A Climate Change Winner and Some Losers

It's a common trope on Fox News and among Senate Republicans that climate change is a hoax. But there are some people who know different. Like, say, the employees of Shell Oil, who recently postponed drilling in the arctic for the season after an accident that occurred while testing their containment equipment. And the people of Greenland.

The New York Times has an article about one town in Greenland and the affects the warming climate has had on its residents:

Narsaq’s largest employer, a shrimp factory, closed a few years ago after the crustaceans fled north to cooler water. Where once there were eight commercial fishing vessels, there is now one. 

As a result, the population here, one of southern Greenland’s major towns, has been halved to 1,500 in just a decade. Suicides are up.

But as they lose one industry another may be starting up.

Vast new deposits of minerals and gems are being discovered as Greenland’s massive ice cap recedes, forming the basis of a potentially lucrative mining industry. 

One of the world’s largest deposits of rare earth metals — essential for manufacturing cellphones, wind turbines and electric cars — sits just outside Narsaq.

Greenland, whose population is only 57,000, is a possession of Denmark. It has relied on half a billion dollars in welfare payments from Denmark, though that subsidy was frozen and scheduled to decline after it was given home rule in 2009.

Greenland has looked at mining in the past. Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize-winning Dane, visited Narsaq in 1957 to investigate its uranium deposits. The weather ultimately nixed mining back then, but with global warming the equation has changed.

The development of mining doesn't thrill everyone. The mining companies have proposed importing Polish and Chinese miners. Fishermen and hunters are unlikely to relish trading in the clear skies and brisk cold air for the darkness and filthy radioactive dust of rare-earth mines. And as happened with every other mining venture since the dawn of man, toxic tailings from the mines will poison the environment, affecting polar bears and the seals that the native Inuit hunt and eat.

Denmark, a firmly anti-nuclear state, will have to revise its laws for the mining of radioactive material for these projects to go forward (rare-earth metals are often intertwined with radioactive elements). Or, which is quite possible, Greenland will be the first modern country created by climate change:

“For me, I wouldn’t mind if the whole ice cap disappears,” said Ole Christiansen, the chief executive of NunamMinerals, Greenland’s largest homegrown mining company, as he picked his way along a proposed gold mining site up the fjord from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. “As it melts, we’re seeing new places with very attractive geology.”

But while Greenland becomes ice-free and independent, sea levels will rise by more than 20 feet. Miami, Manhattan, Bangladesh and the Netherlands will be flooded, and countries like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands will cease to exist.

But I guess that's okay if we get more gold, lanthanum and tantalum for our cell phones.