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Arctic rush freezes out enviros
A glacier seen from the Ice Fjord on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Temperatures in the Arctic region are rising twice as fast as elsewhere on the planet, posing a serious threat to the ecosystem. Picture taken on August 23rd, 2007.
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Bob Moon: I tend to think of the Arctic as a big lump of melting ice. But it's actually packed with natural resources, and it seems destined to become the next frontier
-- to exploit.
Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper took an excursion up near the top of the world today. And just this week, Denmark laid out its "Arctic Strategy." Recently, the U.S. gave Shell Oil its blessing to drill off the Alaskan coast.
The list goes on, and there's fear all these competing geopolitical and economic interests
are drowning out environmental concerns for the region. Marketplace's Adriene Hill tells us why interest in the Arctic is heating up.
Adriene Hill: The Arctic is hot these days, or at least getting warmer. Global warming is causing Arctic ice to melt, and that melting is creating the potential for a high-stakes, big-money, geo-political battle over which countries have sovereignty over what -- and which companies will profit.
There's:
Charles Ebinger: The prospect of oil and gas exploration on a tremendous scale.
Charles Ebinger is a senior fellow at Brookings. He says there's also:
Ebinger: The prospect for potential new maritime routes.
But the political and economic interests aren't the only ones gearing up for a fight over the Arctic's resources.
Brendan Cummings: In all honesty, these are difficult times to be an environmentalist pushing for protection of any landscape.
Brendan Cummings is senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity.
Cummings: There seems to be bipartisan consensus to ignore the climate crisis and proceed with drilling.
He says the Arctic faces a whole bunch of environmental issues, from new and proposed oil and gas exploration and from ongoing global warming. The best way for environmental groups to fight, he says, may be in the courts. But they've got a big battle in front of them.
Cummings: I guess it takes being an optimist is to say the future is uncertain. All signs are bad.
I ask Brooking's fellow Ebinger for his assessment.
Hill: Do you think that the environmentalists maybe have lost this fight?
Ebinger: No, no, no, I don't think the environmentalists have lost at all.
He says a lot of it depends on what happens in the region -- how quickly things change. As people start hearing more and thinking more about the problem, he expects environmental forces will gain momentum.
I'm Adriene Hill for Marketplace.
Yes soot speeds up the melting process as does global warming... There are more pressing problems concerning territorial rights & how to best manage the chaos this melting will create. Human kind could learn from past disasters caused by big oil companies disregarding the local indigenous people as well as the earth. The wheels are turning so let's not roll over and play dead. . . GET INVOLVED IT's YOUR PLANET TOO!!
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Soot causes the arctic ice to melt? Did you listen to that in your head before posting it?
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Michael Kelley 08/25/2011
A correction: the arctic ice melt has been shown to be mainly caused by soot
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So Sta, eureka, Euripides. So all-s we got to do now for a *North West Passage* is to outlaw all scrubbers that take the soot out of our diesel locomotives, diesel trucks, etc. Soon we can sail our Japanese Whalers straight into Greenland just long enough to rev-up the economy. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Soot Man. You have saved our town and its all-American basketball team.
It's a bird.
It's a plane.
It's Soot Man
!
This bemoans a sad lack of imagination and will by the various governments of developed nations of the world. This zeal for Arctic exploration is short-sighted, and will not only destroy the arctic through the not-so-environmentally friendly drilling practices of oil companies (see BP), the utter lack of experience of oil companies drilling in the sub-zero arctic deep which presents whole new challenges, but will do nothing for providing an energy infrastructure that can be used to fuel tomorrow's economy. This is the same old story, and it's sad that we have such narrow-minded greedy people running our country.
And, @ Michael Kelley:
Soot causes the arctic ice to melt? Did you listen to that in your head before posting it?
A correction: the arctic ice melt has been shown to be mainly caused by soot, not by global warming. Perhaps this is part of the reason that environmentalists are being ignored: The fakery and exageration which has characterized their campaigns has damaged their credibility to the extent that nothing they say is believable.
