Potential oil boom in Norway may threaten fragile arctic environment

[theHandpuppet]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4776543.stm

Norway's future Arctic oil bonanza
By Lars Bevanger
BBC News, Hammerfest, Norway

As the world's known oil and gas reserves are running out, the hunt for more is on, and in even more remote places on earth.

One such area is the Barents Sea, off the northernmost tip of Norway and neighbouring Russia.

Both Norwegian and Russian authorities say the potential for future fossil energy exploration here is enormous, while environmentalists warn of the danger to the fragile Arctic environment....

MORE

[Dover]

1. Are people DEAF, DUMB and BLIND with GREED?!!!

Have they noticed there is a little PROBLEM with global warming that supercedes immediate gain??!!!

[Dogmudgeon]

3. It isn't greed anymore

At this point, we're caught between the proverbial rock-and-hard-place.

Unless we can sustain an annual 2.5% (approximately) energy consumption increase, our economy will stagger, sag, and collapse. Nearly all our major recessions and depressions in the last 150 years or more have followed unplanned "powerdowns" in energy sources and supplies.

Since Green Revolution agriculture requires an enormous amount of "input" energy, on the order of 8 calories of external energy for every calorie of nutritional energy produced (even without factoring in sunlight), failure to produce enough energy will have consequences that are far worse than expensive transportation.

First, recession; then, depression; finally, starvation.

Now, I consider the Green Revolution to be a Good Thing; it has saved well over a billion lives since 1965. But we've needed to develop sustainable strategies for food production, and we failed to do so over the past 40 years. If anything, agricultural practices have been warped toward an unsustainable industrial model. The Green Revolution will sputter and collapse as soon as the price of oil goes too high -- a point we're getting closer to every day.

Oil production isn't a luxury any more, and it hasn't been for decades. We're riding the tiger, and we have given NO thought to getting off.

--p!

[Boomer]

5. I have to disagree

>> Now, I consider the Green Revolution to be a Good Thing; it has saved well over a billion lives since 1965. <<

Good only in the short term view. Devastating because it has allowed human populations to boom to levels that simply can't be sustained over the long term.

Those "billion" are going to die anyway. All we've done is to delay the day of reckoning enough to add all their children to the death equation.

Unfortunately, our culture doesn't have an ethical framework to deal with that conundrum. When the means exist to feed people, or to cure them of illness, of course we will persist. By our own deeply ingrained standards, that is the only humane action.

Too bad the end results may be incredibly inhumane.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. Half both our loaves

I think the Green Revolution was good (IMO) because we bought ourselves forty years.

And we fucking blew it.

Four decades in which we had the opportunity to take on the challenge of a generation and a world; four decades in which we cracked endless jokes about "granola" and "Kumbayah" and "solar sex panels" and forgot that we were up against a series of inflexible secular deadlines and unalterable terrestrial limits.

Four decades in which we stepped into a busy thoroughfare, saw a massive truck speeding toward us, then looked the other way.

I quite agree with your here-and-now perspective. But 40 years ago, I was reading about the Green Revolution in fifth grade social studies class in Scholastic Reader. I never realized that when I was as old as my teacher, I would be living in a world ready to make the leap into outer space, limitless freedom, and a near-Edenic phase of civilization, but which had utterly ignored warnings to take care of the mundane things like energy and food production, peacemaking, and environmental stewardship.

I have NOT been optimistic lately. In the six or seven years since these issues have become better-known, nothing has been done to solve the problems, let alone soften the inevitable blow.

So looking at our perspectives, I'd say it's a matter of "half of both our loaves" -- which still won't feed us when the world's agricultural system collapses for lack of energy to run the farms and lack of nitrogen fertilizers to feed them.

--p!

[Submariner]

2. DU will be there to help protect the environment

I leave for Murmansk tomorrow to oversee a 3 month ecological survey of the LNG terminal and offshore pipeline route. Putin has decided it is time to cash in on the U.S. gluttony for oil and gas.

[hatrack]

6. Sounds really interesting!

Keep us posted if you have the time and access - and safe journey!

:toast:

[Submariner]

7. I know it will be interesting when I get there

My trip just got postponed a couple of weeks because the FSB (the former KGB) is concerned about us foreigners working on a naval base where the LNG terminal will be constructed. They said they need to finish the background security checks on me and the Norwegians I'm working for before we can enter the site.

I'll keep DU posted when I eventually get there.

[gula]

4. Some gorgeous underwater pix from the area

The clarity is astonishing. To think that this might become a thing of the past. :cry: :mad:

Click on any picture to get the whole series.

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,5538,PB64-SUQ9MTQ5NDEmbnI9Mg_3_3,00.html