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Trump Moves Toward Drilling in Arctic Wildlife Refuge for First Time in 30 Years

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President Donald Trump is moving toward allowing energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the first time in several decades, according to a report Friday from The Washington Post.

Interior Department officials are modifying decades’ old regulations that have traditionally prevented the agency from conducting seismic studies seen as the first step towards drilling, the report notes.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director James W. Kurth told the agency’s Alaska regional director to strike constraints on a rule that allowed exploratory drilling between 1984 and 1986, the last time drilling was allowed in the ANWR, according to a document WaPo obtained.

“When finalized, the new regulation will allow for applicants to (submit) requests for approval of new exploration plans,” Kurth wrote in the August memo. Yet oil and gas drilling within the refuge’s 19.6 million acres can only take place through congressional fiat.

Drilling in the area has become a prickly political football. Environmental activists typically use the remote refuge as a type of Maginot Line upon which the oil industry should never be allowed to penetrate. They believe the area should be off-limits because it houses North America’s last large caribou herds. (Read more from “Trump Moves Toward Drilling in Arctic Wildlife Refuge for First Time in 30 Years” HERE)

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Coast Guard Plots Long-Term Strategy for Increasingly Important Arctic

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The inhospitable Arctic could become a major area of contention between world powers in the coming decades. As new passages open it, it is up to the U.S. Coast Guard to ensure safe lines of shipping through those perilous waters.

This August, the Crystal Serenity, an 820-foot long luxury cruise liner with 13 decks and 1,000 passengers, will sail from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York City. In an unprecedented feat, the Serenity will get there by taking a route that up until very recently has barely been navigable: the Northwest Passage.

With Arctic sea ice receding, the Serenity’s course is a harbinger of challenges to come, a wave of tourist and merchant traffic traveling through an increasingly accessible Arctic, and Arctic nations have little ability to ensure their safety.

To deal with these rapid changes and future Arctic activity, Arctic nations are stepping up their maritime security efforts in the waters of the High North. The representatives of each Arctic nations’ coast guards gathered in Connecticut in June for one of the first meetings of the Arctic Coast Guard Forum. With its unprecedented levels of coordination, the new forum hopes to chart a shared vision of a secure and cooperative Arctic.

Cooperation in the Arctic will be key for the U.S., as its own capabilities to operate in the harsh environment are currently lacking.

The Coast Guard has minimal presence in the Arctic and will be challenged to carry out large-scale search and rescue operations there if an accident occurs. The primary vessels answering such a call—icebreakers—are often days or weeks away depending on the location of the incident, and the Coast Guard has long argued that its icebreaker fleet is far smaller than it requires in the polar regions. Even if there were enough icebreakers, the U.S. does not have a deep-water port in the Arctic where it could base them.

This need for greater coordination led the U.S. and fellow Arctic nations to launch the Arctic Coast Guard Forum in October 2015. The forum expands on the role of the Arctic Council, which does not discuss military affairs in the Arctic but whose members have entered into agreements on incident response.

In the coming years, the forum will be responsible for dealing with several growing Arctic issues such as maritime security, promoting economic freedom and prosperity in the region, and dealing with its largest and most assertive member, Russia.

The forum’s most basic goal is to improve its ability to cohesively employ different nations’ resources to ensure maritime security in the Arctic. This will require a great deal of information sharing and training exercises among Arctic nations to coordinate incident response efforts, as well as commitments from each member to improve its Arctic infrastructure. This will make shipping, natural resource extraction, commercial fishing, and tourism safer and more reliable.

Since the forum is inherently security-focused (though not militarily), it is uniquely positioned to foster dialogue with Russia where other channels of communication have grown tense or have been cut in recent years.

The need for Arctic security dialogue with Russia has become increasingly important in recent years, as Russia has been rapidly militarizing its Arctic territory. Russia established a new Arctic military command, staged massive unannounced exercises with its Northern Fleet, and has been opening Arctic bases not used since the Soviet Union. These concerning actions introduce a hard security component to what could have simply been Arctic safety issues. The forum will hopefully provide a new way to address these concerns.

