, trial lawyers, freed to sue the entire world of business for emitting carbon, will bring the economy down to its knees.