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The Arctic seems hot these days, and not just because of rising temperatures and retreating ice, or because President Obama plans to speak at an Arctic policy meeting and visit an Arctic community on an Alaska tour starting Monday.

There’s intensified international jockeying over Arctic Ocean seabed resources, with Russia in August updating its claim to a vast region under the Law of the Sea convention (which the United States still has not ratified). There’s the tussle over Obama’s attempt to balance his climate and energy policies, with environmentalists decrying his approval of leases for Arctic offshore drilling (watch “Climate Leaders Don’t Drill The Arctic”) while Alaska Republicans complain about excessive federal control (see Representative Don Young here).

Here’s a smaller-scale indicator of how the tenor of things up north appears to be changing. When I went to the North Pole in the spring of 2003, the only activity on the floating, shifting sea ice other than the research being conducted by the team I accompanied was polar-style tourism centered at a Russian base camp variously called Barneo and Borneo. There was a Russian millionaire snowboarding behind a skimobile, a parasailing Belgian adventurer, a Moscow beauty pageant contestant dancing with Father Christmas.

Last year, 50 or so Russian paratroopers dropped to the sea ice near the polar camp. This spring, scientists conducting polar ice and ocean research told me they were unnerved to see a Russian military encampment nearby for the first time. Their observations came right around the time Dmitri O. Rogozin, a Russian deputy prime minister fond of tweaking the West, visited the North Pole camp, posting “ The Arctic is Russian Mecca” on Twitter.

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Such issues won’t be on the table as Air Force One wings its way west and north, even though the president’s first appearance will come Monday at an ambitiously titled Anchorage event — the Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience.

While the United States this year rotated into its two-year stint leading the eight-nation Arctic Council, this meeting is an unrelated informal session, organized by the State Department and other agencies around a distinctly uncontroversial agenda, ranging from basic science to energy-efficient cold-weather design tips:

– The Arctic’s Unique Role in Influencing the Global Climate – Building the Resilience of Arctic Coastal Communities in the Face of Climate Change – Strengthening International Preparedness and Cooperation for Emergency Response – Focus Session on Climate Resilience and Adaptation Planning – Protecting Communities and the Environment through Climate and Air Quality Projects – Preventing Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean – Strengthening Arctic Cooperation and Coordination on Ocean Stewardship, Environmental Protection, and Support to Local Communities – Healthy Arctic Homes: Designing Cold Climate Structures for the 21st Century (Addressing Health, Efficiency, & Resiliency through Innovative Housing Technologies) – Strengthening Observation Networks

A New Cold War?

The low-key tone of Obama’s Alaskan tour is appropriate. Behind the Russian bluster, the Arctic geopolitical temperature hasn’t changed that much. Resources and shipping routes have long been the source of disputes.

Even the United States and Canada have had diplomatic tussles, particularly over whether the fabled Northwest Passage through Canada’s mazelike Arctic archipelago is an international navigation route or subject to Canadian control.

The 1969 Northwest Passage transit by the SS Manhattan, an American supertanker refitted with an icebreaker’s bow by Humble Oil, was mostly depicted as a gutsy effort to test ways to get newly discovered North Slope oil to markets.

A public relations firm even created a mock Northwest Passage board game for Humble Oil to promote the Manhattan’s achievement.

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But freedom of navigation was a subtext.

As described in American University’s Inventory of Conflict and Environment, the tanker’s owner, Humble Oil, “cooperating closely with the U.S. government, deliberately opted to neglect requests made by the Canadian government to seek its approval before traveling through the Canadian Arctic to the new oil fields on the Alaskan North Slope.”

In 1970, Canadian politicians expressed alarm that the United States was going to bolster its icebreaker fleet, presumably to aid American ships in such transits.

Another test of the right to navigate the Northwest Passage came in 1985. As The Times reported:

Without asking permission, the United States notified Canada in May that the heavy icebreaker Polar Sea would sail from Greenland to Alaska along the Arctic waterway that explorers once thought to be a way to Asia. Washington considers the Northwest Passage an international strait open to shipping. Ottawa says the route, which passes among islands claimed by Canada, lies within its territory.

Still, such Arctic tussles have been resolved through negotiation and compromise.

Maybe things tend to get worked out better in the Arctic because of the harshness of conditions and the distance from bureaucracies. As I found on my 2003 sea ice trip, when three scientists with advanced degrees crouched on the sea ice in 20-below temperatures (Fahrenheit) to fix a broken winch, you have to work things out on your own up there.

You’ll find a long list of stories when you search the Web for “New Cold War,” but I wouldn’t count on things overheating any time soon.

