The new cold war
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The Arctic
A last great unprotected wilderness, safe haven for endangered species and home to native people whose subsistence lifestyle has survived in harmony with nature for thousands of years.
It is here that Shell plans to drill for oil, pulling the detonator on a carbon bomb which eventually could spray 150bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The irony is that the drilling is only possible because manmade climate change is already causing this region to grow warmer twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The melting ice makes these huge reserves of oil and gas more accessible.
It could set major oil companies against each other but also superpower against superpower as they scramble to exploit the last untapped giant reserves in a part of the world where territorial boundaries remain unclear. No wonder some fear a new cold war.
Barrow, the most northerly city in the US, is ground zero for the world’s most controversial oil drilling campaign. Less than 1,200 miles from the north pole, Barrow is also known as a base for climate change study.
Originally called Ukpeagvik, place where the snowy owls are hunted, the town of 4,500 residents was renamed in 1825 after Sir John Barrow of the British Admiralty by naval officers mapping the region for the UK.
Source: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Alaska Region
Now a new British presence is being established by the Anglo Dutch Shell and it is also not one which is welcome by all, especially some of those who live in the tumble of wooden homes that hug the shoreline.
Rosemary Ahtuangaruak is one of them. She describes herself as an environmental justice adviser but is also a former mayor, trained health worker and stalwart defender of Inupiat culture.
“I work with nonprofit organisations that want to protect the Arctic Ocean and wilderness areas. It’s about raising the importance of health, tradition and culture in the venues of those (Shell and others) who want to change our lands and waters,” she says, one eye on three grandchildren she is minding.
“It’s about the (any future oil) spill. They cannot clear up in ice conditions which we have for eight or nine months of the year. The ecosystem renewal, which is needed for the many different animals that migrate here, is important because we are feeding our families from the ocean. We must keep this environment pristine.”
The wild rose of the Tundra, as one critic labelled her, is convinced the subsistence way of life practised by the Inupiat could be extinguished for future generations in the event of oil pollution.
She says she has seen at close quarters what happens in a community that is subject to an oil rush. Although many outsiders presume that fossil fuel extraction is new to the northern shores of Alaska, the contrary is true.
BP and others have been producing oil at Prudhoe Bay down the coast east from Barrow for more than half century. But that is no reassurance to Ahtuangaruak who worked as a health aide – and briefly as mayor of the small village of Nuiqsut, an Inupiat community right next door to Prudhoe Bay.
“I learned living in Nuiqsut there are some really serious health impacts that happen to our people living in the same area where this is happening (oil extraction): cancer rates have gone up ... acute sensitivity to chemicals and even suicides. I had to deal with the sick babies. That’s why I argue so hard now.”
Shell is exploring its own small section of the far north but the US Geological Survey has estimated there could be 412bn barrels of oil equivalents reserves in the wider Arctic region.
The combined onshore and offshore acreage stretching across the top of the globe from Alaska through Greenland and Russia would be far more likely to be sought if Shell gets a good result in the Chukchi.
A successful strike by Anglo Dutch energy group will trigger a black gold rush to the wider polar region which is believed to hold the last remaining giant reserves in the world.
The US Geological Survey has estimated there is 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of oil waiting to be found inside the Arctic circle.
Estimated territory holdings of undiscovered Arctic oil
US
32.6%
Russia
29.2%
Denmark
14.6%
Canada
11.1%
Norway
4.7%
Note: Unaccounted for Arctic oil includes Iceland's 0.3% holding and land either currently under an ECS claim or unclaimed
Source: Geopolitics of Arctic oil and gas: the dwindling relevance of territorial claims, E. Wong (Journal of George Mason University, 2013)
A drop in the price of oil from $115 per barrel last summer to $65 now has forced oil companies – including Shell – to slash their annual capital spending.
But such is the lure of the Arctic for Shell that it has ring fenced this operation despite having spent $6bn on fruitless drilling so far.
And continuing interest in the mineral riches of the Arctic by Russia, Norway Greenland and others has brought sabre rattling: a significant build up in military spending and activity.
The Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) warned recently that Moscow is setting up a naval infantry brigade, an air defence division, and a coastal missile system, in outlying archipelagos in the Arctic Ocean.
The Ukraine crisis has ramped up tension – as has a provocative visit to the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic by Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin.
All the states surrounding the Arctic Ocean are involved in a kind of land grab, applying for right to license oil and gas by making territorial claims under a UN Law of the Sea Treaty.
And the Russians have already signalled the importance they attach to the region by planting a flag on the bottom of the ocean at the north pole. The move by veteran Arctic explorer Artur Chilingarov in 2007 caused widespread protest from the rest of the world but Vladimir Putin laughed it off as a bit of theatre.
The Arctic Council of littoral states has been meeting regularly and played down any suspicions of a growing new cold war.
Rob Huebert, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, is worried: “The intrusions of unidentified submarine in Swedish and Finnish waters and aircraft incursions into Norwegian airspace demonstrates what they (the Russians) can do and it also demonstrates what the western nations now have to begin to prepare for.”
A long and boisterous queue snakes down the road from a blue wooden clapboard home in the strong spring sunshine.