Predictions of larger-scale maritime activity in the Arctic have not yet materialized, but it is crucial that the U.S. Coast Guard be proactive today so that America will be prepared for what future its northern territory might hold. No nation is fully ready for increased Arctic activity, but with its responsibilities in mind, the Arctic Coast Guard Forum is a step in the right direction. (For more from the author of “Coast Guard Plots Long-Term Strategy for Increasingly Important Arctic” please click HERE)

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Frozen Assets: Inside the Spy War for Control of the Arctic

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Photo Credit: Foreign Policy

Photo Credit: Foreign Policy

In August 2014, two Norwegian scientists set off with 21 tons of supplies—food, equipment to measure ocean depth, an instrument to clock water currents, computers, and a specially designed hovercraft named Sabvabaa (Inuit for “flows swiftly over it”)—loaded onto a jagged-edged slab of ice about 200 miles from the North Pole. Unlike their cargo, the researchers’ plan was simple: For the upcoming months, the frozen island would float aimlessly, ferrying a then 72-year-old Yngve Kristoffersen and his younger colleague, Audun Tholfsen, around the Arctic, taking them where even icebreakers could not go.

They were there to drill hydroholes through the ice, film the ocean floor, and collect sediment cores that are millions of years old. After weeks adrift, their ice floe eventually led them into an Arctic no man’s land where temperatures can drop to minus 45 degrees Celsius and trigger powerful gales. The two men were alone but for the occasional white fox. That’s why, in October 2014, the hardy researchers were stunned to spot something unmistakable about two miles from their base: visitors.

As the scientists approached lights they had spotted in the distance, they made out the hulking black bow and sail of a submarine poking up through the ice. But before they reached the site, it quickly disappeared. Based on photographs taken by the scientists, the Norwegian team later determined that the vessel was likely the Orenburg, a Russian sub—which carries with it a nuclear-powered mini-sub—used for deep-dive intelligence missions . . .

The run-in was anything but coincidental. Like Kristoffersen and Tholfsen, the Orenburg was there to drill into undersea ranges in order to collect geological samples from the Lomonosov Ridge, a little-known underwater mountain chain that rises about 12,000 feet above the seabed and stretches for more than 1,000 miles. Under and around this formation lies nearly a quarter of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel resources. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic holds a staggering 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, approximately 90 billion barrels, as well as 30 percent of its natural gas, or about 1,669 trillion cubic feet.

Worth an estimated $17.2 trillion, an amount roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. economy, these resources have been trapped for eons under a dome of ice and snow. . . (Read more from “Frozen Assets: Inside the Spy War for Control of the Arctic” HERE)

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Gore’s Dire Global Warming Predictions?: Satellite Data Shows Arctic Sea Ice Coverage up 50 Percent!

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Pauline Askin

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Pauline Askin

It was only five years ago in December that Al Gore claimed that the polar ice caps would be completely melted by now. But he might be surprised to find out that Arctic ice coverage is up 50 percent this year from 2012 levels.

“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said in 2008.

The North Pole is still there, and growing. BBC News reports that data from Europe’s Cryosat spacecraft shows that Arctic sea ice coverage was nearly 9,000 cubic kilometers (2,100 cubic miles) by the end of this year’s melting season, up from about 6,000 cubic kilometers (1,400 cubic miles) during the same time last year.

This came as a shock to researchers who saw Arctic sea ice coverage shrink to a documented low in 2012. However, now sea ice coverage has expanded to reach the sixth record low, according to AFP.

“We didn’t expect the greater ice extent left at the end of this summer’s melt to be reflected in the volume,” said Rachel Tilling of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling in a statement. “But it has been, and the reason is related to the amount of multi-year ice in the Arctic.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Seventeen Year ‘Pause’ in Global Warming May Last 20 More Years; Arctic Sea Ice Recovering

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Photo Credit: Daily Mail The 17-year pause in global warming is likely to last into the 2030s and the Arctic sea ice has already started to recover, according to new research.

A paper in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics – by Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr Marcia Wyatt – amounts to a stunning challenge to climate science orthodoxy.

