Arctic Resource Exploitation & Ireland.

international | environment | opinion/analysis Monday August 13, 2007 21:28 by iosaf

Casual holiday-season surfers of international news/diplomatic temperature indicators will of course have noticed the Arctic & its potential exploitation are on the agenda. Naturally it's not presented in a cool, sexy, ice-cream way, nor for the moment in horrible cub-clubbing whale slaughtering dirtiness - but the nugget cold war seems for the moment to have left Dharfur, Dead Spies, Tehran's nukes & the mostly French Clearstream scandal's trillion dollar graft behind. It is almost as if we are all wishing on the falling stars & meteorite showers the Perseids which annually offer us a bit of make-believe. There is of course an Irish as well as Southern European dimension to what is being presently spun varyingly as the "Arctic cold war" or "Rush to claim Arctic hydrocarbons". Because to be quite honest all this "divying up the Arctic" has been on the cards (or runestones) for a long time now, I thought to bring you through it.

Of all our most thought-experiment provoking artefacts & memorials which grace the shelves of various museums from North America to the Volga valley - the runestones which at first claim viking presence in the far north of Greenland or the spearheads of paleolithic design found in the Tundra are very popular. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingigtorssuaq_Runestone True, for a period associated with Scandinavian nationalism in the mid to late nineteenth century it was safely assumed that many such runestones and declarations of ownership were fake. Much of the purloined gold from the Spanish main in much warmer lattitudes of the planet was destined to a fruitless quest to discover a northwestern passage which might link the Atlantic to the Pacific. As recently as the early 19th century a dedicated charletan of the early USA who perhaps had caught the viral contagion of that need to "discover & claim yet new territories" had found enough support whilst soap-boxing the southern tobacco rich states of that country to petition the US congress to fund an expedition to the frozen north in search of an entry point to the hollow centre of the planet Earth which he managed to convince many Americans would be found close to the pole and where US ships would without difficulty sail into the interior of the Earth to find not only new lands rich in minerals & buffalo but new natives to enslave too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cleves_Symmes%2C_Jr.

Today we cherish such notions of a “northern entry to the hollow Earth” with as much admiration & no less scoffing than footage of the Apollo mission to the Moon some 160 years later. Yet curiously both were sourced in the same narrow contemplation and speculation of the English scientists Halley and Newton. Thanks to the real cold war, bathometric surveys of the northern hemisphere not only mapped the contours of the pole but established that magnetic north (first established in Canadian territory) had shifted position. The true magnetic pole has of course continued to shift, and well you don't worry about it unless you're left with just a can of petrol (gasoline), a harpoon, a compass, a magnifying glass & 30kilos of food at the north pole.

Whereas the continent Antarctica has long enforced a UN & internationally binding prohibition on smoking which all research personel stationed there, passing naval types or extreme tourists must sign up to & obey (under threat of internationally binding detenion and being escorted to the brig as it were) there are several parts of the Arctic ice shelf which resemble ashtrays. This is not only because so many submarinists or aerial crew have enjoyed their lingering moment of solitude which a good smoke affords - but also because it's pretty sensible survival skill to burn all superfluous equipment when your artic camping trip goes wrong. Rescue pilots can easily see palls of smoke or charred snowplough or even indeed for the more antiquated types toasted huskies on the near infinite white expanse of Arctic ice. Your compass will be useless. But I bore you..,

We have no idea who made the Arctic the tourist wonderland it is, but we could credit NATO US/Canada with building the most northernly airport on the planet, "Alert" which proved just as ridiculously an enticing name for potential employees as the poor bastards the Soviets sent to point freezer on the southern Continent to monitor their deep ice frozen lake Vostok & whatever microbial delights might swim within. Of course the USA who also it seems are to now lay claim to the Arctic through their state Alaska bought the territory of that state from from the Czar’s Russian empire holdings on October 18, 1867, for $7,200,000.

For most "commonly accepted" Europeans & through their beligerant cultural migrations much of the Americas, even the most basic notions of climate change centre on ideas of the Ice Age and frozen north. We are mostly concerned now with the idea that climate change and warming will alter our sea-levels, lay waste to our agricultural bands, & profligate some of the most hostile or parasitic threats to world human health. We now know that the immediate future of at least 100 years includes globalised acceptance of swapping Santa Claus for Locusts.

Irish newspapers at the weekend saw attention given to a proposed Danish mission to secure its Arctic sovreignity which caused me pause to think of how Denmark unique amongst the nation states with overseas possessions still boasts the largest such empire in relation to its own geographical extension. For the moment we can not say how the near but not near enough to full independence natives of Kulaalit Nunaat as Greenland is known to its inhabitants feel to see Danish naval vessels themselves heirs to a sovreignity claim rooted in Scandinavian unions many centuries ago. Which brings me to the other “Viking” nation Norway, which split from Sweden, which split from Denmark yet somehow happened to hold Svalbard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard a small archipelago with decent enough biotech research facilities within the Artic circle. Why indeedy, the Norwegians with their sea oil and gas field exploiting expertise and experience will be the first sovereign power of the Arctic to see appreciable resources made easier to extract. Which is probably why their naval forces are busy this summer doing “Viking landings” on Mediterranean beaches rather than entering the Artic resources grab.

Oh yes – the Irish dimension – I promised to tell you about that –
you see we started it all.

The story of Ireland’s petition to extend its continental shelf was a discreet one with what seemed happy results :
april 2007 quiet Irish acceptance of an extended continental shelf -
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/81849 this was of course not an inefficient bit of political waffle that Ireland had extended her territory, you don't expect that from your regime surely? Accordingly licenses were to be granted within a few weeks http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82196 which naturally accompanied our long-held worries on who exactly gets rich on all this type of thing http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82750 The process of extending Irish sovreignity which had for so long floundered on questions of Graham’s bank and Rockall had first been alluded to by me in this comment to the article "more right wing Shinner stuff" Dec. 2003 http://indymedia.ie/article/62544?&condense_comments=fa...55308

Before that and indeed our wonderful long-standing relationship which is indymedia ireland's peculiar niche on the global cybernetic stage - we saw suspicious Brits report on Canadian hopes to break the ice of the north-western passage http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,69....html
Most people with serious long-term difficult money and not a dust particle shooting star bit of interest in mortgage lending knew the money was on extending the Panama canal in the short term though. & so there you have it. You must now make up your mind which nation-state you favour for Arctic exploration and to be squeaky moral and ethically clean about it, you must argue Ireland relinquishes her sovreignity on much of her continental shelf.

So to finish - the Arctic is a common heritage of humanity - it belongs like Antarctica to all or to none. Even the supreme fakir of American imperialist ambition, Theodor Roosevelt recognised the wealth of the frozen north and Alaskan tundra & till the latest Bush presidency his decrees ensuring those regions would be safe from exploitation held.

No to Arctic exploitation!
Yes to Polar Bears!
Yes to Soumi and Laplander Santa Claus theme parks!
No to Irish shelf expansion!