A Melting Russia Asks: What Global Warming?

“It might seem impolitic to embrace what many regard as a looming global catastrophe. But this has not stopped the Russians”.

So begins an article in the Abu Dhabi based National about the future of my arctic hometown of Murmansk in the age of global warming.

Feted in Soviet times as the largest populated point beyond the Arctic Circle in the world, by the early 90s, it became clear why the decadent West was content to let the USSR keep that distinction unchallenged: it is next to impossible to adequately meet the needs of a polar city of nearly half a million inhabitants without a great deal of expense and difficulty.

The new government, itself bankrupt, no longer felt that Murmansk’s Guiness World Record spot merited maintaing the huge pay hikes, subsidies and food-supply chains that led people there in the first place.  And with the main employer, the former Soviet crown jewel that was the Murmansk Trawler Fleet, privatised out of existence, the city’s hardy inhabitants have lately been forced to lead a rather precarious existence.

But just when they thought things couldn’t get much worse, it appears that global warming may shortly finish off the last townsfolk still standing.

After all, keeping in mind JG Ballard’s apocalyptic global-warming novel The Drowned World, what other than total disaster could befall a town just 1100 kilometres from the North Pole, the gradual melting of which is turning the ice caps into a giant wall of rising water?

How about a renaissance?

That’s right: according to The National, authorities seem to be embracing global warming with a mixture of bravado and devil-may-care foolhardiness that has served the Russian people so well in the past.

“Our scientists say that the Arctic Circle is melting,” Andrei Seryakov, the deputy mayor of Murmansk, said in an interview [with The National] at his office in city hall, on Ulitsa Lenina. “But, really, we don’t see it, and I can say that this is not something that we think about. This is not something that is happening now.”

There is some evidence that a reduction in ice on Russia’s northern flank would open up lucrative commercial routes between Europe and Asia, and that increased temperatures would mean energy savings.

My parents would also become much happier if summer temperatures rise above the current max of around 12C.

Another reason is  that “for the Russians, who regard the Arctic as essentially their rightful territory, shrinking ice floes will ease access to the bounty of natural resources around the polar ice cap, including large reserves of oil, gas, gold, diamonds, nickel and tungsten”.

Yet despite appealing to common sense (and procrastination), this understanding that the melting of ice would make it easier to extract minerals is a profoundly misleading one.

According to a 2007 report by Bremen’s Forschungsstelle Osteuropa and the Center for Security Studies in Zürich, “Climate change could make it more expensive to extract oil and natural gas from current and future sites in Russia, [and] the melting of the permafrost, in particular, will impose a wide variety of costs”.

In fact, the researchers show that not only has “the thawing of ice-rich discontinuous permafrost already damaged houses, roads, airports, pipelines, and military installations”, it “is likely to increase the costs of natural gas and oil extraction in the very parts of Siberia where extraction is already expensive today”.

The myth of the bounties of global warming is just another alibi for a government determined to do virtually nothing to stop climate change.

Unfortunately, Russia’s vast current natural gas reserves make the price of doing something about global warming higher than the short term costs of doing nothing at all.

Add to that the country’s deep cultural attachment to idleness (a Russian saying goes, “work is not a wolf, it will not run away into the woods”) as well as almost entirely absent environmental controls, and in a few decades you’ll have a scenario Ballard would have been truly proud of.