Climate bill stalls, but hope lingers in Alaska villages

Newsminer.com (Fairbanks, Alaska): Nuiqsut resident Rosemary Ahtuangaruak was in Washington last week for the short-lived debate in the U.S. Senate about climate change legislation. A much-hyped bill to drastically cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and limit the effects of climate change suffered a quick death on the Senate floor Friday after Democrats from oil producing states joined Republicans in voting against allowing the legislation to advance.

Ahtuangaruak, the former mayor of Nuiqsut and a board member of the Inupiat Community of Arctic Slope, said she’s optimistic Congress will set a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions sooner rather than later…. “We are going to come out with a progressive plan that will help us,” Ahtuangaruak said Thursday. “If we don’t, I don’t want to think about it.”

…Nuiqsut and the whole of the North Slope are on the front line of global warming, with rising temperatures bringing changes to the environment that threaten the Inupiat’s traditional subsistence culture, Ahtuangaruak said. “We had rain in November a few years ago for the first time,” she said.

Unseasonably warm temperatures have weakened ice during the spring and fall hunting, making travel more hazardous and shrinking hunting seasons. The loss of sea ice means the marine mammals the Inupiat depend on are harder to find...

That red dot is on Nuiqsut. Map by Seth Ilys, Wikimedia Commons, released under the GNU Free Documentation License