Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (5 page)

Five miles from the Pentagon, in a nondescript office tower in downtown Arlington, was the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. When I visited, its seven commissioners and three staffers were the nexus of the country’s Arctic policy, insofar as it existed. Its executive director proudly showed me a new pan-Arctic bathymetric chart the commission had helped produce: The North Pole was at the center, and the contours of the oil-rich seabed—still the least mapped part of the planet—were revealed as never before.

I asked first about the Northwest Passage, but in America, unlike Canada, the topic elicits little passion. The United States does not disagree that the Northwest Passage runs through Canadian waters. Its claim is that the passage is an international strait like Malacca, Gibraltar, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Dardanelles, and the Bosporus—a waterway that should be open to container ships and oil tankers from all nations. The European Union shares America’s interpretation, and China—another country with much to gain from an open passage—had recently signaled its thoughts when its 550-foot icebreaker
Snow Dragon
appeared in the Arctic and the captain nonchalantly landed passengers at the Canadian settlement of Tuktoyaktuk.

“Why should we be the ones negotiating with Canada over it?” exclaimed George Newton, a mustachioed former nuclear-submarine captain and longtime commissioner. “Shouldn’t Japan, which has a large fleet, take the lead? Or Maersk, the big shipping company in Denmark? Shouldn’t Denmark be in on this?” He explained that the right of “innocent passage” through active straits was enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—the so-called constitution of the oceans, a treaty signed at the latest count by 164 countries. (The United States drafted much of the law but, owing to conservative wariness of UN pacts, is not yet party to it.) Newton granted that legal arguments over the Northwest Passage are complicated by the ice: It is normally frozen over, so it’s difficult to call it an active strait. And it’s equally difficult to say it will never become one. The treaty’s language regarding ice-covered areas hurt the U.S. position as much as the language regarding international straits helped it. Still, everyone in Washington was confident that the rhetoric could be toned down, that we could all act like adults about this. The economics of the thing made an agreement inevitable.

Ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty was and is the Arctic Research Commission’s greatest goal. This has hardly anything to do with the Northwest Passage, though, and almost everything to do with oil and gas. While the treaty establishes navigational rules and each nation’s rights to the fish and minerals within two hundred nautical miles of its coastline, it also allows nations to claim further territory based on how far their continental shelves extend under the surface. “This is part of our land,” the basic argument goes. “It just happens to be underwater.” This provision, Article 76 of the Law of the Sea, could turn the world into a different place. In terms of seabed it could someday own, the United States, with its maritime borders extended and each of its island holdings surrounded by an oversize doughnut of sovereign ocean, would grow by 4.1 million square miles. It would surpass China, Canada, and Russia, with their own expanded holdings, to become the world’s largest country.

In the shallow Arctic, nearly every patch of seabed could be claimed by someone, and America had a foothold in the form of Alaska. Article 76, the commissioners hoped, was what would help the country secure its share of polar petroleum—some $650 billion worth, by one count. It was the rule under which the five nations with Arctic Ocean frontage—Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States—would carve up the north. It was the terms of engagement for the last great imperial partition.

“Our need for oil is not going to go away,” Newton said. “We’re going to need every bit we can get our hands on. Even if we don’t use as much in cars and trucks, we’re going to need plastics, and fertilizers, and all these other things essential to daily life. The more oil that’s tied to us directly, the more that comes in a pipeline or in a short trip in U.S. waters, the better off we are.” Canada’s Arctic archipelago, he said, was the next “oil elephant,” and that’s not all: An estimated twenty-one billion tons of coal sit on Ellesmere Island, and methane—another potential energy source and a greenhouse gas at least twenty times more damaging than carbon dioxide—bubbles up everywhere through the Arctic’s melting permafrost.

The commissioners had watched Russia—which had just announced plans for a special army to guard oil rigs and pipelines—get rich off its northern petroleum fields. “Look at how that country is digging itself out of a quagmire,” Newton said. “They’re getting up, flexing their muscles, feeling like big boys—people gonna pay respect. That’s all thanks to the Arctic.”

