Greenland
For Greenlanders who have already lived through an advanced dose of climate change, talk of mitigation, of limiting emissions, of constructing global agreements to curb what Minik Rosing called ‘mankind’s passion for burning things’ is already too late. The warming of Greenland is already so advanced that it is transforming all other climates, from the economic to the strategic and the political.
Greenland’s cold has largely protected it from exploitation. Now the receding ice is uncovering its mineral treasures and oilmen and miners are beginning to sniff the air. With the prospect of mineral wealth and a prosperity that might allow the country to dispense with Danish government subsidy, Greenland has begun to negotiate with Denmark for its independence. The world of treaties and boundaries, resource competition and exploitation scarcely mattered in an icebound Arctic. As the ice melts, strategic rivalries have sharpened.
For the United States, Greenland is a link in a strategic chain. It maintains a secretive base at Thule, far to the north, established first as a monitoring station watching for Russian rockets and retained now as part of the grandiose illusion of missile defence. Fifteen Inuit families were moved to make way for the base in September 1953. It was 40 degrees below zero and the promised houses did not arrive for months. Aleqa Hammond, Greenland’s finance and foreign minister, told me that half of them died in the move. The survivors are still battling fruitlessly in the Danish courts for their right to return.
On August 2, 2007, Russia claimed that, for the first time, a submarine had reached the ocean floor 4,000 metres under the North Pole and planted a Russian flag. The event was illustrated on Russian television with footage that an alert teenager recognized as a clip from the beginning of the film Titanic, but this comic incident had a strategic purpose: it demonstrated, according to Moscow at least, that the Lomonosov Ridge, extending from the New Siberian Islands in the east of the Laptev Sea towards the Canadian Arctic archipelago, is a submerged geological extension of the Siberian platform and part, therefore, of the Russian continental shelf. The North Pole, and any continental riches it may contain — the Russians are saying with their flag — is theirs. ‘It’s nonsense,’ said Aleqa Hammond. ‘Everybody knows that the North Pole is ours. That’s where Santa lives.’
Until now, Santa has had the Pole pretty much to himself, but if Aleqa Hammond’s vision of the future of Greenland comes to pass, he will have to defend his claim against some determined competition. He may lose his workforce to more lucrative employment: the giant multinational company Alcoa is planning the world’s second largest aluminium smelter in Greenland, to be driven by the hydropower generated by the melting ice cap. Two others are under consideration. Stranded hunters and elves will have the option of retraining as foundry and factory workers. Greenland will enter an industrial age, a perverse and unintended consequence of the rest of the world’s industrialization.