Updates
May 28, 2019: Zerohedge updates the Obama Doctrine.
March 30, 2019: court agrees. The Arctic belongs to Denmark, Norway, Russia, Canada, China, others, but not to the US. The US cedes the Arctic to the rest of the world. Link at WSJ.
March 15, 2019: now it's Norway. Norway announces plans to expand exploration areas in the Arctic. Thank you, Mr Obama.
March 12, 2019: Russia's next oil boom is happening in the Arctic.
August 29, 2015: US ceding the Arctic to Russia, New York Times.
August 4, 2015: Los Angeles Times headline -- Russia claims 460,000 square miles of the Arctic -- and the area's oil and gas resources. That was easy. GOP slams Obama on this, August 8, 2015.
September 27, 2014: Russians discover huge reservoir of oil in the Arctic; could be bigger than "the US part of Gulf of Mexico."
June 19, 2013: Norway moving closer to the Arctic; US will not participate.
June 5, 2013: add the Chinese to the list of "everyone" looking to drill the Arctic for oil.
May 13, 2013: I posted the link/article a couple of days ago. Now Bloomberg is confirming exactly what I said. The US is the only Arctic player without a policy: it's going to be a "land grab" and the US won't be participating -- at least not in any meaningful way. Russia, especially, sees Obama as a paper tiger.
Original Post
The icy Arctic is emerging as a global economic hot spot — and one that is becoming a security concern for the U.S. as world powers jockey to tap its vast energy resources and stake out unclaimed territories.
Diplomats from eight Arctic nations, including Secretary of State John Kerry, will meet next week over how to protect the thawing region as its waterways increasingly open to commercial shipping traffic.
U.S. officials estimate the Arctic holds 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil reserves, and 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits. Until recently, however, the lucrative resources that could reap hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues were frozen over and unreachable.
But global warming has melted sea ice to levels that have given rise to what experts describe as a kind of gold rush scramble to the Arctic.
On Friday, President Barack Obama announced a new U.S. strategy for the Arctic, calling the region "an amazing place" and maintaining a need among nations to protect its fragile environment and keep it free of conflict.
"An undisciplined approach to exploring new opportunities in this frontier could result in significant harm to the region, to our national security interests, and to the global good," the 13-page strategy concluded.
The Arctic is getting hotter faster than any part of the globe. Experts predict the region will be free of sea ice during the summer within about 20 years. Sea ice is important because it keeps the rest of the world cooler, and some scientific studies suggest that its melting may be indirectly connected to the extreme weather in the United States and elsewhere in the past few years, changing global weather patterns, including the track of Superstorm Sandy.President Obama won't have to worry about any "conflict" in the Arctic. As long as the US stays out, the Canadians, Danes, Norwegians, and Russians will be more than happy to split the spoils. If the president can't even come to a decision on a pipeline, he will never come around to a decision on the Arctic.
And so it goes.
But the nice thing about free market capitalism: investors can buys shares in foreign oil companies that will drill the Arctic. Like Statoil. And it will be US oil service companies that will partner with foreigners in the Arctic, like Halliburton (which at one time was run by Dick Cheney), TransOcean, and Schlumberger. Oh, that's right. Schlumberger is French. And TransOcean --- I don't know what they are any more; their offices are in Switzerland, I believe.
With the Arctic sea lanes opening up, Susan Sarandon and Johnny Depp can take their private cruises up to the pole to watch the drilling.
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