REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Arctic oil and gas drilling could spell the end of humanity, suggested a group of academics gathered at the Arctic Circle Assembly here Friday.
The thinking of the panel of professors from Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Canada and the U.S. went like this:
Global warming opens the Arctic to oil and gas development. New oil and gas production means more global warming. More global warming opens even more of the Arctic, which leads to even more drilling.
And pretty soon climate change threatens or kills everyone.
Thus, to save humankind, the panel on "The Nexus of Environment, Resource Extraction, Global Economy, (State) Sovereignty, and Global Governance -- An Arctic (Security) Paradox" suggested that it would probably be best not to drill anywhere in the Arctic.
"We should start asking if we should be doing that (drilling)," said Professor Gunhild Hoogensen Gjorv of the University of Tromso -- the Arctic University of Norway. She criticized her own nation for its contradictory stand on oil drilling. Norway, she said, presents itself as a protector of the environment while it follows a policy of drill, baby, drill.
Then, she said, it makes a big deal out of being the environmentally cleanest oil producer in the world.
"I think we need to challenge that as a norm," she said, because otherwise the globally warmed environment is just going to get more and more messed up until "poof, it's gone."
Assistant professor Audur H. Ingolfsdottir of Bifrost University in Iceland said she was worried that her country has now begun its own hunt for oil off this island's northern coast.
Iceland doesn't need nonrenewable energy, she said. The country is now almost 100 percent heated and electrically powered by renewable geothermal and hydropower energy, but it wants oil for the financial value.
She worries Iceland will find oil and then use it to add to global warming, because "if you have a resource, of course, you're going to use it," she said.
And Iceland, along with the rest of the world, shouldn't be using more oil; it should be using less in Gjorv's view.
As it stands today, she said, the world needs to reduce its current consumption of non-renewable energy resources to 25 percent of what is used today to stall global warming. They only way to make that happen is to limit supply.
"This is the answer to climate change," she said, noting that appeals to consumers to use less energy don't seem to be working so well.
"There's a lot of demand (for oil) on the consumer side," she said in an answer to a question after her presentation.
The real problem, said Professor Matthias Finger of Ecole Polytechnique in Switzerland, is that almost everyone is in "denial" about the consequences of the profligate and continuing use of global oil, gas and coal resources.
Fingers titled his presentation "Too scary to be true, or the denial of the global Arctic."
He argued that no one -- not government, not business, not academics, not consumers -- wants to face the reality of the current system, which many, if not most, blame for hiking the global temperature by 2 degrees Centigrade since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
"I don't want to be alarmist at all," Finger added, while being alarmist.
Most of those attending the panel seemed to embrace the view of the professors. At the question and answer session after the presentation, William Moomaw, a professor of international environmental policy at The Fletcher School at Tufts University just outside of Boston, made the claim that Arctic residents had been driven to suicide "by giving them development."
There appears little evidence to support the claim in modern times. There is a stronger suggestion the suicide epidemic that plagues much of the north today is linked to a lack of hope.
As Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told the entire assembly earlier in the day:
"Without prospects for economic development, without jobs ... without hope for the future, our communities struggle."
Murkowski specifically linked both suicide and domestic violence, another plague on the north, to that lack of hope.
Climate change, she warned, "can't be our sole focus. We can't lose focus on the people of the North."
She tied the future of those people to jobs. Some others contend the development required to create jobs will just make things worse.
This is but one of the Arctic paradoxes being debated at the annual gathering, started by Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson and Alaska Dispatch News publisher Alice Rogoff to talk about Arctic issues.
"The whole conference is about paradoxes," said Finger.
There are those here who believe Arctic residents cannot go back, but can only go forward into a new economic future. And there are others who believe Arctic residents would be happier living the way they lived a thousand years ago, although it is unclear how one gets back there after adopting snowmachines, chainsaws, and the many electric-powered conveniences of modern life, such as the cellphone.
Murkowski noted Arctic Alaskans already feel abused by the high costs of fuel they need for the machinery with which they hunt and often for the diesel power plants that provide vital village electricity.
This is part of the reason there have sometimes been disagreements between Alaska Natives and environmentalists who want to block Arctic development -- because they largely share the views of the professors, though they often claim to be primarily worried about the on-the-ground consequences of development.