
Thanks to a tip from NY freelance science writer Jonathan Beard we all get a chance to read a bracing, if to me infuriating in one narrow but important dimension, report on the state of play in the Arctic. It's an essay, not journalism, but is largely science writing. It gets to the heart of several issues that are drawing attention from mass media by the barrel-load.
- Foreign Affairs – Scott G. Borgerson: The Coming Arctic Boom ;
It's got (almost) all of it. The plain fact of a rapid melt of sea ice and transformation of Arctic ecology at sea and land alike and its vast economic and industrial potential is deeply covered. Borgerson is a founder of the non-profit, business-focussed forum Arctic Circle and managing director of something called CargoMetrics that analyzes global trade. He has written for FA on Arctic affairs before. In this essay he skillfully arrays big-picture and small-vignette examples and facts to portray how quickly things are moving up there. He has a sane take on the politics. He confesses to being wrong in a previous article that forecast heavy diplomatic and perhaps armed conflict in the far north (diplomacy instead is forging sensible agreements). He argues strenuously for the US to finally get over its stupid and, coincidentally, largely Republican-led resistance to ratifying the Law of the Sea Convention, and so on. It's a bit like reading a piece by Dan Yergin, wide in scope with well-crafted narrative story-telling for propulsion.
Perhaps I read it too fast (both times) and missed something. But he says little or nothing about the irony inherent in the fact that oil and gas reserves up there are the biggest drivers of the land and sea-floor rush to the Arctic. The very thing, heavy reliance on fossil fuels, that warmed the place up so much and that has sent its environment into the turmoil he describes and that is doing vast harm to the whole planet, will be accelerated by the combustion of the Arctic's share. While he writes earnestly of the need for environmental protections as industry gets its grip on the Arctic, the story overall takes no stand against or overtly for extraction of mineral lodes from the land and ocean where the north wind is born. Would it have killed him to write, if only in passing, that if efforts succeed in moving us all into a low-carbon economy it will put the kibosh on the drilling he foresees? Could he not have noted that even if that happens, an open Arctic seems surely on the way and seems likely stay that way for many decades if not a century or more? And that there is plenty else up there to spur industry – summertime shipping of course, and other minerals, hydroelectric power, geothermal too? Such broader views would have enhanced, not detracted from, the article's strength.
Here's another irony. While the writer appears to be studiously neutral on climate change questions generally, the comments on the article are (surprise surprise) heavily provided by trolls screeching in complaint about the article's mere, and sensible, recognition that summer sea ice extent is dropping fast.
Finally it would seem that, in a report as generally thorough and strategically aware as this, an opportunity for worthy speculation is missed. This would be to address how those who profit from a vibrant Arctic economy will, when fully entrenched, react to any effective set of taxes and regulations or other means for putting an end to rampant use of the atmosphere as a free, public dump for fossil carbon. In a half century or sooner that could be a donnybrook that Foreign Affairs writers will be all over.
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