[ad_1]
PEVEK, Russia — A renovated port. A new plant to generate electricity. Renewed roads. And the remaining money to repair the library and put a new promenade along the coast of the Arctic Ocean.
Globally, the warming climate is a creeping disaster that threatens lives and livelihoods with floods, fires and droughts, requiring enormous effort and expense to combat.
But in Pevek, a small port town on the Arctic Ocean in Russia’s Far North, the warming climate is seen as a bonanza that’s barely mitigated as the Arctic benefits from a boom in shipping.
“I call it rebirth,” said Valentina Khristoforova, curator of a local history museum. “We are in a new age.”
As governments around the world race to fend off the potentially devastating effects of climate change, the economy of global warming is doing differently in Russia.
The arable land is expandingWith farmers planting corn in areas of Siberia where it had never grown before. Winter heating bills are falling, and Russian fishermen have found a modest catch of pollock in thawed areas of the Arctic Ocean near Alaska.
Nowhere do the prospects look brighter than in Russia’s Far North, where rapidly rising temperatures open up a host of new possibilities, such as mining and energy projects. Perhaps the most profound of all is the prospect of year-round Arctic shipping as early as next year, with specially designed “ice-class” container ships offering an alternative to the Suez Canal.
The Kremlin’s policy on climate change is contradictory. It is not an important issue in domestic politics. But always mindful of Russia’s global image, President Vladimir V. Putin recently promised for the first time that Russia, the world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases and an outstanding producer of fossil fuels, will become the world’s fourth largest country. . carbon neutral by 2060.
Fortunately for Pevek and other Far North outposts, in practice, the Russian approach boils down to this: While climate change is a huge threat to the future, why not take advantage of the commercial opportunities it presents now?
Across the Russian Arctic, a government-backed consortium of companies is in the middle of a Russian plan to invest 735 billion rubles, or about $10 billion, over five years to develop the Northeast Passage, a shipping line between the Pacific and Atlantic. Northern Sea Route. They plan to attract shipping between Asia and Europe, currently passing through the Suez Canal, and enable mining, natural gas and tourism ventures.
The more the ice is pulled, the more meaningful these business ideas will be. Researchers at the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center said the minimum summer ice pack in the Arctic Ocean last year was about a third less than the average in the 1980s, when monitoring began. The ocean has lost nearly a million square miles of ice and is expected to be mostly ice-free during the summer months, even in the Arctic by mid-century.
Pevek is an important port at the eastern end of this melting sea. Before its great meltdown and its economic prospects came to the fore, it was an icy backwater that was on its way to becoming a ghost town, one of the many dying outposts of the Soviet empire.
It was established in the 1940s as a gulag camp for tin and uranium mining, where large numbers of prisoners died. “Pevek, apparently, consisted of watchtowers,” said a former prisoner, Aleksandr Tyumin, in a collection of memoirs about the Arctic Siberian camps.
In the tundra outside the town, snow piles up on piles of abandoned helicopters, junk cars, and old fuel drums, as trash is too expensive to transport.
Eerie, empty gulag settlements scattered nearby, broken glass staring blankly at the frozen wasteland.
In winter, the sun goes below the horizon for months. A seasonal wind howls, accelerating 90 miles per hour. Parents do not take their children out so that they do not throw them out on the street.
Past business plans for Pevek have failed miserably. North Star correspondent Raisa Tymoshenko said that efforts to sell reindeer meat to Finland, for example, fell through after Finnish inspectors rejected the product.
Just a few years ago, towns and satellite communities were mostly abandoned. The population had fallen from about 25,000 to about 3,000 during the Soviet era. “There were rumors that the town was going to close,” said resident Pavel Rozhkov.
But with global warming, the wheel of wealth has turned and the population has grown by nearly 1,500, confirming, at least in a small pocket, the Kremlin’s strategy of adapting to change – spending when needed and profiting when possible.
This policy has its critics. “Russia speaks of the benefits of adaptation approaches because they want to realize the full commercial potential of their fossil fuel resources,” said Marisol Maddox, an Arctic analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scientists in Washington.
Overall, for Russia, “the evidence suggests that the risks far outweigh the benefits, no matter how optimistic the language of the Russian government is,” he said.
The Kremlin is not blind to the drawbacks of global warming and acknowledges in a 2020 policy decree that “Russia’s population, economy and natural resources are vulnerable to the consequences of climate change.”
The plan noted that global warming will require costly adaptations. Government will have to cut fire extinguishers in new forests vulnerable to forest firesstrengthen counter dams river overflow, rebuild the collapsed dwelling melting permafrost, and be prepared for possible lower world demand for oil and gas.
Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, which coordinates investments in the shipping line, said the initiative benefits from climate change, but will also help fight emissions by reducing emissions from ships navigating between Europe and Asia by 23 percent compared to the much longer Suez route. .
For example, the journey from Busan in South Korea to Amsterdam is 13 days shorter via the Northern Sea Route, resulting in significant savings in time and fuel.
Ship traffic in the Russian Arctic increased by nearly 50 percent last year, but still accounts for only 3 percent of traffic passing through the Suez Canal. But testing with a specially fortified merchant ship last February provided proof that the crossing can be crossed in winter, so traffic is expected to increase sharply when the route opens next year, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev said. said Russian media.
“We will gradually take transportation from the Suez Canal,” Trutnev said of the plan. “A second possibility for humanity will certainly not bother anyone.”
Money is flowing in for Arctic projects. Rosatom in July signed an agreement With Dubai-based ports and logistics company DP World to develop ice-class container ships and ports with specially reinforced hulls for navigating icy seas.
The thawing ocean has also made oil, gas and mining ventures more profitable, reducing the cost of shipping products in and out. A multi-billion dollar joint venture Russian company Novatek, Total of France, China’s CNPC and other investors currently export about 5 percent of all liquefied natural gas traded globally via the thawed Arctic Ocean.
Overall, analysts say at least half a dozen large Russian companies in the energy, shipping and mining sectors will benefit from global warming.
One benefit that the Pevek people don’t feel is any sense that the climate is actually warming. To them, the weather looks as cold and miserable as ever, despite being on average 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 20 years ago.
Olga Platonova, a librarian, said global warming is “an economic plus.” Still, he and other residents say they have no reason to celebrate in light of the costly and dangerous changes worldwide.
And even here those who say the environmental impacts are uncertain are referring to the alarming appearance of a roaring flock of crows never seen before in recent years.
And Ms. Platonova had one more regret: “It’s a shame that our great-grandchildren and great-grandchildren don’t see the frozen north as we experience it.”
[ad_2]
Source link