![]() ![]() What’s delicate is that stronger Canadian ties to China could strain U.S.-Canada relations. “There’s uneasiness with China, at a certain level, but how do you say that politely?” asks Huebert. Now Canada, next up to chair the Arctic Council, may support China’s effort to participate in council deliberations, though Beijing wouldn’t have a vote. But with so much natural wealth at stake, the council’s policies are increasingly critical. The organization-whose members include Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States and representatives of indigenous Arctic peoples-was founded in 1996 to promote environmental protection and maritime safety. Beijing has also ex- pressed a sudden desire to join the once-obscure Arctic Council. ![]() That would expand Russia’s borders to cover some five billion tons of oil and natural gas.Ĭhina, 900 miles from the Arctic Circle, isn’t in a position to claim territory, but the world’s largest energy consumer is investing billions in Canadian oil and gas projects. Russia’s in the game again, dispatching submarines into the Arctic Ocean to gather geological samples and, in 2007, planting a titanium flag to metaphorically support the claim that much of the seafloor-as far as the North Pole itself-is an extension of Siberia’s continental shelf. The prize then was the riches of India today, it’s new shipping routes and untapped natural resources, including an estimated 13 percent of the earth’s oil and 30 percent of its natural gas. Maybe a 21st-century version of the Great Game, which Russia and Britain played among the mountains and deserts of Central Asia in the 19th century. “The ice kept everybody out, and now all of a sudden the ice is going to be gone. “We’ve never had a situation where an ocean has appeared overnight,” says Rob Huebert, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, who studies Arctic security issues. Global warming might be an environmental catastrophe, but countries eyeing the North Pole also see it as an opportunity.
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