The risk that the new Arctic could be destroyed before it is born has been quickly understood in Alaska and for once we can be upbeat. The Arctic seas that fall within U.S. boundaries were closed to commercial fishing in January 2009, thanks to pressure from the Juneau-based Marine Conservation Alliance. Curiously, that alliance was set up by commercial fishermen, not environmentalists. David Benton, the alliance’s director, who once represented Alaska in negotiations with Russia over the Donut Hole, explained. “We suspect that the fish stocks are moving north. And we also suspect that even some stocks already in this far north are becoming more accessible, as the sea ice retreats. As an industry, we don’t want to be part of the problem. So let’s prohibit fishing up there right now in our own waters and get a good scientific picture of what’s happening in the environment up there before we open up, if ever.”
The decision to close around 150,000 square nautical miles of sea came on top of a U.S. Senate resolution directing the State Department to open negotiations for an international agreement on Arctic fish stocks. “We think that there is a much larger conservation problem looming both on the Canadian side and on the Russian side and international waters in the Arctic basin,” Benton explained. How fast might we see progress, I asked? “Well, quick in diplomatic time, slightly less slow than glacial time,” Benton replied with a laugh. The good news is that talks are going ahead.
Even if new fisheries can be well regulated, the Arctic will still be left with changes to its fish life that may have profound consequences on its mammal and bird life. Arctic cod (Boreogadus saida) is a keystone species that is not taken by commercial fishermen. It weighs only three or four ounces, with a thin body that tapers away sharply from a large head with big eyes. Seals and birds rely upon Arctic cod to fatten themselves up and the cod in turn relies on amphipods and copepods, like the lipid-filled Calanus glacialis. Much about its life is mysterious. “In the summertime they are dispersed all over the place so they are very difficult to find,” says Louis Fortier, a professor at Université Laval who studies fish and zooplankton population dynamics. “But in the winter time they start to aggregate on the shelf seas some 150 meters to 300 meters down. Then you can see they are really abundant.” Fishery scientists using an acoustic scanner found 900 million Arctic cod with a total biomass of over 30,000 tons in just one small area of the Canadian Arctic.6
Fortier has been watching seals swim down to feed on Arctic cod. The seals have almost become “research collaborators,” he says, as he had up to ten of them living in the moon pool (a circular pool in the middle of the ship giving access to the sea beneath) of his research ship. They grow extremely fat in the winter time. “Sometimes they come into the moon pool, and they would be so stuffed with Arctic cod that they would regurgitate a few specimens that we would quickly catch up and include with our own sampling,” he says.
Arctic cod are well adapted to ice and live under it, perhaps partly to avoid being eaten by birds. Nevertheless, Fortier points out, if there is less ice, the species will probably do better at first. “If you have less ice, you have more primary production and there would be more copepods and those small crustaceans to feed on,” he says. But then the competitors who have been kept out because they aren’t so well adapted to ice will arrive. “If conditions improve too much for Arctic cod, then they will become suitable for other species, especially capelin (a small smelt) and maybe the sand lance. They will outcompete the Arctic cod. When the ice disappears, Arctic cod are going to be replaced by other species.”
At the same time, the large lipid-filled copepod species that the Arctic cod like to eat may gradually be displaced by more southerly species, as we have heard. Then the Arctic cod will have more problems. Arctic cod will not disappear, says Fortier, but by midcentury its huge population might become much thinner. As ringed seals are extremely dependent on them, they too will have problems. “Whether the ringed seals will be able to adapt to the reduction in its main staple food and shift to other species we don’t know,” says Fortier. And of course, the polar bear is in turn dependent on the ringed seal.
The Arctic is seeing a more dramatic change to its environment and ecosystems than any part of the planet has seen for many thousands of years. The Arctic is turning into a new kind of sea; frozen over in winter with a thin layer of new ice which melts way in summer to open water. The seas will be free from the thousands of square miles of old hard ice, rich with life within it, beneath it, and on top of it, that the old Arctic knew. In the warmer open seas plankton may bloom—we can’t be sure how richly—but it will be a different kind of plankton, blooming in different places and at different times, feeding the more southerly species that are already adapted to the seas that the Arctic will come to resemble.
