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With oil above $100 a barrel and Arctic ice melting faster than
ever, some of the world's most powerful countries - including the
United States and Russia - are looking north to a possible energy
bonanza.
This prospective scramble for buried Arctic mineral wealth made
more accessible by freshly melted seas could bring on a completely
different kind of cold war, a scholar and former Coast Guard
officer says.
While a US government official questioned the risk of polar
conflict, Washington still would like to join a 25-year-old
international treaty meant to figure out who owns the rights to the
oceans, including the Arctic Ocean. So far, the Senate has not
approved it.
Unlike the first Cold War, dominated by tensions between the two
late-20th century superpowers, this century's model could pit
countries that border the Arctic Ocean against each other to claim
mineral rights. The Arctic powers include the United States,
Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway.
The irony is that the burning of fossil fuels is at least in part
responsible for the Arctic melt - due to climate change - and the
Arctic melt could pave the way for a 21st century rush to exploit
even more fossil fuels.
The stakes are enormous, according to Scott Borgerson of the
Council on Foreign Relations, a former US Coast Guard lieutenant
commander.
The Arctic could hold as much as one-quarter of the world's
remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits, Borgerson wrote in the
current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.
Russia has claimed 1.191 million sq km of Arctic waters, with an
eye-catching effort that included planting its flag on the ocean
floor at the North Pole last summer.
Days later, Moscow sent strategic bomber flights over the Arctic
for the first time since the Cold War.
"I think you can say planting a flag on the sea bottom and renewing
strategic bomber flights is provocative," Borgerson said in a
telephone interview.
Scrambling and sleepwalking
By contrast, he said of the US position, "I don't think we're
scrambling. We're sleepwalking...I think the Russians are
scrambling and I think the Norwegians and Canadians and Danes are
keenly aware."
Borgerson said that now would be an appropriate time for the United
States to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which
codifies which countries have rights to what parts of the world's
oceans.
The Bush administration agrees. So do many environmental groups,
the US military and energy companies looking to explore the Arctic,
now that enough ice is seasonally gone to open up sea lanes as soon
as the next decade.
"There's no ice cold war," said one US government official familiar
with the Arctic Ocean rights issue. However, the official noted
that joining the Law of the Sea pact would give greater legal
certainty to US claims in the area.
That is becoming more crucial, as measurements of the US
continental shelf get more precise.
Coastal nations like those that border the Arctic have sovereign
rights over natural resources of their continental shelves,
generally recognized to reach 200 nautical miles out from their
coasts.
But in February, researchers from the University of New Hampshire
and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released
data suggesting that the continental shelf north of Alaska extends
more than 100 nautical miles farther than previously
presumed.
A commission set up by the Law of the Sea lets countries expand
their sea floor resource rights if they meet certain conditions and
back them up with scientific data.
The treaty also governs navigation rights, suddenly more important
as scientists last year reported the opening of the normally
ice-choked waters of the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the
Pacific.
"Of course we need to be at the table as ocean law develops," the
US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"It's not like ocean law is going to stop developing if we're not in there. It's just going to develop without us."
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