A bid by incoming United States President Donald Trump to wrest control of Greenland could be big business for fossil fuel firms — and could tip the planet into a climate-change spiral that it would have no hope recovering from.
Trump, set to be inaugurated for his second term on Jan. 20, has issued a pledge to annex the icy island territory, which has been part of the Kingdom of Denmark for three centuries. He threatened to impose heavy tariffs to force Copenhagen’s hand.
There’s another reason the island could be a tantalizing prospect for Washington, beyond Trump’s claim of needing “economic security.”
According to an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey, Greenland “contains approximately 31,400 million barrels oil equivalent (MMBOE) of oil” and other fuel products, including around 148 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
“That’s the kind of reserves that if they were discovered in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, businesses would be jumping for joy,” said Ajay Parmar, a senior crude markets analyst with commodities intelligence firm ICIS.
“Of course, given it’s in Greenland, there would be technical challenges putting in place the piping to extract it and get it around the world,” he said. “But there’s still a major commercial opportunity there, even if it would require a lot of time and effort to make it work.”
However, in 2021, Greenland introduced a moratorium on oil and gas exploitation after the socialist, pro-independence Inuit Ataqatigiit party took power, vowing to “take the climate crisis seriously.”
Drill, baby, drill
Trump, by contrast, has vowed to “unleash American energy” once he takes office, and has summed up his support for pumping more oil and gas in general with a simple slogan, “drill, baby, drill.” He has also promised to overturn a Biden administration freeze on new natural gas projects and consistently reneged on U.S. climate change commitments.
Environmental campaigners worry that the prospect of Greenland falling into Trump’s hands could mean the oil and gas drilling ban is dropped, leading to more emissions they say amounts to a “carbon bomb.”
“We can easily say that there is no path to limit warming to 1.5 degrees that does not include moratoriums or bans or not opening new oil fields anywhere,” said Kirtana Chandrasekaran, a campaigner with Friends of the Earth.
According to her, expanding extraction in Greenland would be a very poor example to set for global climate leadership and used as an excuse by climate change skeptics in Europe and further afield “as to why other countries should now just forget about it and collapse.”
In an interview with Fox News, Congressman Mike Waltz — Trump’s incoming national security adviser — said the plan “is not just about Greenland.”“This is about the Arctic,” he said. “You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic with 60-plus icebreakers, some of them nuclear-powered … We have two, and one just caught on fire.”
“This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well … it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security,” he added.
The impact of mining could itself have a disastrous effect on local fauna and flora in the thawing region, according to Anne Tolvanen, professor and research program director at Natural Resources Institute Finland, who has co-authored a review on mining in the Arctic environment.
“Northern growing seasons are short and cold, so all species are more or less on the edge of … survival,” she said, adding that nature could take “decades or even centuries” to recover from disturbances caused by heavy industry and other human activity.
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