By Sajith Kumar
With the EU joining the race for offshore oil and gas exploitation in the icy Arctic, the interest is intensifying as greedy mankind estimates that global warming is shrinking the polar ice and that could someday open up resource development and new shipping lanes.
The EU on Friday gave its clearest signal to date that intends to play a role in the escalating race to exploit the Arctic mineral, oil and gas resources, fishing stocks and new shipping routes that are being made increasingly accessible by global warming.
The move is likely to irk other Arctic players, including Canada, Russia, Norway and the United States all of which have issued territorial claims in the polar region.
The European Commission said the 27-member bloc, who has three member states in the polar region, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, should get involved in the current rush in the Arctic, notably in offshore oil and gas exploitation. Denmark controls the semiautonomous territory of Greenland.
The announcement was part of a first outline of priorities the EU is seeking in the Arctic, an area where the bloc is now planting its own flag of sorts as a key economic and security interest for Europe.
Arctic multilateral governance through the existing legal frameworks as well as to keep the Arctic ice will trigger a scramble for resources between the states with an interest in the region, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, the US, Canada, Russia, and Iceland.
Various territorial disputes have already emerged and last year Russia sent the submarine under the North Pole to plant a flag in a symbolic gesture intended to underlines its claims to the region.
Environmentalists have also expressed fears that the melting of the arctic ice could have the ironic effect of further accelerating climate change by giving countries access to an estimated quarter of current untapped oil and gas reserves.
This obsession with exploiting the Arctic for all its worth is overshadowing the real issue at hand: climate change. Nowhere else in the world is climate change occurring faster than in the Arctic, with winter temperatures having risen 3-4 degrees Celsius over the past fifty years and the polar ice cap having lost nearly 20% of its volume in the past two decades.
Despite providing easier access to resources, the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice is an extremely worrisome phenomenon. As the Arctic's ice and snow cover disappears, the albedo of the Earth's surface decreases, meaning that more solar radiation is absorbed rather than being reflected back out into space.
This further increases the rate of global warming. It is for this reason that Arctic climate change should not be viewed as a positive development. It is dangerous to highlight its supposed benefits at the risk of diminishing our combative response.
This rush to claim whatever stores of oil and gas are contained within the Arctic region will only extend our dependency on fossil fuels at a time when it is crucial that we start to develop more green technologies and invest in renewable forms of energy.
The ridiculous fact that we have now actually resorted to searching for oil in the Arctic Ocean, one of the least accessible places on the planet, only serves to highlight that there is a finite amount of oil available to us and it is time to look to other energy resources.
