How Russia Is Cashing In on Climate Change

 

"While governments across the globe may be racing to head off the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, the economics of global warming are playing out differently in Russia.

Arable land is expanding, with farmers planting corn in parts of Siberia where it never grew before. Winter heating bills are declining, and Russian fishermen have found a modest pollock catch in thawed areas of the Arctic Ocean near Alaska.

Nowhere do the prospects seem brighter than in Russia’s Far North, where rapidly rising temperatures have opened up a panoply of new possibilities, like mining and energy projects. Perhaps the most profound of these is the prospect, as early as next year, of year-round Arctic shipping with specially designed “ice class” container vessels, offering an alternative to the Suez Canal.

Across the Russian Arctic, a consortium of companies supported by the government is midway through a plan to invest 735 billion rubles, or about $10 billion, over five years developing the Northeast Passage, a shipping lane between the Pacific and Atlantic that the Russians call the Northern Sea Route. They plan to attract shipping between Asia and Europe that now traverses the Suez Canal, and to enable mining, natural gas and tourism ventures.

The more the ice recedes, the more these business ideas make sense. The minimum summertime ice pack on the Arctic Ocean is about one-third less than the average in the 1980s, when monitoring began, researchers with the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center said last year. The ocean has lost nearly a million square miles of ice and is expected to be mostly ice-free in the summertime, even at the North Pole, by around mid-century.

 

Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear company that is coordinating investment in the shipping lane, said the initiative benefits from climate change but will also help fight it by reducing emissions from ships sailing between Europe and Asia by 23 percent, compared with the much longer Suez route.

 

The trip from Busan, in South Korea, to Amsterdam, for example, is 13 days shorter over the Northern Sea Route — a significant savings in time and fuel.

 

Ship traffic in the Russian Arctic rose by about 50 percent last year, though still amounting to just 3 percent of traffic through the Suez Canal. But a test run last February with a specially reinforced commercial vessel provided proof that the passage can be traversed in winter, so traffic is expected to rise sharply when the route opens year-round next year, Yuri Trutnev, a deputy prime minister, told the Russian media.

“We will gradually take transport away from the Suez Canal,” Mr. Trutnev said of the plan. “A second possibility for humanity certainly won’t bother anybody.”

Money has been pouring in for Arctic projects. Rosatom in July signed a deal with DP World, the Dubai-based ports and logistics company, to develop ports and a fleet of ice-class container ships with specially reinforced hulls to navigate icy seas.

 

The thawing ocean has also made oil, natural gas and mining ventures more profitable, reducing the costs of shipping supplies in and products out. A multi-billion-dollar joint venture of the Russian company Novatek, Total of France, CNPC of China and other investors now exports about 5 percent of all liquefied natural gas traded globally over the thawing Arctic Ocean.

 

Overall, analysts say, at least half a dozen large Russian companies in energy, shipping and mining will benefit from global warming." 

 Notify Patriarch Landsbergis immediately. Russia must not be allowed to benefit here. Urgent Reverend Landsbergis and the fascism-inclined women who elect Conservatives have to take off their underwear and push out strong streams of gas to keep the climate cool.