By Isaac Bickerstaff
Op-Ed Contributor
The irony isn’t lost on anyone that the rush to claim stakes in the high Arctic’s putative treasure of fossil fuels (perhaps 25% of the word’s reserves of oil and gas) is a result of climate change brought about by global warming resulting from our monstrous consumption of fossil fuels.
Led by Russia, the arctic powers, including The US, Scandinavia, and Canada, are setting out to prove that their continental shelves in the Arctic Ocean extend to the North Pole.
Actually, Canada is a laggard in the rush. The scientific work has to be completed within ten years of a country’s ratifying the international Law of the Sea convention, which for Canada means 2013, a scant six years away.
The Russians have already mapped the Lomonosov Ridge, extending from Siberia to the Pole, which they claim as an extension to their continental shelf. The Danes have a seaborne scientific expedition under way this summer to establish Greenland’s shelf. The Americans are working on the Alaskan shelf.
Canada’s response under Stephen Harper is to build a small fleet of gunboats that will be able to operate only in the relatively ice-free months, a deep-water port at Resolute, and an Arctic training camp for about one hundred troops—simple-minded military solutions to a complex scientific and diplomatic problem.
Harper is not the first PM to posture vacuously on the Arctic issue. In 1985 the Americans sent a nuclear powered icebreaker through “our” Northwest Passage to demonstrate their rejection of our claim to the Passage as Canadian waters. The Conservative government of the day promised a super duper all-Canadian icebreaker to be christened the Polar 8 to redress this insult. It would assert our sovereignty and carry out scientific research. Well, the Mulroney government hemmed and hawed and nothing happened and then the Liberals regained power and set about slashing federal expenditure and Polar 8 was forgotten.
Harper’s off-the-top military solution is a typical quick fix, like his multibillion-dollar purchases of tanks and heavy-lift aircraft to deal with the Afghanistan problem. But whom is Canada supposed to fight in the Arctic? Russia? The US? Denmark? Our interests in the region can be protected only through detailed and lengthy negotiations seeking to resolve the conflicting economic claims under international law. As things stand, Foreign Affairs is outside the loop and unprepared beyond the obvious bluster we got from Peter MacKay. Harper’s new MFA Maxine Bernier better fit the Arctic problem into his already crowded agenda of trying to explain Afghanistan to Quebec.
And there is an ironic downside for Harper in the Arctic oil rush situation: the oil rush opens up the question of global warming, one of Harper’s weakest points. Touch the Snow Man; get smeared by the Tar Baby. Nothing seems to work out smoothly for the poor guy.
Oh. And regarding the burning of Arctic fossil fuels thirty or forty or whenever years from now—not to worry. By the time climatic conditions in the Arctic are sufficiently benign to permit exploitation, Florida will be a sandbar, changes in the Gulf Stream will have made northern Europe uninhabitable, and the North American Great Plains will be a desert. There won’t be much demand for that oil and gas.
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