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Norway will reopen Barents Sea for drilling exploration

by TeresePersse Posted on May 20, 2016

Norway will reopen Barents Sea for drilling exploration

By on May 19, 2016Share

Norway has just announced that it will begin issuing drilling licenses to oil companies looking to cash in in the Arctic — after two decades of declining their advances.

“Today, we are opening a new chapter in the history of the Norwegian petroleum industry,” said petroleum and energy minister Tord Lien in a statement. “For the first time in 20 years, we offer new acreage for exploration. This will contribute to employment, growth and value creation in Norway. Northern Norway is now in the forefront of further developing the Norwegian petroleum industry.”

Environmental groups fighting to keep oil well underwater are, naturally, displeased. Aside from the carbon impact of burning fossil fuels, the drilling will take place in the ecologically delicate Barents Sea.

“The Barents Sea is one of the richest, most unique marine ecosystems in the world, with remarkable concentrations of seabirds, marine mammals, fish, and other marine life,” wrote Greenpeace’s Rick Steiner in 2014. “The potential short-term energy potential here is truly not worth the long-term environmental risk from offshore drilling.”

Norway’s announcement comes after state revenues around the country have been slashed by the global drop in crude oil prices. That drop has hit many economies dependent on oil, like Alaska’s. Still, Norway is in a better position than most oil-rich countries due to having diversified its economy with industries such as tourism and fisheries, as well as raising taxes, reports KTOO. In a visit to Anchorage this week, Ambassador Kare Aas said that the Norwegian government currently receives about 20 percent of its revenue from fossil fuel interests — while Alaska’s oil and gas industry produced roughly 90 percent of the state’s funds until fairly recently.

With luck, drillers won’t find enough easily accessible oil in the Barents Sea to make it worth their while. That’s what happened in Alaska last year: After a heated battle over offshore drilling in the Arctic, Royal Dutch Shell ultimately it wasn’t worth the bother and pulled out.

Either way, we’ll find out soon enough: Statoil plans to begin drilling in the Barents in 2017.

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Norway will reopen Barents Sea for drilling exploration

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Baked Alaska

by Myrna Posted on March 17, 2015

If the Last Frontier is the canary in the climate coal mine, we’re in trouble. Bear Glacier, Alaska, in 2007 Tim Hamilton/Flickr Earlier this winter, Monica Zappa packed up her crew of Alaskan sled dogs and headed south, in search of snow. “We haven’t been able to train where we live for two months,” she told me. Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which Zappa calls home, has been practically tropical this winter. Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Alaska, has been dumbfounded. “Homer, Alaska, keeps setting record after record, and I keep looking at the data like, Has the temperature sensor gone out or something?” Something does seem to be going on in Alaska. Last fall, a skipjack tuna, which is more likely to be found in the Galápagos than near a glacier, was caught about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, not far from the Kenai. This past weekend, race organizers had to truck in snow to the ceremonial Iditarod start line in Anchorage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska tweeted a photo of one of the piles of snow with the hashtag #wemakeitwork. But it’s unclear how long that will be possible. Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the country—a canary in our climate coal mine. A new report shows that warming in Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, is accelerating as the loss of snow and ice cover begins to set off a feedback loop of further warming. Warming in wintertime has been the most dramatic—more than 6 degrees in the past 50 years. And this is just a fraction of the warming that’s expected to come over just the next few decades. Read the rest at Slate. Read more –  Baked Alaska ; ; ;

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Baked Alaska

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Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

by SherrylKilburn Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this winter, Monica Zappa packed up her crew of Alaskan sled dogs and headed south, in search of snow. “We haven’t been able to train where we live for two months,” she told me.

Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which Zappa calls home, has been practically tropical this winter. Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Alaska, has been dumbfounded. “Homer, Alaska, keeps setting record after record, and I keep looking at the data like, Has the temperature sensor gone out or something?“

Something does seem to be going on in Alaska. Last fall, a skipjack tuna, which is more likely to be found in the Galápagos than near a glacier, was caught about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, not far from the Kenai. This past weekend, race organizers had to truck in snow to the ceremonial Iditarod start line in Anchorage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska tweeted a photo of one of the piles of snow with the hashtag #wemakeitwork.

Read: Freak floods flattened Eagle, Alaska. One man’s race against the water.