As this great change happens, a symbol for the new Arctic looks set to emerge. The reign of the polar bear is coming to an end. We don’t have to assume that the polar bear will disappear. It is unlikely to move onto land because it would run into competition with the grizzly bear and lose. More likely it will hold out, at least until late this century, at the top of Ellesmere Island and Greenland where the currents push ice up against the land.7 “I think the polar bears and some of these ice-adapted whales and animals will still probably be able to survive there,” says Ferguson. “From a management and conservation perspective, it’s going to be difficult,” he says, “because the actual number will be low. But they might survive.”
While the polar bear lingers on in a tiny part of his former kingdom, the next ruler of the Arctic will be roaming the seas. The new Arctic and its open summer waters will belong to the killer whale.
OIL & SHIPS
Chapter Twelve
THE BATTLE FOR ARCTIC OIL
Alaska was the first place that I went to figure out where the world’s oil companies would make a push into the Arctic seas. I already knew that the U.S. Geological Survey had excited the oil industry by describing the Arctic as “the largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on earth,” with 13 percent of the world’s oil and 30 percent of its gas.1 With a third of that oil in Alaska’s offshore waters and with a huge and highly developed Arctic oil industry sitting there on the North Slope, Alaska seemed the place to look for action.
I quickly discovered that it was not that simple. In late 2007, I found a battle was under way. On one side was the oil giant Shell, which had been planning to drill exploratory wells seventeen miles off the north coast of Alaska in the Beaufort Sea that summer. It had an impressive armada. There was the circular, cone-shaped Arctic drill ship Kulluk, designed to shrug off any ice that came its way, the high-tech Frontier Discoverer drill ship with a derrick taller than the Statue of Liberty, icebreakers to escort them, support vessels, and a truly impressive oil spill emergency response flotilla, including a special vessel, the Nanuq, painted blue and white on the advice of local hunters so that it would blend well into the environment.
On the other side were many residents of the community of Barrow, home to the North Slope’s most famous native whale hunt and led by its mayor, Ed Itta, along with environmental groups, including Pacific Environment, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club.
Shell said that they had held innumerable meetings around Alaska and talked to local residents. They had come up with a conflict avoidance agreement with the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, which meant Shell would stop work when the bowhead whales arrived so that the traditional Inupiat whale hunt could go ahead without disturbance. Over a million dollars had gone to acoustic research on the underwater calls of whales.
Still, Shell’s efforts were not enough. A lawsuit had begun, not against Shell, but over whether Shell had been granted proper approval by the Alaskan Minerals Management Service for the project, given that the noise of drilling might upset the migrating bowhead whales. The suit had brought the project to a halt. When I arrived, the entire fleet of drill ships, support ships, and spill ships was just standing by in the Beaufort
Sea at unbelievable expense.
In Anchorage, Patricia Cochran, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and a native of Alaska, explained to me that oil had brought benefits to people living on the North Slope, including “the school system, the children being able to be taught in their own language, and the infrastructure.” But she explained that, “we also have to think of the impacts on our culture. People just adamantly do not support offshore oil development. We have been pretty strong in saying that this is as far as it can go. To our Arctic communities, whaling is such a part of our culture that the loss of whaling would be devastating.”
The hunt is still carried out from small boats with a man at the bow carrying a harpoon that he must thrust deep into a spot just behind the whale’s head. Nowadays a successful strike triggers an explosive charge carried on the harpoon which kills the whale instantly. Then the whale must be pulled to shore. Crowds gather the moment that there is news of a kill and acclaim goes to the whaling captain taking the first whale of the year. The whale’s meat is shared among family, friends, local people, and the wider Inupiat community throughout Alaska.2 Taking a whale, or as the Inupiat put it, “going out in the hope that a whale will give itself to you,” feeds an entire community and reinforces all the values that hold it together. The worry is that even small disturbances to the environment might change the spring and fall migration routes that bring the whales past Barrow and put them beyond the whalers’ reach.
