Europe's Arctic adventure - Soybeans and oil spills
Statoilhydro, the Norwegian energy giant is in the forefront of oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, but environmentalists have other ideas (Photo: Leigh Phillips)
LEIGH PHILLIPS
12.11.2008 @ 17:42 CET
In a four-part series, the EUobserver heads to the Arctic - the very top of Europe - and speaks to oil company executives, environmentalists, government ministers, bio-chemists, engineers, geo-politics experts and the bright young things that are heading to the region ahead of the new "Cold Rush" - the bonanza of resource development that is just beginning to take off in this stark, fragile region. In this, the fourth and final part, we speak to a range of environmentalists who are not all in agreement on what should happen in the Arctic.
EUOBSERVER / OSLO - PART FOUR - Environmentalists are horrified at how rapidly the Arctic is melting. They are mortified that governments and energy companies want to use this disaster as an excuse to start drilling and shipping in so fragile an ecosystem. And they are petrified about the potential for militarisation in the high north.
There's not a lot they are optimistic about in the land watched over by the aurora borealis - but they aren't all in agreement.
"You know that last week, [Russian President] Medvedev shot up a rocket that landed in Kamchatka?" asks Melanie Duchin, an Alaska-based campaigner with Greenpeace, active on the other side of the Arctic Ocean, campaigning against offshore drilling in American Arctic waters. "It's crazy."
On 12 October, the Russian President, wearing an Amercian Air Force-style leather jacket with a badge reading "commander-in-chief," supervised the test firing of an intercontinental Topol missile from the taiga forests of Russia's north. The missile landed half an hour later on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the country's far northeastern regions, just above Japan.
Melanie is shocked at the pace of industrial development and frightened about the military posturing by the Polar powers.
"There has to be a moratorium on commercial and industrial activities in the Arctic. Opening it up should be kept off limits until there is some form of treaty that is transparent, participatory and genuinely protects the natural resources of the region.
"And, like the Antarctic Treaty, it should protect the Arctic as a scientific preserve free from territorial claims and military activity.
Beyond the moratorium, she says, there should be no oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, and she is appalled at the idea of turning the Arctic into a shipping superhighway.
"Living here in Alaska, I've seen the impact of oil spills on the environment - you still see the effects from the Exxon Valdez to this day, but shipping can actually be a bigger problem.
"In late 2004, the Selendang Ayu, a tanker loaded with soybeans, just soybeans - nothing particularly worrisome about a soybean spill - heading from Seattle to China via the Great North Route through the Aleutian Islands lost power, drifted and ran aground en route. Hundreds of thousands of bunker fuel spilt."
"You always run the risk of running aground and spilling bunker fuels, and it stays in the environment for decades. In the Arctic, the higher you go in latitude, the less able the ecosystem is able to deal with stress."
In Tromso, Kongsberg Satellite Services monitors the seas, takes high-altitude photographs of Iranian nuclear sites and watches the Arctic ice melt, amongst other work it does for satellite owners public and private, scientific, commercial and military. Fredrik Landmark, a vice-president with the operation, spits with contempt at how shipping companies operate: "I'd say we see 1,000's of bilge dumps every year - between 16 and 17 bilge dumps a day in the areas we monitor. There was an all-time high around Finland in April this year."
"What really troubles me are not so much massive oil spills every four or five years, it's these everyday releases. And it's done for nothing else than just financial benefit. If you clean your tanks onshore, you have to pay for someone to do it, but at sea..." he trails off.
"It pisses me off," he concludes.
There are however, a range of views within the environmental community on Arctic resource exploitation.
Clive Desire-Tesar, a jovial Canadian with the World Wildlife Fund's International Arctic Programme, which is headquartered in Oslo, is closer to the developers than his colleagues with Greenpeace.
"We're not opposed to oil and gas development everywhere, but the Arctic is so fragile."
"It is just that there is simply no effective way of cleaning up oil spills in ice-covered waters, and for as long as that's the case, there should be a moratorium on further exploration in Arctic waters," he says, adding that the organisation is "relatively less concerned about gas."
"The trick is to strike the right balance between the environment and development."
Tor Christian Sletner, the head of WWF Norway's domestic Arctic campaign, echoes his Canuck colleague: "We're not looking for something like the Antarctic Treaty in terms of governance, but a framework convention that can co-ordinate the gaps in terms of development."
"Local people require a way to make a living, especially indigenous people, but at the same time we don't want a Disneyland made of the Arctic."
Greenpeace's Melanie Duchin does not understand WWF's relative serenity on the issue.
"Methane hydrates are already bubbling up. We're almost at a tipping point. Even if you could get the stuff out of the ground without spilling a drop, you would still have to burn it as well, and we need to just stop burning fossil fuels period.
"It's due to the use of oil and gas that the ice is disappearing, and the development of them will only exacerbate the problem. The States, Europe, and the all circumpolar countries, should instead be seeking alternative sources of energy.
"It is just obscene to look for economic interests that are being carried out as the result of an environmental catastrophe."
Furious at how resource development is proceeding in the Arctic despite warnings from scientists and a handful of environmental campaigns targetting this or that individual resource project, green groups are currently in discussion about some sort of bigger campaign linking up work in the different polar nations and in Brussels and Washington.
If the world is indeed the old man in the hospital smoking away, bolting off to the Arctic to get a hold of the last great stores of oil and gas even as he says he's trying to quit his addiction to fossil fuels, it seems that the nurses are about to show up just in time, and try to grab the cigarette from his mouth.
He's a stubborn old man, though. The nurse's will have a bit of a fight on their hands.
The first three parts of this series of articles on the Arctic are also available to read:
Part One - 'The new cold rush for resources'
Part Two - 'Little Murmansk'
Part Three - 'It was the Red Army that liberated the north, you know.'
