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It's a record-breaking moment. As Dahr Jamail, author of The End of Ice, pointed out recently at Truthout, amid the planet's warmest July on record, Alaska's sea ice disappeared -- just melted away for the first time in recorded history. There's none within 150 miles of the Alaskan coast in an Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Like the Amazon rain forest, Arctic forests and peat bogs have also been burning, putting vast plumes of smoke into space for dramatic satellite photographs.
Consider all this a signal that humanity is entering a new age. And speaking of Alaska, it wasn't just that the temperatures in March (March!) were 20 degrees warmer than usual or that, in July, those in Anchorage, the state capital, rivaled Miami's, but that the wildfire season, which usually ends in the first days of August, continues today. With 200 wildfires still active, the state's Department of Natural Resources officially extended that season to September 30th amid unprecedented dryness. In other words, the Epoch of the Great Meltdown is already underway.
As in all catastrophic situations, though many will suffer, vultures are on the scene, too, eager to benefit from the carnage. In response to that reality, TomDispatchregular Michael Klare, author of the all-too-appropriately titled book All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change (to be published in November), turns his attention to the burning Arctic and those very vultures. While officially denying anything of significance is going on, they couldn't be more intent on taking full advantage of the ever-grimmer situation in the Far North and, in the process, will only ensure that the planet heats yet more. Tom
The Pompeo Doctrine
How to Seize the Arctic's Resources, Now Accessible Due to Climate Change (Just Don't Mention Those Words!)
By Michael T. KlareDonald Trump got the headlines as usual -- but don't be fooled. It wasn't Trumpism in action this August, but what we should all now start referring to as the Pompeo Doctrine. Yes, I'm referring to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and, when it comes to the Arctic region, he has a lot more than buying Greenland on his mind.
In mid-August, as no one is likely to forget, President Trump surprised international observers by expressing an interest in purchasing Greenland, a semi-autonomous region of Denmark. Most commentators viewed the move as just another example of the president's increasingly erratic behavior. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen termed the very notion of such a deal "absurd," leading Trump, in an outburst of pique, to call her comments "nasty" and cancel a long-scheduled state visit to Copenhagen.
A deeper look at that incident and related administration moves, however, suggests quite a different interpretation of what's going on, with immense significance for the planet and even human civilization. Under the prodding of Mike Pompeo, the White House increasingly views the Arctic as a key arena for future great-power competition, with the ultimate prize being an extraordinary trove of valuable resources, including oil, natural gas, uranium, zinc, iron ore, gold, diamonds, and rare earth minerals. Add in one more factor: though no one in the administration is likely to mention the forbidden term "climate change" or "climate crisis," they all understand perfectly well that global warming is what's making such a resource scramble possible.
This isn't the first time that great powers have paid attention to the Arctic. That region enjoyed some strategic significance during the Cold War period, when both the United States and the Soviet Union planned to use its skies as passageways for nuclear-armed missiles and bombers dispatched to hit targets on the other side of the globe. Since the end of that era, however, it has largely been neglected. Frigid temperatures, frequent storms, and waters packed with ice prevented most normal air and maritime travel, so -- aside from the few Indigenous peoples who had long adapted to such conditions -- who would want to venture there?
Climate change is, however, already altering the situation in drastic ways: temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet, melting parts of the polar ice cap and exposing once-inaccessible waters and islands to commercial development. Oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered in offshore areas previously (but no longer) covered by sea ice most of the year. Meanwhile, new mining opportunities are emerging in, yes, Greenland! Worried that other countries, including China and Russia, might reap the benefits of such a climate-altered landscape, the Trump administration has already launched an all-out drive to ensure American dominance there, even at the risk of future confrontation and conflict.
The scramble for the Arctic's resources was launched early in this century when the world's major energy firms, led by BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Russian gas giant Gazprom, began exploring for oil and gas reserves in areas only recently made accessible by retreating sea ice. Those efforts gained momentum in 2008, after the U.S. Geological Survey published a report, Circum-Arctic Resources Appraisal, indicating that as much as one-third of the world's undiscovered oil and gas lay in areas north of the Arctic Circle. Much of this untapped fossil fuel largess was said to lie beneath the Arctic waters adjoining Alaska (that is, the United States), Canada, Greenland (controlled by Denmark), Norway, and Russia -- the so-called "Arctic Five."
Under existing international law, codified in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal nations possess the right to exploit undersea resources up to 200 nautical miles from their shoreline (and beyond if their continental shelf extends farther than that). The Arctic Five have all laid claim to "exclusive economic zones" (EEZs) in those waters or, in the case of the United States (which has not ratified UNCLOS), announced its intention to do so. Most known oil and gas reserves are found within those EEZs, although some are thought to be in overlapping or even contested areas beyond that 200-mile limit, including the polar region itself. Whoever owns Greenland, of course, possesses the right to develop its EEZ.
For the most part, the Arctic Five have asserted their intent to settle any disputes arising from contested claims through peaceful means, the operating principle behind the formation in 1996 of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental organization for states with territory above the Arctic Circle (including the Arctic Five, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden). Meeting every two years, it provides a forum in which, at least theoretically, leaders of those countries and the Indigenous peoples living there can address common concerns and work towards cooperative solutions -- and it had indeed helped dampen tensions in the region. In recent years, however, isolating the Arctic from mounting U.S. (and NATO) hostilities toward Russia and China or from the global struggle over vital resources has proven increasingly difficult. By May 2019, when Pompeo led an American delegation to the council's most recent meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, hostility and the urge to grab future resources had already spilled into the open.
Reaping the Arctic's Riches
Usually a forum for anodyne statements about international cooperation and proper environmental stewardship, the lid was blown off the latest Arctic Council meeting in May when Pompeo delivered an unabashedly martial and provocative speech that deserves far more attention than it got at the time. So let's take a little tour of what may prove a historic proclamation (in the grimmest sense possible) of a new Washington doctrine for the Far North.
"In its first two decades, the Arctic Council has had the luxury of focusing almost exclusively on scientific collaboration, on cultural matters, on environmental research," the secretary of state began mildly. These were, he said, "all important themes, very important, and we should continue to do those. But no longer do we have that luxury. We're entering a new age of strategic engagement in the Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate, and to all of our interests in that region."
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