 • • • 

OUR CAMPSITE ON
Devon Island was a flat patch of high ground at the base of a reddish hill of scree. In front of us was the Northwest Passage; to our side was the fjord that was Dundas Harbor; and below us, a few hundred yards away, were the weather-beaten wooden buildings of the abandoned Mountie post. There were a few bergy bits in the bay, a few patches of yellow grass around the cabins. The greenest thing in sight was the Vandoos’ lineup of A-frame tents, which had been set up one next to another in a very military row. Our crew of Inuit Rangers, two men and two women who had arrived earlier by helicopter, were zipped inside a nearby dome tent, playing cards. They kept bursting into laughter because one of them kept farting. I was wedged in my own green tent along with Sergeant Strong and Master Corporal Bradley, who had been told, incorrectly, that they would be provided shelter.

There was little to do. The first evening, the Vandoos’ sergeant spent hours trying to make contact with the
Moncton
and the two observation posts across the sound. He received mostly static, even after his men restrung the wire antenna a few times. “Eeny stay-shun, eeny stay-shun?” he called into the void. “Thees ees Thirtee-one-Bravo . . . Say ageen? Say ageen? Say ageen?” One of the Inuit, who, unlike the Quebecer, had learned proper Canadian English in school, took over, with scarcely better luck. Four of the Vandoos, apparently bored, ran off and climbed the hill behind camp, returning only after their superiors yelled at them. I counted icebergs. There were fifteen in sight, including two ship-size giants and two halves of another iceberg that the Rangers had watched break apart earlier that day. The ice was moving, but so slowly that you had to look away for a moment to detect any change. The sun tried but never really set. Night at seventy-four degrees north, if you could call it night, was a three-hour period of darker-than-normal gray.

We learned that the electric fence we’d been allotted to fend off polar bears didn’t work. Our bear protection consisted of two .303 shotguns and four Inuit, so the Rangers’ sergeant had the entire camp huddle around his laptop to watch a bear-safety DVD. Advice: Poking it in the eyes won’t work. He said that the .303’s first three rounds would be “bear bangers”—firecracker-like shots meant to spook polar bears—and the last was a slug of lead. Under Canadian law, only Inuit were allowed to kill polar bears, and there were no exceptions. But if it became a matter of life or death, we should all be ready to use the lead slug anyway. We should aim for the bear’s neck or just below its shoulder, where we would have a chance at piercing its heart.

More tourists invaded on the second morning—ninety-two of them, all in matching yellow Gore-Tex jackets—and streamed toward our tents. “It looks like the march of the penguins, eh?” said Sergeant Strong. An old woman with a beret and a tiny backpack arrived and fixed her gaze on him.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Who are you?” asked the sergeant.

“I’m from the boat,” she said. She was an American from Chicago. Her friend, who was Portuguese but lived near Canada in upstate New York, joined us. The conversation turned to sovereignty. “The Americans are essentially greedy,” the friend said. “If there’s oil up here, they’ll be here. That’s what all these wars are about.” She mentioned Hans Island, and Sergeant Strong lit up.

“I think the simple solution for Hans Island is to just put someone there,” he said. “You’ve just got to keep people there year-round.”

The woman made a face. “But then the Danes would just send someone there, too,” she replied.

The pair walked off, and we stood there in camp, our hands in our pockets. “That woman has an opinion about everything,” the sergeant said. “She was way out of whack,” Bradley said. “It’s just silly to talk about a fight over oil. We’re producing so much and sending so much south that you guys don’t need to come up here and take it—we’re selling it to you freely.” We watched the tourists return to their ship in a flotilla of Zodiacs. As soon as they were back on board, one of the Rangers grabbed his rifle and shot a three-foot-long Arctic hare—a bullet between the eyes from two hundred yards away. He’d spied it earlier but hadn’t wanted to scare our visitors. He skinned it and chopped it into chunks and left it on top of a plastic bag in the middle of camp, where it began to dry in the sun.

