Climate change is now an undeniable reality for the oil industry. It threatens their reputations, their business models, and in some cases, the actual physical infrastructure they’ve built to extract all that oil in the first place.
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Polar bears are technically the largest land carnivore on earth. But they’re also marine mammals. And in the last couple of decades the Arctic sea ice has begun to vanish out from under them. So, they are spending more time on land. Nowhere is this more visible than in the tiny Alaska Native village of Kaktovik, on the Arctic coast. And while we hear a lot of alarm about how vulnerable polar bears are to climate change, in Kaktovik, changing ice conditions have created something different: too many bears.
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For years, fishermen in Alaska have worried that climate change would threaten their livelihoods. Now, it has. In late 2013, a strikingly warm mass of water arrived in the Gulf of Alaska and stayed for three years. Scientists called it “the blob.” Fishermen started to notice a drastic drop in the population of cod- an unassuming fish that’s been an economic powerhouse for the community of Kodiak. As fishermen struggle to adjust to the lowest cod numbers on record, scientists are asking if it’s a preview of what’s to come as the ocean warms.
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Which side is Lisa Murkowski on? Alaska’s senior senator faces an impossible balancing act: How to reconcile her state’s dependence on the oil industry with the fact that Alaska is extremely vulnerable to climate change. She says we need to reduce carbon emissions but remains an ardent advocate for more oil production. She straddles both sides of the debate. But in her straddling, she also represents us all: how do we come to terms with our dependence on the very products that are threatening the globe?
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The Alaska Native village of Newtok is disappearing. It’s rapidly losing ground to a combination of thawing permafrost and coastal erosion and residents worry their traditional way of life could disappear with the land. Newtok’s residents are some of the first Americans to face this problem, but they won’t be the last. And their predicament raises the question: What do we owe communities in the path of climate change?
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