The line of blue jeans and coloured anoraks is mainly made up of middle aged or young couples, their children playing in the snow in front of the house.
When the older members of the community arrive later on often propped up by relatives and walking frames they are immediately ushered to the front of the long line.
Suddenly the door opens and a smiling host greets the carnival like crowd. “Hey, hey hey,” he cries. “Hey, hey, hey,” they shout back as they begin to move through a side entrance from where a sweet but distinctive smell emanates. This is called a whale feast but it’s a relatively brief affair.
Within minutes the front door opens and the same visitors stream out clutching small plastic bags full of whale meat or skin and blubber, muktuk, and thanking the owner of the house.
That is Gordon Brower, a 52-year-old local whaling captain, who is performing a ritual central to the local Inupiat culture: hosting the entire “village” of Barrow to celebrate each successful hunt.
Whaling has been going on for centuries in this part of the world and the hundreds of residents who are involved in supporting the various crews tend to be at the centre of opposition to Shell’s Chukchi drilling programme.
Bowhead whales migrate in the spring and autumn in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the coast of Barrow and the wider North Slope region. These enormous mammals stand to be disrupted most by oil.
Rosemary Ahtuangaruak argues that the whaling, which cannot by law be done on a commercial basis and which is heavily controlled by a quota system, is not just a cultural event. It is about survival in a town where supermarket food costs are astonishingly high as everything used or sold in Barrow has to be airlifted in.
“Right now our people are out on the ice providing the nutritious food from the bowhead whale...We cannot replace those foods in our diet – not from shop foods out of a box,” she argues.
The Inupiat of northern Alaska are not alone in their worries about the future of their way of life.
This is a central issue too for the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents 160,000 indigenous peoples from Alaska, through Canada and Greenland to Russia.
Aqqaluk Lynge, the chairman of the Council, expressed his worst fears a few years ago when he said: “When I'm lying awake at night, I pray we don't find oil.”
But not everyone in Barrow is gloomy. Many are aware that the local economy in the wider North Slope area has grown relatively prosperous on the back of half a century of hydrocarbons at Prudhoe Bay.
It is not unusual then to come across someone such as local carver Ron Saganna or Jake Calderwood, a 29-year-old, bushy-bearded, music teacher at the local Fred Ipalook elementary school who are essentially supportive of drilling.
Standing most firmly against 'big oil' and local government is George Edwardson, a flamboyant and respected elder in the Inupiat community.
With white hair flowing down his back, a ready smile and a conspiratorial wink, George was, until health intervened, president of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope for 20 years.
“Shell is a bulldog that is acting on behalf of other foreign oil companies. It used to be BP until the Gulf of Mexico. Basically lease sale 193 (which gives Shell the right to acreage in the Chukchi) was illegal. The MMS (Minerals Management Service) violated the law because the right environmental impact assessments were not completed,” he says.
When Alaska was bought by the US government in the mid 1800s for $7.2m (£4.6m) critics called it Seward’s folly after the secretary of state who was accused of overpaying the Russians.
It is tempting to think that the decision by Washington to grant drilling rights to Shell in the waters off Alaska this month may yet become known as something worse: Mankind’s folly.
And those against big oil’s Arctic adventure are aware that any success by Shell will have major reverberations around the top of the world. ConocoPhillips and other oil companies are present in Barrow and interested in the icy waters.
Charlotte Brower, the mayor of the North Slope borough, is in the hot seat when it comes to the most basic conflict in Barrow and the surrounding villages: oil versus the environment.
She has little time for those who think oil companies should be stopped in their tracks saying all basic services in the form of schools, hospitals, roads and utilities have been paid for in oil-derived revenues from Prudhoe Bay.
“There are parts of the world that have enjoyed these services for so long that the potential of living without them seems foreign, but among our people there are those of us who can still remember when some parents had to watch their children die in their arms because there was no clinic or medical staff to treat relatively simple ailments."
“Our leaders have worked diligently to strike a balance that ensures resource development to ensure our people do not have to endure these condition any longer while protecting our a pillar of our culture, our subsistence harvests. We will continue to strike that balance for the good of our people.”
Ben van Beurden, the chief executive of Shell, told the Guardian that he would not enter the Arctic unless it could be done safely although he dismissed as “emotional” suggestions Shell should stay away just because the region was showing advanced signs of climate change. “I have spent a lot of time on this and I think we can do it responsibly.”
However much the Dutchman dresses it up, Shell is taking a significant gamble on the environment - and his own company.
The Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico has already cost BP $40bn and left it at one stage close to collapse.
While the Shell drilling in the Arctic is in shallower water and lower well pressures, the stakes are much higher. The reputational risks alone convinced Shell’s French rival Total that it should abandon any post-Macondo oil search in the Arctic.
Equally the mayor of Barrow is presiding over a community deeply divided over oil - even before the drilling starts.
Activists such as Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, tribal leaders such as George Edwardson and the whalers will continue to voice their opposition.
The most vulnerable potential victims of big oil - the migrating eider ducks, the whales, walruses, seals and polar bears - have no say.
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