Arctic

At Arctic Circle Assembly, as in Arctic, a delicate balancing act

REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- A chill wind gusted to 30 knots across Faxafloi Bay on Friday as the Arctic Circle Assembly convened in the Harpa Convention Center on the bay's southern shore. The wind stirred sea foam above the white caps to remind those here of the harshness of the Arctic world only two degrees latitude north of this picturesque and friendly port city.

Inside the modernistic Harpa, there was nothing but warmth, or at least that's the way things started out.

After Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson opened the proceedings with a call to "manifest the experience of Arctic cooperation," the word "cooperation" got tossed around more than the F-word at Palin family brawl in Anchorage.

"High north, low tension, should be the motto for today," said Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur Davio Gunnlaugsson.

Russia and the Western powers might be having a little disagreement over the Ukraine, added Finnish president Sauli Niinisto, but that can be overlooked because the nations of the Arctic need to work together to deal with the melting ice affecting the region's 4 million people.

"Should this work get paralyzed," Niinisto said, "everyone would lose."

There followed a lot of talk about the "climate change crisis" and how everyone had to work together to combat it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was beamed in on the big video screen dominating the hall to offer the cooperative help of her country in saving the Arctic and suggesting some areas might need "special protection."

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Those themes pretty much held until Canadian Vincent Rigby, chair of the Senior Arctic Officials, an arm of the Arctic Council took the stage. He mentioned the need for jobs in the north -- poverty and unemployment being another crisis across northern Alaska, northern Canada and northern Russia.

A question-and-answer session after his presentation saw him challenged immediately on the jobs issue by moderator Alice Rogoff, one of the founders of the Arctic Circle Assembly along with Grimsson, and publisher of the Alaska Dispatch News.

"There's very clearly a sense of bifurcated agendas here," she said, noting the inherent conflict between development and the environment.

Rigby soon found himself on a development defensive. A professor from the University of British Columbia wanted to know why Canada hadn't done more to cap emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. Much of it leaks out of homes and the tailpipes of motor vehicles.

A woman who identified herself only as an Icelander wanted to know "what prevention measures have been taken" to protect the Arctic. She was of the opinion development was moving along pretty much as "business as usual," though there isn't really that much business in the Arctic. It's more talk about business.

Rigby countered that the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental group involving the eight Arctic nations and six indigenous organizations, was focused on the "responsible side" of development.

Alaska born and raised Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, followed Rigby to the stage to underline that at least when it comes to climate change there are some issues with cooperation. There are real people living in the Arctic, she observed, and few of them are living anywhere near as well as the folks attending the conference here.

"Without prospects for economic development, without jobs, it is very difficult to (keep) our best and brightest," Murkowski said. "Without hope for the future, our communities struggle.

"(Climate change) can't be our sole focus. We can't lose focus on the people of the north."

The real world was suddenly intruding on the hopey-feeley goodness of cooperation. And it only got more complicated when retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Robert Papp took the stage.

Papp is the U.S. special representative for the Arctic and has been named to head the Arctic Council, when the United States takes over as the next chair, succeeding Canada, in six months. He offered an uplifting speech several times invoking the name of late president John F. Kennedy and Kennedy's success in launching the U.S. toward the difficult goal of putting a man on the moon.

He quoted JFK's observation that the country was going for the moon "not because it is easy, but because it is hard." It was meant as an example of how big problems can be overcome.

But the project to put a man on the moon only required jumping scientific hurdles. They are, in some ways, easy compared to the political and socioeconomic problems, not to mention the environmental ones, of the Arctic. Questioners were quick to remind Papp.

No sooner was he done speaking than people were lining up behind the two available microphones in the auditorium waiting to pepper him with questions. They wanted to know how U.S.-Russia relations were going to influence his leadership of the council, which has been good, so far, at getting easy things done.

The council brokered agreements among all the Arctic nations on cooperation in search and rescue, and oil spill cleanup. The questions about resource development are much trickier.

With a border skirmish raging between Russia and Ukraine, and the possibility of war threatening the region, the U.S. and European nations this fall sanctioned Russian oil companies. ExxonMobil, a U.S. company that had helped the Russians earlier find a major Arctic oil field in the Kara Sea, was forced to pull out of a joint-operating agreement.

The New York Times reported Wednesday the Russians now intend to proceed with development on their own.

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"Whether Russian technology can fill the gap left by Western oil majors as the country prepares for the extraordinary engineering challenge of oil drilling under the Arctic ice remains an unsettled question within the industry," the story noted, but it called the latest find Russia's "Saudi Arabia" and noted the country was unlikely to back off.

Most everyone agrees an offshore oil spill in the Arctic would create an unprecedented environmental disaster, and the odds for a spill increase the less the experience of the drillers and the worse the drilling equipment to which they have access. The potential for disaster is high enough that when the Russians in September threatened to finish the test hole in the Kara Sea with or without Exxon's help, the U.S. government relaxed sanctions on the company to allow the company to finish the project in the country's western Arctic.

Where any oil spilled there would end up is unclear, given complicated Arctic currents. But Russia is also exploring for oil in its eastern Arctic just across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Though Shell's exploration in U.S. Chukchi Sea waters was stalled this summer, Exxon was continuing seismic exploration in the Russian Chukchi.

"Seismic surveys will go along in certain parts of the Russian license areas this year and next year, just like we did in the Kara Sea," Patrick McGinn, a spokesman for Exxon told Nome radio station KNOM at the start of the season.

The Russians have not been as cautious as the U.S. and Canada in approaching offshore drilling in the Arctic. Given that, there could be serious oil-spill dangers in cutting off their access to the best available technology and personnel.

On the U.S. diplomatic front, Papp is going to have some big issues with which to deal.

"We are concerned about some of the activities Russian has been involved in," he said. "Ukraine is no secret ... (but) we view this as an opportunity to keep business going."

It was unclear what that meant. In response to a follow-up question about where the Arctic was positioned in overall U.S. foreign policy, Papp said, "it's all a delicate balance."

Questions were at that point cut off with nearly a dozen people still waiting in line to get to a microphone. It was another delicate balance.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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