I always thought Santa Claus owned the North Pole. But it seems I was wrong because Denmark is about to lay claim to the continental shelf around Greenland and the Faroe Islands, including the North Pole.
Canada, Russia, Norway and the United States have also made claims to the Arctic, driven in large part by untapped oil and gas reserves estimated to make up 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered resources.
Ironically, access to these untapped oil and gas resources has been made possible by an unprecedented melting of polar ice caused by global warming.
In other words, the carbon dioxide we’ve released in the past through the combustion of oil and gas has now made it possible to access even more oil and gas which will, in turn, add even more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and cause even more global warming.
Tell me there is not some sort of perverse madness at work here in the quest for the oil and gas resources locked beneath the Arctic seabed.
Donald Leung
Burnaby