Climate Change Denial - Kivalina V. ExxonMobil

Kivalina V. ExxonMobil

On February 26, 2008, attorneys for the Native American Rights Fund and the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment brought suit against ExxonMobil Corporation and two dozen other members of the energy lobby, including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell. The complaint sought to recover damages for the destruction of Kivalina, Alaska, a village which "is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate." Kivalina v. ExxonMobil was reported to be the first climate-change lawsuit with "a discretely identifiable victim." The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined in 2006 that Kivalina residents would be forced to relocate, at a minimum cost of US$95m, as soon as 2016. According to Stephan Faris, a writer for The Atlantic, the Kivalina suit accuses ExxonMobil et al. of

"... conspiring to cover up the threat of man-made climate change, in much the same way the tobacco industry tried to conceal the risks of smoking — by using a series of think tanks and other organizations to falsely sow public doubt in an emerging scientific consensus."

The suit was dismissed by the United States district court for the Northern District of California on September 30, 2009, on grounds that "the law suit raised non-justiciable political questions and that the plaintiffs did not have standing, because their harm was not fairly traceable to the defendants’ conduct." An appeal was filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and rejected in September 2012.