WikiLeaks: A battle to 'carve up' the Arctic

[ensho]

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/05/201151713273937174.html


Resource wars are possible as global warming melts polar ice - opening new areas to oil exploitation, cables indicate.


-snip video and text-

"The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources," Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying in a 2010 cable. "Russia should not be defeated in this fight."

Along with exposing an estimated 22 per cent of the world's oil, ice melting due to global warming will open new shipping lanes, the arteries of global commerce, which nations are competing to control. And Russia certainly is not the only country eyeing the frozen prize.

Per Stig Moller, then Danish foreign minister, mused in a 2009 cable that "new shipping routes and natural resource discoveries would eventually place the region at the centre of world politics".

Canada, the US, Russia, Norway, Denmark, and perhaps even China, have competing claims to the Arctic, a region about the size of Africa, comprising some six per cent of the Earth's surface.

-long snip about the battle and how global warming will change things dramatically-
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another place on the earth to dirty up