The next day I heard Shell’s head of Alaskan operations, Rick Fox, speak at an oil conference.3 Fox outlined the Alaskan Minerals Management Service’s estimates of the riches that may lie offshore in the state: “25 billion barrels of oil and 120 trillion cubic feet of gas.” That is a serious amount, given that the oil comes close to a tenth of Saudi Arabia’s claimed reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil, and the gas is 2 percent of known world reserves. He explained Shell’s commitment to the “new frontier,” adding confidently, “At Shell, we are focused on the Arctic, specifically the offshore. We know the world is watching us and frankly we don’t mind the attention. We came expecting to earn our right to be here every day.” Fox listed the consultations that had been held, the exceptional quality of its oil spill response team, the thousands of jobs that would come to Alaska, the hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts over the long life of offshore work and the money that would go into the state’s coffers. He explained U.S. energy needs and national security concerns and that “we hear a lot about alternative fuels and Shell is involved in that, but for the foreseeable future fossil fuels, especially oil and gas, remain the bread and butter at the heart of our system.” He signed off with Shell’s commitment to Alaska and to finding “a common ground.”
On the oil side, there’s money, jobs, energy needs, national security, and the need to sustain the pipeline that keeps the money flowing into state coffers before it is too late. On the other side are the whalers, and while they don’t have the big bucks, they do have the passion. A couple of months later I met a couple of North Slope leaders at the Arctic Frontiers conference in the north of Norway. Robert Thompson, an Inupiaq Eskimo wildlife guide and hunter, is one of the founders of REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands), which is “dedicated to preserving the land in order to preserve our culture.”
A quiet man, he was at first suspicious of my questions. “I have lived in Kaktovik twenty years, before that in Lake Minchumina, made my living fur trapping—marten and beaver mostly. The oil industry, I don’t see them as nice people, they are a for-profit corporation, they don’t act as if they have a soul or if they care,” he said. What about all that oil money that would flow from offshore? “Yes,” he said, “85 percent of the economy of Alaska, maybe a lot more, is from oil, but the fact that we benefited because they are pumping our oil doesn’t mean I am going to sell my body and soul. There is a saying,” he continued. “You can either be an oiler or a whaler; it is money or muktuk [the tastiest part of the whale], we’ve got to choose, if you want to keep the whaling culture we’ve got to protect the whales.”
George Edwardson was there too. A big man, his hair tied back in a ponytail, he is the president of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, which encompasses nine communities including Kaktovik and Barrow. He is full of stories, and he reckons that 80 percent of the people up there are related to him, “within third cousin. We are not so much a race or a tribe as a family. Our problem,” he says, “is that there is no baseline study that has assessed the environment properly, without it we cannot see the damage that is going on to the environment there. We have had a vote. Our stand has been very well defined. Each community was called by their names and all said ‘No’ to any kind of offshore development.”
As you might guess, the search for common ground did not succeed. After leaving Alaska I continued to call friends and contacts I had made there. The summer of 2008 passed with lawsuits continuing and Shell unable to get on with its work. This time it decided to pull back its fleet and send its contractors home until the legal issues were cleared. The community in Barrow also made a choice. In October 2008 they reelected Mayor Ed Itta, who had supported the lawsuit against Shell with the slogan “our ocean is not for sale.” At first, it looked as though they had backed the winning side. In November 2008, the court ruled that the Minerals Management Service had illegally approved Shell’s drilling plans as they had provided insufficient evidence that it would cause no harm to the migrating bowheads. Shell cancelled any plans for drilling in 2009. Indigenous and environmental groups were thrilled: a full and lengthy environmental survey would surely now be needed. But in disputes over oil it never pays to celebrate too early. A few months later, in March 2009, the court suddenly vacated its ruling, which meant that it intended to consider the case all over again.
The same month an economic analysis of future offshore oil and gas development commissioned by Shell from the consulting company Northern Economics of Anchorage was released.4 The analysis looked out over the next fifty years and envisaged seven production platforms in the Beaufort Sea (oil by 2019, gas by 2029) and four in the Chukchi Sea (oil by 2022, gas by 2036) with fifteen to twenty-four years of exploratory drilling. That activity would create 35,000 new jobs and $15 billion in state revenues (with oil at $65 a barrel).