 • • • 

WE DIDN’T KNOW IT THEN,
but only a year would pass before the Northwest Passage was ice-free and open for the first time in recorded history. The polar ice cap would break all records as it shrank to the shape of a kidney, sickly and thin, just eight hundred miles across at the waist. And Canada’s show of force in the north, its grit, would be overshadowed by an international incident courtesy of Russia. In August 2007, an icebreaker carrying the polar explorer Artur Chilingarov, the deputy speaker of Russia’s parliament and a prominent figure in Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, found an opening in the ice above the North Pole. In went two submersibles, and for three hours they descended in complete darkness to the seabed fourteen thousand feet below. Then Chilingarov’s sub used its mechanic arm to plant a titanium tricolor flag—the white, blue, and red of Russia—in the flat clay at the true North Pole and floated back up to the more than forty journalists waiting at the surface. “The Arctic,” he proclaimed at the press conference, “has always been Russian.” A meme—the Battle for the Arctic—was born.

For a year or two, everyone would pretend that Russia’s flag, like Canada’s sovereignty operations, possessed some sort of coherent geopolitical logic, that it fundamentally mattered. But the truth was, under the Law of the Sea, the partition of the Arctic was already well under way. It was just that it’s less dramatic: What matter are bathymetric charts, seismic surveys, and good lawyers. Scientists are mapping the formerly uncharted seabed and they and politicians and lawyers will argue about what is and isn’t continental shelf, and whose is whose, and then the warming Arctic will be split five ways by five rich countries whose historic emissions helped make it such a worthy conquest in the first place—no flags or warships needed.

Far from flouting international law in its rush north, Russia had been the first country in the world to make an Article 76 submission, in 2001. Its opening bid, which laid claim to 45 percent of the Arctic Ocean, was rejected at the UN because its data was incomplete, and it is now gathering more. One forty-five-day, sixty-scientist cruise took place two months before Chilingarov’s North Pole dive, producing reams of data but zero media fanfare. In a dingy office down a backstreet in St. Petersburg, the geologists who have led this and other follow-up surveys would proudly show me photographs of their approach to gathering seismic data: men pushing a golf-cart-size mesh sack of dynamite into an ice opening.

Canada signed the Law of the Sea in 2003, Denmark in 2004. Despite remaining tensions over Hans Island, the two countries have worked together to try to prove that the Lomonosov Ridge, the eleven-hundred-mile, trans-Arctic, undersea mountain range that may justify Russia’s claim to the North Pole, is also connected to Canada’s Ellesmere Island and Denmark’s Greenland. America has sent scientists and State Department representatives north of Alaska to prepare claims to parts of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas; I once spent a drama-free month with them on an icebreaker. As for the fifth Arctic Ocean nation, Norway, it made its Article 76 submission in 2006. Wielding data collected by its Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, it claimed 96,000 square miles of ocean floor, reserving the right to claim more once it and Russia resolved their disputed border in the oil-rich Barents Sea—which they quietly did four years later.

Only Russia would say out loud what the other Arctic nations were beginning to recognize. “Global warming is not as catastrophic for us as it might be for some other countries,” declared a spokesman for the Ministry of Natural Resources. “If anything, we’ll be even better off. More of Russia’s territory will be freed up for agriculture and industry.” Putin once put it more casually: “We shall save on fur coats and other warm things.” In Moscow, I would hear warm words from Chilingarov himself. “Of course I’m for international cooperation in the Arctic!” he told me in his office in Russia’s parliament, the Duma. He supported the Law of the Sea, and his explanation of the titanium flag was straightforward: When an explorer goes someplace—be it the moon, be it Mount Everest, be it the true North Pole—he plants his country’s flag. He signed a photograph of the flag and robotic arm for me, then stabbed dramatically at it with his index finger, pointing at the seabed. “Look here, and here, and here, and here,” he said. “There is plenty of room for other nations’ flags.” If each country got a big enough piece of the Arctic, I eventually realized, there would be little incentive to fight over the scraps.

In time, I would learn that this was also the considered wisdom of America’s spy agencies. In an amusingly furtive meeting in a Washington, D.C., Starbucks, I discussed the National Intelligence Council’s classified report on climate change with someone who asked to be identified as “a senior intelligence official familiar with the issues.” His perspective was clear. Be worried about refugees from the desiccating south, sure. Be worried about having to intervene in Africa’s resource wars. Be worried about sea-level rise damaging key infrastructure at home. But in the Arctic, when your country is one of just five laying claim to a quarter of the world’s remaining petroleum in a region others consider the global commons, don’t worry too much about the other four.