President Trump announced on Wednesday that the United States would withdraw from an international treaty known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which forms the legal foundation for global climate cooperation. Here’s what to know:
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This is a step beyond withdrawing from the 2015 Paris agreement, Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman report, in which countries agreed to limit global warming to relatively safe levels. The administration also announced it would pull out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top U.N. climate science body.
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So what is the U.N.F.C.C.C., and why the U.S. is pulling out? Somini Sengupta explains more.
Why Trump wants Greenland
Greenland is warming much faster than the global average, and its expansive ice sheet has been shrinking for decades.
These shifts, driven by climate change, have made the vast island a more appealing acquisition target for the Trump administration.
Controlling Greenland, an idea that was regarded as a punchline among Trump’s own advisers during his first term, is now viewed within the White House as a real strategic objective. Stephen Miller, a Trump aide, asserted on Monday that the U.S. had the right to “take” the territory, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that President Trump planned to buy it from Denmark.
Greenlanders are not on board. Denmark’s prime minister has warned that military intervention would end the NATO alliance.
But why focus on the Arctic at all? Climate change is rapidly transforming Greenland, turning it into a geostrategic asset that could be key to future shipping routes and the race for mineral resources.
“Trump talks about climate change as a hoax, but it’s partly climate change that is fueling the growing interest in the region because it’s making it more accessible,” said Sherri Goodman, distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and former deputy under secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton.
Warming waters, higher traffic
As northern ocean waters have become less difficult to navigate, the Arctic has seen an uptick in shipping traffic.
In theory, Arctic waters offer a big shortcut for vessels navigating between Asia and the United States or Europe, but ice and harsh conditions have long stood in the way. Russia has been developing the Northern Sea Route for commercial traffic, deploying icebreakers to help carve routes for cargo vessels in pursuit of what Andrew Kramer described in 2021 as a “massive toll road.”
In October, a Chinese container ship traveling along this route for the first time reached Britain in 20 days, roughly half the time it takes to make the journey using other routes, Reuters reported. The vessel carried solar panels and electric vehicles.
These shipping lanes could get easier to navigate in the future. “Some projections are that there could be ice-free summers across parts of the Arctic within the next 20 years or so,” Goodman said, adding that China has expressed hopes to take advantage of a “Polar Silk Road” through the region.
Perhaps eyeing these developments, Trump signed a memorandum in October authorizing the construction of up to four icebreakers. It cited “growing strategic competition, aggressive military posturing, and economic encroachment by foreign adversaries, all of which threaten U.S. interests in the Arctic.”
“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,” Trump said on Sunday.
Mining opportunities
Greenland sits atop vast stores of rare-earth minerals used to manufacture high-tech products like batteries and mobile phones. China dominates the global critical minerals industry, and Trump has made efforts to secure access to resources that will help develop a competitive supply chain.
Some of Trump’s allies have also invested in potential opportunities in the Arctic: Before his Senate confirmation, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick held a stake in a mining company with interests in Greenland through his financial firm, Kate Kelly reported. And Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley moguls who donated directly or indirectly to Trump’s re-election efforts or inaugural committee, all have financial ties to a company that has explored mining in the region.
While climate change may eventually make it easier to mine in Greenland, hopefuls have found it exceedingly difficult thus far. As The Times reported last year, dozens of exploratory projects pepper the island, but Greenland has only two active mines.
Greenland has fewer than 100 miles of roads, and only 57,000 residents. Some areas are accessible for only a few months at a time.
“It’s not clear any of these projects in Greenland are financially viable right now,” Goodman said. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t be viable decades into the future. And if you put your New York real estate hat on, the president and his son and others in the mix see these as long-term development projects.”
Trump Administration: Live Updates
Updated
- Democratic lawmakers ask for an investigation of the Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
- Prosecutors said to pursue new investigation of Letitia James.
- Congress challenges Trump on vetoes, health, war and spending.
Local pushback
Attempts to extract natural resources from Greenland face local political opposition in addition to logistical and legal hurdles.
An Australian mining operation with Chinese backing spent $100 million to develop a project only to see the territory’s governing party kill it amid fierce opposition from a neighboring town, The Times reported.
Greenland has banned uranium mining, a move that has complicated efforts to extract other resources because uranium is often found alongside rare-earth minerals. The ban is currently facing legal challenges. The territory has also stopped trying to produce oil, citing a lack of commercial success and environmental risks.
Journey to Antarctica
Face to face with a key glacier, finally
Yesterday, we arrived at the Thwaites Glacier. This morning, we are surrounded by it.
The end of the glacier that sits on the ocean is formed of two long tongues of ice, with a narrow channel of water between them.
We sailed down this channel overnight and, by breakfast, made it to the end. Now we are enveloped on three sides in Thwaites’s icy embrace.
The captain of the icebreaker Araon, Kim Gwang-heon, was nervous about sailing here. Satellite imagery showed the passage strewed with sea ice. Once the ship started down the channel, the winds could have blown the ice in our direction, blocking our way back out. But Won Sang Lee, the expedition’s chief scientist, was determined to try. — Raymond Zhong
And read more fromour journey to study the Thwaites glacier.
Number of the day
$115 billion
That’s the total cost of the damage from natural disasters in the United States last year, according to a new report from Climate Central, a nonprofit group.
This is the fifth time in the last six years that U.S. disaster damage totaled above $100 billion, Scott Dance reports. Notably, the $115 billion in losses did not include any damage from hurricanes. For the first time in a decade a single hurricane did not touch U.S. shores last year. Read more.
Quote of the day
“If we’re serious about carbon dioxide removal, it’s going to be the largest thing humanity has ever done. It really should be something that governments pour effort into, like the Manhattan Project.”
That’s from David Ho, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He spoke to Ferris Jabr about a bold idea from a start-up that is exploring a type of geoengineering known as ocean alkalinity enhancement, which involves adding alkaline minerals to the ocean en masse, essentially antacids for the sea.
There are understandable ecological concerns and, as Ho suggests, the scale of this kind of geoengineering would need to be immense.
“The supplemental mining effort required to remove just one billion tons of carbon dioxide annually by adding alkaline minerals to the sea would most likely be equivalent to a second global cement industry, for example,” Jabr writes.
Read more about geoengineering in our series from 2024.
More climate news from around the web:
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Airline emissions could be cut in half by getting rid of premium seats, ensuring flights are nearly full and using more efficient aircraft, according to a new study highlighted by The Guardian.
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Also in The Guardian: The police in India have raided the home of Harjeet Singh and his wife, Jyoti Awasthi, two of the country’s most prominent environmental activists.
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In little-noticed government records, the Environmental Protection Agency has questioned its legal authority to revise pollution rules when new science emerges, even if decades have passed, ProPublica reports. If the agency changes its stance, ProPublica writes, “environmentalists fear that the decision could have wide implications, significantly curbing the E.P.A.’s ability to limit nearly 200 pollutants from thousands of industrial plants.”
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Claire Brown covers climate change for The Times and writes for the Climate Forward newsletter.
The post Climate Change Has Turned Greenland Into a Target for Trump appeared first on New York Times.