Oil is a very long game and fifty years of benefits cannot be dismissed lightly. Many oil companies had already bet that the lawsuits would eventually go their way. In the February 2008 sale of oil-prospecting leases for the Chukchi Sea, $3.4 billion was paid for 2.76 million acres of offshore leases. Among the buyers were StatoilHydro of Norway, which was anxious to apply its skills learned in Arctic Norway; Eni of Italy; and Shell—which spent a staggering $2.1 billion—along with U.S. companies. Another lease sale, this time for the Beaufort, was planned.
It wasn’t long before those bets looked a little less certain. In April 2009, a Washington, D.C., court ruled that the entire 2007–2012 Outer Continental Shelf leasing program—of which the new Chukchi Sea leases had been a part—had been approved without adequate review of its impacts and should be reexamined. That meant that new lease sales would stop, leaving a big question mark over whether the leases that had already been sold were still valid, and triggering more court action. Meanwhile, Shell decided to come back with a new scaled-down program for the Beaufort Sea (which had been leased to them in the earlier 2002–2007 program) and leave the ongoing court case behind.
At this point in the story, the question is whether this great legal game, which is sure to have many more twists and turns, will ever come to a definitive conclusion. With every passing year, as the ice disappears, the stress on Alaska’s polar bears, bowhead whales, seals, and fishing industry is sure to grow. The additional impact from the noise of seismic exploration, drilling, and possible oil spills becomes harder to justify. The pressure to move away from fossil fuels will grow too as climate change continues. But on the other hand, look at the benefits to the Alaskan economy and U.S
. energy security. And energy alternatives aren’t ready yet. If oil prices rise steeply in the long term, as many predict, then the stakes in this game are going to grow. No conclusion is certain.
I asked Whit Sheard—Alaska program director at Pacific Environment, one of several environmental groups that are leading legal actions to stop offshore drilling—for his view. “I think we will still be here in the next couple of years fighting this,” he replied. “Whether or not the United States really does put forward a commitment to renewables and conservation will partly determine what happens. Whether or not we have the political will to really take this on as if it were our race to get a man on the moon I don’t know.”
The State of Alaska is playing it safe. It’s pushing hard for a gas pipeline from the North Slope that will connect to the North American grid. There are lots of stranded gas fields onshore which are ready to be exploited, but there has never been a way to take the gas down south. If the pipeline is built, Alaska will have a second revenue stream if the oil slows. Oil may find a new lease on life in Alaska without going sixty miles offshore too. There’s less objection to taking near-shore oil by sophisticated “long-reach” drilling from established sites. British Petroleum is planning to break new records by drilling out almost horizontally for over seven miles to reach oil in the Liberty Field off the coast.
I left Alaska no longer willing to place any bets on the United States charging into the Arctic seas any time soon, but also sure that neither oil companies nor environmentalists would quit the struggle. The immediate action looks more likely to happen in Russia, the clear winner in total hydrocarbon resources, according to the USGS survey. Alaska did come first for proven oil resources, but Russia has staggering quantities of gas as well as oil in the Arctic. Onshore, development in Arctic Russia is already roaring ahead and the political picture is very different: there is uninhibited enthusiasm for more. Russia knows all about the horrors of oil spills too. During the Soviet era, when there was a rush for oil, few cared about the environment. At the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø in 2008, I heard the deputy governor of Khanty-Mansiysk, Gennady Oleynik, talk about the old days. The name “Khanty-Mansiysk” doesn’t mean a lot to Westerners, but it should. Travel 2,000 miles east from Moscow across the Ural Mountains and you’ll be there, in the vast West Siberian Plain crossed by the meandering Ob River. Bigger than California but with a population of just 1.5 million, Khanty-Mansiysk produces 60 percent of Russia’s oil; that is more than any nation except Saudi Arabia.
After the Ice Page 20
