CNN)Russia is amassing unprecedented military might in the Arctic and testing its newest weapons in a region freshly ice-free due to the climate emergency, in a bid to secure its northern coast and open up a key shipping route from Asia to Europe.
?2021-04-05T17:39:27Z
IF they stay on their side of the Arctic I see no problems but that is probably not the way this is going to play out...
The US does not want that natural gas, they want to go green. The US is no longer interested in balance of power. Our current leadership believes if we are nice and bend over, everyone else will be nice. Failure to learn from history.
The arctic has become ice free enough in the summer to allow shipping, as global warming continues, the time they can pass through will extend.
Methane (natural gas) is really cheap as it is, hauling it from the arctic would be too costly, it is so cheap that even Texas is flaring it off rather than install the pipelines to bring it to market. It is the cheapest fossil fuel but it can not compete with wind and solar, which are still getting cheaper. Ba terry prices are tumbling. (they are less than 100 US retail if you buy them from China, in China those same batteries are 40 dollars)
It is silly to spend billions on building those pipelines to move the gas when they will operate for only 10 to 20 years. But it does make sense to build the ports for the ships as more and more pleasure craft with tourist will be going through, fishing boats will operate from those ports and they will need law enforcement, banks etc...
Canada has a much better claim than the US over a good portion of that ocean. I suspect very strongly though that this "problem" was in Trump's tiny brain when he proposed trading for Greenland a couple/few years ago. In other words, the news release you cite is probably part of a campaign by the government to justify doing something they have been planning on for a while now. Even Trump was aware of it, and you know that he wasn't exactly a center of information, what with his attention span of a three-year old.
So, what is the US doing? The people doing it aren't actually telling us. Does that surprise you? But they want you to accept whatever they plan on doing, so time to tell you that you ought to worry about "russians" because that is the excuse they plan to use.