“Mapping Claims to the Spoils of Global Warming”

(’cause it belongs on the FP – promoted by LithiumCola)

If you read some newspapers, you’ll find global warming is good for business. No, strike that. Global warming is GREAT for business. This is how the “science” journal at the Wall Street Journal enthusiastically describes what Global Warming means to its readers.

Researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy are mapping claims to the spoils of global warming.

North of Alaska, the 23 scientists of the Healy are gathering the data legally required to extend national territories across vast reaches of the mineral-rich seafloor usually blocked by Arctic ice. Fathom by fathom, multibeam sonar sensors mounted on the Healy’s hull chart a submerged plateau called the Chukchi Cap, in a region that may contain 25% of the world’s reserves of oil and natural gas.

In an era of climate change, these frozen assets are up for grabs, as melting ice allows detailed mapping and, one day perhaps, drilling.

The faster the ice goes, the sooner the oil flows. And vice versa. The faster we burn oil, the sooner the ice goes. Where there’s oil, there’s money to be made. The stunning, accelerating loss of the polar ice cap merely opens up the Arctic for oil and gas exploitation. If the polar bears go extinct along the way, then sobeit — no cost to doing business.

In the hunt for Arctic oil, the U.S. has joined Denmark, Norway, Canada, and Russia. No country ‘owns’ the North Pole, but in August, Russia went and placed a flag on the ocean floor at the North Pole claiming it for Moscow. “If recognized, the claim would bring 1.2 million square kilometers of seabed under Russian influence. Current laws grant countries an economic zone of 200 nautical miles beyond their land borders, but the zone can be extended where a country can prove a geological relationship between its own territory and the land beyond.”

While Russia is busy placing flags, the United States is trying to determine what’s at stake. As an article in Spiegel Online, USGS Looking for Fossil Fuels in the Arctic, explains:

While countries surrounding the Arctic get geared up for what promises to be a drawn-out diplomatic tiff over who owns what beneath the polar ice cap, the US Geological Survey is busy trying to figure out whether that territory is even worth owning.

For the next several months — until the presentation of its final report in the summer of 2008 — the USGS will be conducting an assessment of just how much oil and gas might be hiding under the ice. By analyzing rock types and formations and by looking at geologic history, the team hopes to provide accurate guesses as to where deposits are to be found and whether they contain natural gas, crude oil — or nothing.

According to OPEC, “Oil exploration can cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.” But the price tag for the Healy expedition is a mere $1 million and the entire proposed budget for the USGS in 2008 is only $1.033 billion. If researchers can find where are likely oil fields, then expeditions like the Healy and research done by USGS scientists are a ‘bargain’. Because not only do the U.S. taxpayers foot the bill, but it saves money for the oil corporations that would have been spent on exploration and that’s good for their bottom lines.

The Bush administration has mobilized the government to hunt for the last, untapped oil fields across the earth. The Christian Science Monitor noted that not only has the US Coast Guard joined in the Arctic oil rush, but “the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been conducting similar surveys over the past several years around the Marianas Islands, the Gulfs of Alaska and Mexico, and off New England”. From the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the using government agencies to hunt for oil, it’s as if the Bush administration has transformed the U.S. government into a tool for oil corporations.

In lamenting the appalling fate of the polar bears, The Independent wrote, “polar bears – the very symbol of the Arctic’s looming environmental disaster – are crashing towards extinction as a result of global warming, the US government has found. The admission, the result of a massive investigation by the Bush administration, could force the President finally to take action against climate change…” But, why would George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, two oil men, take any action to reverse global warming?

Polar bears don’t drive SUVs. Polar bears don’t need plastic bottles of water. Polar bears don’t use oil to heat. In reality, polar bears are “giant, marauding, godless killing machines” [Warning Colbert on O’Reilly]. If anything, the polar bears must be eliminated and global warming isn’t doing the job fast enough. Because, according to The Independent, “American hunters exploit a loophole in the Marine Mammal Protection Act that allows them to get licences to import polar bear trophies from Canada. Some 953 have been granted or applied for since 1994.” Dick Cheney would be proud.

The polar bears are standing on the last chunks of polar ice in the way of the last, great oil boom. Or, as Spiegel observes of the first Arctic oil report put out by the USGS — “even if the fossil riches were proven, there is at present no profitable way to extract reserves buried under a thick armor of floating ice.” But not for long. If you’re the oil men in the Bush administration, why would you even think of trying to halt or reverse global warming? The faster the ice goes, the sooner Arctic oil will flow.

_{Portions of this essay appeared in “The Faster the Ice Goes, the Sooner the Oil Flows” on Daily Kos.}