Not only does it explain the unexpected pause, it suggests that the scientific majority – whose views are represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – have underestimated the role of natural cycles and exaggerated that of greenhouse gases.

The research comes amid mounting evidence that the computer models on which the IPCC based the gloomy forecasts of a rapidly warming planet in its latest report, published in September, are diverging widely from reality.

The graph shown above, based on a version published by Dr Ed Hawkins of Reading University on his blog, Climate Lab Book, reveals that actual temperatures are now below the predictions made by almost all the 138 models on which the IPCC relies.

Read more from this story HERE.

Gullible Green Sailors Trapped in the Arctic

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Photo Credit: netrightdaily

Photo Credit: netrightdaily

The naïve advice of ardent activists can kill. Last spring, Paul Beckwith of Sierra Club Canada predicted that the Arctic seas would be ice-free ice this summer. (So did Britain’s BBC network.) This exciting adventure opportunity attracted a variety of yachts, sailboats, rowboats, and kayaks owners to try sailing the fabled Northwest Passage.

As a former sailboat owner I can understand their excitement, but my heart aches for the agonies they now face. The Arctic sea ice suddenly expanded 60 percent this fall, after the coldest summer in the modern Alaska temperature record. The passage is now impassable. More than a dozen of the boats are trapped, apparently even including a group of tiny American jet-ski “personal watercraft” that were attempting to cross from the east coast of Russia to the North Atlantic. Arctic observers are now warning that even Canadian icebreakers might not be able to rescue them.

The Northwest Passage blog reminds us that fall super storms are a potentially deadly fact in Alaska. “It is only a matter time. . . . Give Mother Nature her due time and she will move billions of tons of sea ice and push it up against the Alaska Arctic coast—effectively closing the door to exit the Arctic ice from western Canada. . . . No icebreakers are going to be able to offer any assistance. Mother Nature is mightier than all the icebreakers put together.” Note that the Atlantic exit is already problematic.

Helicopter rescues on Arctic ice are incredibly expensive, involving hundreds of miles of flying by copters and crews expensively maintained in that icy and sparsely populated region. Additionally, all the lovely boats become write-offs.

Read more from this story HERE.

Industry Protests Obama’s Plan for Alaskan Oil Reserves

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Photo credit: roger4336

A new proposal by the Obama administration to expand drilling to half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A) has attracted criticism from the oil industry, as the plan still leaves a broad area off limits to new oil development. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said new development will be permitted in an 11.8 million-acre geographical area, which purportedly holds about 549 million barrels of oil, while coastal regions such as Kasegaluk Lagoon and Peard Bay — where there is a higher concentration of seals and polar bears — will receive “special protection.”

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the entire reserve harbors about 900 million barrels of oil, a region west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge approximately the size of Indiana. Opening up only half of this area to leasing is disappointing, says Erik Milito, a director at the American Petroleum Institute (API). “This falls short of where we need to be.”

In a conference call on Tuesday, API president and CEO Jack Gerard disputed President Obama’s so-called “all of the above” energy policy. “Today, we’re sending a letter to the White House to urge the president and his agencies to do more than merely talk about ‘all-of-the-above’ while they pursue policies that include ‘none-of- the-below,’” Gerard charged.

Gerard protested that the Obama administration’s plan to restrict this vast opportunity for oil development is unacceptable, and that it will further depress the nation’s capabilities to become more energy independent. “One half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, it was announced just yesterday [August 13], has been taken off limits,” Gerard affirmed. “This is an area by law dating back to the 1920s, [which] was specifically set aside in Alaska for oil and natural gas development. The announcement yesterday by Secretary [Ken] Salazar was essentially an announcement that we’re going to take everything that was legislatively set aside and we’re placing them off-limits.”

President Warren Harding established the NPR-A in 1923 as a resource for the U.S. Navy during a period when its ships were transferring over from coal to oil power. In 1976, the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act handed 23.5 million acres over to the Department of the Interior. Then in 1980, the Interior Department Appropriations Act appointed the agency’s Bureau of Land Management to administer oil leasing on the Alaskan land.

Read more from this story HERE.