Climate Change, Oil Development Threaten Alaska's Polar Bears

By Jennie Gosché, Alaska Wilderness League

27 July 20

n late 2019, before the world was completely upended by the COVID-19 pandemic, I was presented a last-minute chance to photograph polar bears outside one of the northernmost villages in the United States — Kaktovik, Alaska. It was an opportunity I couldn't refuse, and as the COVID-19 pandemic now stretches into summer 2020, I'm grateful I accepted.

Kaktovik is an Inupiat native village of around 250 people on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, located on barrier islands at the edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. My first trip there took place in September 2016, and I traveled with the purpose to photograph the threatened Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear population. The coastal region of the Arctic Refuge in fall is a special place to photograph these magnificent animals, as they congregate on dirt and sand spits of land waiting for the winter ice of the Beaufort Sea to make its way to the Alaska shore.

During the late summer and early fall, Inupiat boat owners from Kaktovik guide "tourist" photographers out to view polar bears from a safe distance in the placid lagoon adjacent to the raging waves of the Beaufort Sea. I joined one such group of photographers led by Hugh Rose, a professional photographer and geologist who lives in Fairbanks, and we took a short charter flight from Deadhorse to Kaktovik, landing in a morning snowstorm. But by afternoon, the sun was out and we had three and a half days of sunshine that combined with the ice and snow to create great conditions in which to photograph polar bears.

We were out in the lagoon twice a day, breaking only for lunch at our hotel, the modest but welcoming Waldo Arms Hotel owned by Walt "Waldo" Audi and Merlyn Trainer — one of only two options for places to stay in Kaktovik when visiting. The boat guides are skilled, and they have to be, because knowledge and awareness of depths in the lagoon is critical to prevent a boat from getting stuck in shallow water.

This trip we were in a boat with a heated cabin, a perk since we were there later in the season. Our boat driver, however, told us that at that very same time the previous year, the lagoon was completely frozen over. He shared this as we floated on the lagoon in open water, though ice was visible in places and we occasionally heard pieces rubbing against the hull of the metal boat.

With rapidly rising temperatures, increases in wildfires, thawing permafrost, receding glaciers, eroding coastlines and disappearing sea ice, Alaska and the Arctic are on the front lines of climate change. It has hit Alaska's rural communities and Alaska Native villages especially hard, including villages like Kaktovik. Warming waters and the disappearing Arctic ice cap are also impacting ocean life, from plankton to polar bears to whales. And the decline in sea ice is making it increasingly unsafe for humans and wildlife to travel across it to hunt marine mammals like seals, walrus and bowhead whales.

The Inupiat are primarily subsistence hunters and whalers, harvesting whales each summer (in addition to caribou and other wildlife), the meat from which is shared by the entire village. It is a staple of their diet and has been for thousands of years, but as temperatures warm, the lack of ice combined with changes in whale migration patterns and timing could make hunting progressively more difficult.

The Inupiat share their whale meat with the polar bears, something they have done for many years. This gesture provides much needed food for polar bears, especially as they spend longer periods of time on land due to the receding sea ice. When I visited Kaktovik in 2016, my most memorable photo is of a cub on top of whale bones, shaking what looks like animal skin in its mouth.

As I returned to the village in late 2019, however, they had moved the bone pile away from the lagoon to an area off-limits to tourists. I was told the bone pile now only stays on land for a short time, and then the bones are pushed into the ocean. Eventually, this change could affect the overall health of the Southern Beaufort Sea polar bears, as many of them increasingly den on land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and utilize the shared whale meat for sustenance during the summer and early fall before they enter their maternal birthing dens in November.

Which brings me back to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as wild a place as any other on Earth but one also under threat of oil and gas development. While in Kaktovik I learned that there is not a consensus in the village on the question of allowing oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Climate change and impacts to wildlife are serious concerns, so much so that more than 60 village residents signed a petition in 2017 opposing drilling on the Arctic Refuge coastal plain.

Helping to prevent development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a place that supports the greatest variety of plant and animal life in the entire circumpolar north — is very important to me, not least of all because the U.S. government has admitted it simply doesn't have enough information about the impacts of oil and gas development on the coastal plain to protect its wildlife and other values. Oil drilling will compound the devastating climate impacts already being felt by villages in the region, increasing carbon emissions, worsening climate pollution and further harming front line communities.

Especially now, in the midst of an uncertain present and looking forward to an uncertain future, we need to press pause on Arctic Refuge development. Instead of recklessly rushing ahead, more research over extended periods of time is needed so that we can fully understand the potential impact oil drilling will have on local villages, our climate and wildlife like the majestic polar bear.