But it’s unclear how long that will be possible. Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the country—a canary in our climate coal mine. A new report shows that warming in Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, is accelerating as the loss of snow and ice cover begins to set off a feedback loop of further warming. Warming in wintertime has been the most dramatic—more than 6 degrees in the past 50 years. And this is just a fraction of the warming that’s expected to come over just the next few decades.

Of course, it’s not just Alaska. Last month was the most extreme February on record in the Lower 48, and it marked the first time that two large sections of territory (more than 30 percent of the country each) experienced both exceptional cold and exceptional warmth in the same month, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All-time records were set for the coldest month in dozens of Eastern cities, with Boston racking up more snow than the peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada. A single January snowstorm in Boston produced more snow than Anchorage has seen all winter. The discrepancy set off some friendly banter recently between the Anchorage, Boston, and San Francisco offices of the National Weather Service.

The terminus of Bear Glacier in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park in 2002 (above) and 2007 (below). USGS

USGS

Alaska is at the front lines of climate change. This year’s Iditarod has been rerouted—twice—due to the warm weather. The race traditionally starts in Anchorage, which has had near-record low snowfall so far this winter. The city was without a single significant snowstorm between October and late January, so race organizers decided to move the start from the Anchorage area 360 miles north to Fairbanks. But when the Chena River, which was supposed to be part of the new route’s first few miles, failed to sufficiently freeze, the starting point had to move again, to another location in Fairbanks.

On Monday, Zappa and her dogs set out on the 1,000-mile race across Alaska as one of 78 mushers in this year’s Iditarod. A burst of cold and snow are in the forecast this week, but for most of the winter, the weather across the interior of the state has also been abnormally warm. To train, many teams of dogs and their owners had to travel, often “outside”—away from Alaska. Zappa ended up going to the mountains of Wyoming.

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Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

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Alaska Republican: “Birth Control Is for People Who Don’t Necessarily Want to Act Responsibly”

by MichaelMaddock Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fetal alcohol syndrome is a devastating problem in Alaska, so state Senate Finance Committee co-chairman Pete Kelly, a Fairbanks Republican, has made it his personal mission to stamp it out. This week, in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News, he described the ways he plans to clamp down on the problem, including spending “a lot of money” on media campaigns and providing publicly funded pregnancy tests in Alaska’s bars and restaurants, so that women will be discouraged from shooting whiskey if they find out they’re pregnant. But make no mistake: Kelly is not interested in providing state-funded birth control in public places. He says that “birth control is for people who don’t necessarily want to act responsibly” and that would amount to “social engineering.”

Providing pregnancy tests in bars isn’t an entirely new concept. In 2012, a pub in Minnesota got national attention for installing a vending machine that dispensed pregnancy tests at $3 a pop—but the tests weren’t state-funded. Kelly envisions the government contracting with a nonprofit to make the tests widely available at places that serve alcohol. As he explains, “So if you’re drinking, if you’re out at the big birthday celebration and you’re kind of like, ‘Gee, I wonder if I…?’ You can just go in the bathroom and there should be a plastic, Plexiglas bowl in there, and that’s part of the public relations campaign, too. You’re going to have some kind of card on there with a message.”

The interviewer asked Kelly whether he would also support offering state-funded birth control in bars. Alaska does not accept federal money from the government’s Medicaid expansion, which would fund contraception, and state Sen. Fred Dyson (R-Eagle River) recently spoke out against it, declaring that if people can afford lattes, they can afford birth control. In response to the birth control question posed by Anchorage Daily News, Kelly said he wouldn’t support it:

No, because the thinking is a little opposite. This assumes that if you know, you’ll act responsibly. Birth control is for people who don’t necessarily want to act responsibly. That’s—I’m not going to tell them what to do, or help them do it, that’s their business. But if we have a pregnancy test, because someone just doesn’t know. That’s probably a way we can help them.

When the interviewer pointed out that using birth control could be seen as being responsible, Kelly replied: “Maybe, maybe not. That’s a level of social engineering that we don’t want to get into. All we want to do is make sure that people are informed and they’ll make the right decision.” He then said that lawmakers would consider, down the road, discussing involuntarily commitment if someone “is damning her child to a lifetime of mental problems and physical problems.” But he added, “We haven’t gone down that road far enough to make a decision.”

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Alaska Republican: “Birth Control Is for People Who Don’t Necessarily Want to Act Responsibly”

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