Tag: oil drilling

Avoiding a climate lockdown 🧐💭

Ms. Cat

As the world faces three major threats, namely the COVID-19 induced public health and economic crises as well as the ongoing climate emergency, the business world is in a position to make real positive change.

Avoiding a climate lockdown (original)

H/T: Kim Iversen—The Next Agenda

Related:

A green economic renewal after the COVID-19 crisis (PDF)

WEF: Paris Is Planning To Become A ’15-minute City’

15-minute city:

A 15-minute city is a residential urban concept in which most daily necessities can be accomplished by either walking or cycling from residents’ homes. The concept (see also the New Urbanism of the 1980s) is present, among many, in D’Acci’s Isobenefit Urbanism since 2013 (“The Isobenefit Urbanism approach aims to create cities in which each dweller can do her/his usual main daily activities by walking or at maximum biking”) was popularized by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and inspired by French-Colombian scientist Carlos Moreno who in 2016 coined the term. 15-minute cities are built from a series of 5-minute neighborhoods, also known as complete communities or walkable neighborhoods. The concept has been described as a “return to a local way of life”.

US to Appoint New Arctic Ambassador With Eye on Russia

Ms. Cat

US to Appoint New Arctic Ambassador With Eye on Russia

The US military is preparing for a future conflict in the Arctic with Russia, as well as China, by revamping its forces in the region. The US Army released a strategy document last year that said the Arctic has the “potential to become a contested space where United States’ great power rivals, Russia and China, seek to use military and economic power to gain and maintain access to the region at the expense of US interests.”

The US Navy released a similar strategy document in early 2021. Then-Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite suggested that the US could start challenging Russian claims to the Arctic by sending warships near Russia’s northern coast, similar to how the US Navy makes provocative passages near Chinese-controlled islands in the South China Sea.

Related:

Melting ice will change the economics of extracting resources from the Arctic

Of the 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas estimated to lie north of the Arctic Circle, 84% lies offshore. And while Arctic conditions can still be as harsh as they were on the Seabees, the infrastructure of oil and gas extraction has improved vastly. “If people aren’t drilling all over the Arctic now, I don’t think it’s because there’s a gap in technology,” said Stig-Mortean Knutsen, a petroleum geologist at the Arctic University of Norway. “It’s more to do with cost.”

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These extractive ambitions rub against the urgency of our environmental moment: the need to cut down, rather than pursue, fossil fuel use. As part of their sustainability goals, banks claim they’re now making it difficult for oil firms to get funds for new Arctic projects. Knutsen calls this decision to withhold financing an easy one to make, “like kicking down an open door,” because the upfront expense of a project is so steep today. If those expenses shrink in a warming Arctic, banks might well step up once again, he said. One sustainability executive at a London-based bank, who asked not to be named, pointed out: “In any case, China and Russia will be happy to fund new projects.”

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Ironically, to best transition away from carbon fuels, the Arctic may first have to yield up another kind of resource: metals. The batteries, electric vehicles, and fuel cells of the future will need huge quantities of copper, nickel, manganese, rare earths, and other metals, said Gerard Barron, the CEO of The Metals Company, which hopes to mine the sea floor once the International Seabed Authority, a body within the UN, finalizes an undersea mining code. Barron’s miners are most actively studying the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a region just south of Hawai’i, where there is, Barron believes, enough metal to build 280 million EV batteries.