What Joe Biden's Climate Plan Really Signals

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

26 July 20

hen Joe Biden issued his extensive climate plan last week, there were endless analyses, including mostly positive reviews like those from the energy expert Julian Brave NoiseCat, who called it “a Green New Deal in our view, substantively,” and the Sunrise Movement, which had graded Biden’s primary-season plan an F, but now says that he’s “talking the talk,” and that a post-election mobilization will insure that he’ll “walk the walk.” The main opposition came from President Trump, who insisted that Biden, in his zeal for energy efficiency, had called for abolishing windows.

I don’t want to go deeply into the details of the plan here, because chances are that few of the proposals will get enacted in their precise form, but they seem a truly useful compendium of the mainstream and obvious ideas for an energy and conservation transition. And they provide a good roadmap by which to steer, even if that map avoids the most controversial areas of the debate. (The plan is especially quiet about the efforts that will be necessary to limit mining and drilling for fossil fuels.) The best way to understand them, I think, is as a loud signal in the ever-louder conversation among élites about the trajectory and the pace of that transition.

Non-élites—members of activist movements and renewable-energy engineers—have built the pressure. Assuming that Trump exits next year, and that high-level climate denial goes with him, that pressure will do what pressure does: finally start to make things pop. A big signal comes from the investment community, where banks have started announcing major losses in the hydrocarbon sector. Wells Fargo, for instance, said that forty-seven per cent of its nonperforming corporate loans last quarter were in the three per cent of its deal book devoted to oil and gas. News like that dramatically ups the odds that, say, a Federal Reserve under Biden might increase capital requirements for oil loans. Indeed, earlier this week, a consortium of investors with nearly a trillion dollars in assets urged the Fed to “explicitly integrate climate change across your mandates,” in particular, by providing more information about the financial risks that global warming now presents. On Monday, Morgan Stanley announced that it would rate all its investments for their climate impact—on the one hand, that puts off the necessary end of those investments, but it’s probably also a first signal of acquiescence to reality. And, of course, as big money starts to edge away from the industry, politicians feel less need to do its bidding.

I think we’ve already reached the point where it’s clear that real change is finally coming, and that fossil fuel’s main hope is to slow and shape that change. (Above all, as I wrote last week, the industry is hopeful that natural gas has a future, though new scientific findings and technologies seem to be closing in on even that facet of the business.) The crucial job of activists, then, is to always be demanding that we move faster.

If you want a really powerful signal, one came last week from Teen Vogue, which published an op-ed encouraging young people to not open accounts with banks that are reckless with the planet. (The authors’ “Not My Dirty Money” pledge can be found here.) Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg and fellow climate strikers sent an open letter to the European Union. (I am among the tens of thousands of people who signed onto it.) It says, “You must stop pretending that we can solve the climate and ecological crisis without treating it as a crisis.” Just the right signal, reminding politicians that a devastated climate is not merely an excuse for a jobs program, and at just the right volume. And if signals don’t replace action they do usually precede it—so consider this season a relatively hopeful one.

Passing the Mic

Passing the mic is difficult for me this week, because I can barely even sit up in bed. I fell off my two-wheeled, low-carbon transit device on Thursday, and managed to break six ribs and a shoulder blade, and incurred a severely separated shoulder. I’ve been in the hospital since, and that’s why this newsletter is shorter than usual. I am enormously grateful for all the get-well e-mails; they are a surprisingly good anesthetic. And, although it’s a pretty self-absorbed thing to do, perhaps I can refer you to a letter that I sent my colleagues in the climate movement last week, explaining my plans to do more mic-passing in the years to come.

Climate School

Important news from Al Gore, who has rallied a bunch of hard-chargers in the tech world behind plans for Climate TRACE, which stands for Tracking Real-time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions. The platform “will leverage advanced A.I., satellite-image processing, machine learning, and land- and sea-based sensors to do what was previously thought to be nearly impossible: monitor G.H.G. emissions from every sector and in every part of the world. Our work will be extremely granular in focus—down to specific power plants, ships, factories.” That data will be incredibly powerful: think C.S.I. for carbon.

From time to time, one hears from people contending that the “real cause” of climate change, and all other troubles, is overpopulation. The thinking is sometimes racist, but almost as often, I think, it’s rooted in a leftover understanding of demographic trends. Given a choice, women in most parts of the world are deciding to have far fewer kids than they used to, and the new projections for population circa 2100 are fascinating. It won’t be easy for policymakers to deal with a Japan that is half its present size, but doing so shouldn’t be impossible, either. Japan, after all, was half its present size less than a century ago.

Scoreboard

Even though writers hate to admit it, sometimes a picture (from a really talented photographer) is worth more than words. I’d read often that the enormous Lake Chilwa, in Malawi, is drying out more frequently because of climate change, but it took this image from reader Chris Dawe to really drive that reality home.

Warming Up

There are weeks when one really needs some uplift. That must be why Bill Withers recorded his concert at Carnegie Hall, in 1972.