BBC: Wikileaks cables reveal int’l rush to stake mineral claims in Arctic Ocean.
(Missed this earlier today, here’s a late day tracker getaway special for the weekend)
What!? An ice free north pole within two years?!! That outlier projection is just one of the amazements in a BBC report today by Meirion Jones and Susan Watts as ministers from Arctic nations gather to discuss climate, sovereignty, trade, and shipping routes as Arctic ocean sea ice volume, and extent, continues to plummet.
Jones and Watts base much of the story on US embassy cables, released as part of Wikileaks’s roll out of a trove it obtained last year. But they also phoned around and learned a great deal more about what the serious money, both governmental and resource industry-related, jockeying for play and leverage in the expected transformation of what so recently was a forbidding sea of thick ice and lost expeditions, and where the ravenous appetites belonged more to polar bears than to captains of industry.
Aside from the continuing melancholic signs of a world sliding inexorably into conditions unseen on Earth for hundreds of millennia, one wonders if we’re seeing a wedge penetrating conservative, Chamber of Commerce, American Enterprise Institute, Fox New etc. reflexive doubt about the reality of global warming. It is one thing to reject the fact of it because of gut disgust for international actions, against climate change or anything, that might crimp free market and private property freedoms not to mention American exceptionalism and sovereignty. It’s quite another for the same class of people to see business opportunities that foreign corporations might get, and military advantages that foreign navies might seize, and sovereignties to be surrendered, if the US does not move fast up northward from Barrow, Alaska. But to act, one implicitly concedes the Arctic is warming and losing ice at an accelerating rate. Reality bites. Somebody call around. Professors of all things Arctic are surely standing by. There is reporting to be done.
Hmmm. I can’t think of any, but I wonder if ocean acidification will somehow open new markets for hedge fund managers to leverage? That’d be another compulsive change of tune for the moneyed, unscientific classes.
Other Wikileaks & Arctic Stories:
- Independent (UK) Shaun Walker: Revealed: the secret battle for the riches of the Arctic ;
- Globe and Mail (Canada) Colin Freeze : Harper’s hard line on Arctic softens among U.S.envoys: leaked cables ;
- PostMedia News via Vancouver Sun – Randy Boswell: U.S. agreed to hold off on Arctic sovereignty claim during 2008 election ;
Other Arctic Council meeting stories:
Stars and Stripes – John Vandiver:Arctic pact may herald cooperation in region ;- Speaking of that wedge thing I supposed above…The Washington Times – Gen. Joe Ralston: From sea to shining sea to Arctic Ocean / Sovereignty issues and energy opportunities can no longer be ignored.
- Washington Post – Joby Warrick: As Clinton works against global warming in Greenland, some there don’t mind it ;
Grist for the Mill: Arctic Council Press Info ;
- Charlie Petit
