Alaska’s Push for an Arctic Rush
Warmer weather and Russian aggression in Ukraine heat up new energy ambitions in the melting Arctic
This story was reported in collaboration with The Nome Nugget
ANCHORAGE, AK — It seemed cockeyed at times and maybe even a little harsh to hear how a rapidly melting Arctic is being targeted for world energy dominance. But that was what drove dialogue at the Arctic Encounter Symposium, a two-day conference in downtown Anchorage this week attracting a global roster of diplomats, politicians, energy executives, and Indigenous stakeholders.
Following the Arctic’s seventh warmest year on record, interest in the Circumpolar North is heating up almost as fast as the region, itself. The planet’s melting ice cap has become a lucrative location for extractive energy forecasting, mostly in the form of shipping liquified natural gas or LNG through routes once too frozen to cut through.
Alaska’s former lieutenant governor and petroleum patriarch, Mead Treadwell, may be no more to blame than anyone else for the thawing that now threatens bowhead whales, bearded seals, and the ancient lifeways connected to these mammals. Still, the latest Arctic Report Card — finding that waters of the Bering Strait, shared with the U.S. and Russia, are now noisier due to an…
