The Last Remaining Place

Last month, BRT posted an article titled, Agent Smith was right, a piece discssing how man goes from place to place, taking all the resources of said place before moving on to plunder some other place even though we have now basically run out of places to pillage save for the Arctic, a region that was relatively safe from the predation of man until global warming reared it's ugly head, thus opening up a pristine frontier harboring, perhaps, the last significant deposits of oil and natural gas on the planet. 

[AMHERST, Mass. — WHILE many existing oil and gas reserves in other parts of the world are facing steep decline, the Arctic is thought to possess vast untapped reservoirs. Approximately 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil deposits and 30 percent of its natural gas reserves are above the Arctic Circle, according to the United States Geological Survey. Eager to tap into this largess, Russia and its Arctic neighbors — Canada, Norway, the United States, Iceland and Denmark (by virtue of its authority over Greenland) — have encouraged energy companies to drill in the region.]

It gets better.

In addition, the Arctic itself has proved to be a formidable adversary: In the summer of 2012, during Royal Dutch Shell’s first attempt to probe its Arctic deposits, shifting winds and floating ice halted drilling. Several months later, when one of its drilling rigs ran aground during an especially severe storm, Shell announced that it would suspend operations in Alaska’s Arctic waters and that before it proceeded, it would bolster its capacity to operate there.

Shell’s misfortunes have heightened concern that Arctic drilling poses an unacceptable threat to the region. Any major spill that occurs there is likely to prove far more destructive than the one produced in the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010, because of both the lack of adequate response capabilities and the likelihood that ice floes and sea ice will impede cleanup operations. As more companies push into the Arctic and accelerate their operations there, the risk of accidents and spills is bound to increase. The fact that Shell — one of the most technically advanced oil companies — has so far proved unable to overcome these risks should provoke intense concern over the prospect that other, less proficient firms will soon be operating in these perilous waters.

Bad tech being introduced into a hostile area, driven by greed and stupidity, is a recipe for disaster but we already know that, right?