The best argument for why this is the case was made in 2010 in Foreign Policy by Lawson W. Brigham, a former Coast Guard icebreaker captain and leader of a major study of Arctic shipping trends who is now Distinguished Professor of Geography & Arctic Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. As he wrote:

Today’s Arctic is governed by eight developed states that arguably cooperate more than they have at any other period in history. International collaboration in scientific research, for instance, is at record levels in the Arctic today. The looming Arctic resource boom doesn’t threaten this stability — it reinforces it. States such as Norway and Russia have much to lose economically from Arctic conflict, as do the many non-Arctic countries and multinational corporations that will be among the eventual investors in, and consumers of, future Arctic ventures….

A Bloomberg News story on Friday built on Brigham’s thesis, noting other reasons why the Arctic rush (that was the title of a 2005 Discovery Times Channel documentary I worked on) will be a relatively slow affair:

Falling commodity prices are discouraging exploration for Arctic oil and gas, while new trade routes across the top of the world are falling short of expectations. “Arctic development is a lot slower than people thought,” says Malte Humpert, executive director of the Arctic Institute, a Washington-based policy group. “The hype is wearing off. It’ll be many, many years before we see the development people have been talking about.”

On this front, I also encourage you to read “The truth about politics and cartography: mapping claims to the Arctic seabed,” an illuminating recent piece by Philip Steinberg, the director of the Center for Borders Research at Britain’s Durham University. He says:

In short, little is actually happening on the international seabed – in the Arctic or elsewhere – other than states using science to claim the limited economic rights that are reserved for them by international law. These filings should therefore be celebrated as reaffirmations of the will toward peace and stability, rather than feared as unilateral acts of aggression.

Here’s a map from his research group showing how little Russia’s claim has changed since 2001:

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Oil and Alaska

On the main domestic issue, balancing oil needs and environmental concerns, there’ll be no simple answers up north. Alaska defies simple stereotypes, with its indigenous communities as divided as the United States more broadly over the risks and merits of oil extraction. Kirk Johnson’s fine curtain raiser on the trip in The Times has a section illustrating this divide:

“It’s a battle for humanity,” said Ryan Joe, 26, an Alaska Native college student who was helping plan an anti-Arctic-drilling rally for Monday in downtown Anchorage, led by Greenpeace and other groups. “How is drilling somewhere going to make it better for the world?” Mr. Joe said…. An Alaska Native tribal group with investments in Arctic leases also began a statewide television advertising campaign this week to coincide with the president’s visit. The tribe asserts that, contrary to the idea that drilling threatens native life, energy development is crucial to paying for the services that tribes depend on in remote places. The Arctic “is not a pristine snow globe that deserves to be tucked away and preserved,” said Tara Sweeney, a spokeswoman for the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, based in Barrow, in a telephone interview.

Obama used his Saturday recorded message to stress the need for action to cut emissions of greenhouse gases while recognizing that oil will continue to be needed for many years to come and, in his judgement, is best gotten domestically, with rigorous oversight.

“The bottom line is, safety has been and will continue to be my administration’s top priority when it comes to oil and gas exploration off America’s precious coasts – even as we push our economy and the world to ultimately transition off of fossil fuels,” Obama said in his message on Saturday.

Connecting Americans with their Arctic

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Perhaps the best thing about the trip will simply be to remind Americans in the contiguous states that this country has an Arctic Ocean coastline and that Arctic change — both climatic and geopolitical — resonates everywhere. It’s a challenge sustaining this kind of awareness, similar to that of Brazil engaging its southern urban residents with its vast Amazon rain forest. But it’s well worth doing.

One thing is certain. Obama’s visit to Alaskan glaciers this week, aimed at connecting with his administration’s global warming policies, won’t include one of the diversions staged for President Warren G. Harding on his Alaska voyage in 1923.

Read the marvelous piece on that trip by George E. Condon, Jr., in the National Journal to get the idea. Here’s the opener:

As President Obama embarks on the most ambitious presidential exploration of Alaska in U.S. history, he hopes to call attention to the threats facing that state’s precious and majestic glaciers, attending a State Department-sponsored conference on glaciers and meeting with locals concerned about their melting. That probably means he won’t do what the last president to spend a lot of time in Alaska did: have the Navy bombard a glacier for his amusement. That was part of the entertainment for President Harding during his historic tour of Alaska in July 1923. With the president aboard the USS Henderson going from Juneau to Skagway, the ship’s gunners fired several rounds of 5-inch shells into the wall of the Taku Glacier “so that Harding could watch the flashing ice avalanche,” according to Harding’s biographer, Francis Russell. What Harding saw is called “calving,” when huge chunks of ice “calv,” or break off, a glacier. “It is very dramatic. I’m sure President Harding liked that,” joked Michael Hawfield, an expert on Alaska history and an associate professor at the Kachemak Bay campus of Kenai Peninsula College in the University of Alaska system. [Please read the rest.]

I forgot to include a link to the transcript of a press call with a senior State Department official discussing the trip. Here’s my question and the reply: