The arctic oil rush

[Randall]

This is an interesting article about what the russians are doing and oil that's becoming accessible as glaciers melt in the arctic and who owns what rights.

 

Global warming is also part of this controversy.

 

It's long so here is the link.

 

One excerpt-

 

According to an obscure clause in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (unclos)—also called the Law of the Sea Treaty, or lost, by its critics—if you can prove that your continental shelf extends beyond the 200 nautical miles that signatory states with coastlines are automatically entitled to, you have sovereign rights to its oil, gas, and minerals. The Russians’ Arctic claim hinges on an underwater formation called the Lomonosov Ridge, which runs 1,240 miles from Siberia through the North Pole nearly to the juncture of Ellesmere Island (Canada’s northernmost point) and Greenland, and which Russia says is an extension of its shelf. Actually, it is claiming only half of the ridge—the half on its side of the pole. This has the rest of the world nervous. Much of Europe depends on Russia’s natural gas, and the Kremlin has already turned the faucet off once, on Ukraine, and threatened to do the same to Belarus. If it starts tapping the Arctic deposits, Russia will be back as a superpower and may become the world’s dominant energy supplier. There would then be a Fifth Russian Empire, presided over by the increasingly autocratic Putin, who has sidestepped the presidential two-term limit by making himself prime minister.

 

The U.S. hasn’t even signed unclos. Its ratification has been blocked for years by a few conservative Republican senators currently led by Oklahoma’s James Inhofe, who is famous for dismissing the human contribution to global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” These senators don’t want to cede an inch of American sovereignty to the U.N. and apparently find the treaty’s designation of the high seas as “the common heritage of mankind” to be intolerably Marxist. So the U.S. isn’t on the 21-country Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which will decide on Russia’s claim. It has some fancy footwork to do if it’s even going to be a player in the scramble for the Arctic.200805