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| Mon, 2nd Aug 2021 15:26:00 |
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Climate crisis has cost Colorado billions - now it wants oil firms to pick up the bill |
ExxonMobil and Suncor face lawsuits in the western state but big oil’s apologists say the US consumer is to blame for emissions
Supported by
guardian.org
About this content
Chris McGreal in Gold Hill, Colorado
Mon 2 Aug 2021 11.00 BST
More than a decade after the Fourmile Canyon blaze drove even the firefighters out of Gold Hill, blackened hillsides and scorched trees attest to the Colorado mountain town’s close shave with destruction.
“Because of the wind and the dryness, it took off,” said Chris Finn, who volunteers as the town’s fire chief when he’s not running the local inn. “That day in 2010, I felt that my business and my house might not be here any more.”
Gold Hill’s few hundred residents fled as the fire moved along the ridge above a town that began life as a mining camp during the 1859 gold rush. The firefighters followed when they could not stop the flames swallowing scores of homes.
By the time it was extinguished, the Fourmile blaze had destroyed 169 houses, the most by any wildfire in Colorado history. But that record was broken less than two years later, and then again within days, as the pace of fires picked up.
Gold Hill was once again surrounded by flames last year, which saw a record number of wildfires in Colorado. Now, Finn is bracing for another season of record-breaking fires.
“I’ve lived up here my whole life. You can see the change in the weather,” said Finn.
The 65-year-old fire chief paused in the garden of his modest wooden house.
“I hope that my grandson can be sitting here when he’s my age,” he said.
Finn’s nagging fear that Gold Hill is living on borrowed time is replicated across western states ravaged by some of the most intense wildfires in modern American history. But angst about the immediate threat is accompanied by increasingly urgent questions for communities on the frontline of the climate crisis about the long-term financial cost of survival – who should foot the bill?
Gold Hill has received a state grant to thin out the forest around the town in the hope of slowing if not stopping future fires. But that is a fraction of the cost that the surrounding county says it will take to deal with the impact of global heating.
Boulder county estimates it will cost taxpayers $100m over the next three decades just to adapt transport and drainage systems to the climate crisis, and reduce the risk from wildfires.
The county government says the bill should be paid by those who drove the crisis – the oil companies that spent decades covering up and misrepresenting the warnings from climate scientists. It is suing the US’s largest oil firm, ExxonMobil, and Suncor, a Canadian company with its US headquarters in Colorado, to require that they “use their vast profits to pay their fair share of what it will cost a community to deal with the problem the companies created”.
Boulder county, alongside similar lawsuits by the city of Boulder and San Miguel county in the south-west of the state, accuse the companies of deceptive trade practices and consumer fraud because their own scientists warned them of the dangers of burning of fossil fuels but the firms suppressed evidence of a growing climate crisis. The lawsuits also claim that as the climate emergency escalated, companies funded front groups to question the science in order to keep selling oil.
“It is far more difficult to change it now than it would have been if the companies had been honest about what they knew 30 or 50 years ago,” said Marco Simons, general counsel for Earth Rights International, which is handling the lawsuit for the county. “That is probably the biggest tragedy here. Communities in this country and around the world were essentially robbed of their options.”
Boulder county’s lawsuit contends that annual temperatures in Colorado will rise between 3.5F and 6.5F by 2050 and imperil the state’s economy, including farming and the ski industry.
Extremes of weather are already melting the mountain snowpack, causing increased evaporation and a shortfall in the amount of water flowing down the region’s most important river, the Colorado, which supplies drinking water to the state’s largest cities and irrigation all the way to California and Arizona.
Micah Parkin, founder of an environmental coalition, 350 Colorado, moved to Boulder from New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
“We decided to move to higher ground knowing hurricanes are getting more intense, sea levels are rising,” she said.
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