Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (4 page)

Two days before our “insertion,” which is what everyone insisted on calling our mission to Devon, we were allowed to take a tour of the
Montreal
’s operations room—a cave of damp air lit only by radar and sonar screens and low red lights. Inside we met the ship’s underwater-warfare officer. “Could you detect a passing submarine?” I asked. He could not. The ship couldn’t drop sonar rays in the water without NATO permission. “They’d wonder why we were asking,” he said. “And if we did detect something, we’d say, ‘Hey, we found your sub,’ and the Americans would say, ‘No you didn’t,’ and we’d say, ‘Yes we did.’ It’s a touchy subject.” I asked about the relative size of the two navies. “The Americans, jeez, I can’t count how many ships they have. They have sixty thousand people working in Norfolk alone. On one base. That’s as many as we have in our entire armed forces. They have massive fleets. Massive. And we’re obviously, you know, small.” Our tour guide interjected, “But we can punch above our weight class.” The officer agreed. “Yeah, we punch above our weight class.”

One deck below the ops room was the lower-ranks mess, and I went there one afternoon to hear Commissioner Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, the formal head of Nunavut, address the troops. She told them about her childhood speaking only Inuktitut, her forced relocation to Toronto for schooling, and her Canadianized life in journalism and politics. “I have to disabuse southerners of their igloo notions,” she said, “and explain that there’s more to us than drumming and throat singing.” A sailor named Roberts, one of perhaps five black people on the entire ship, asked how climate change was affecting the Inuit way of life. The commissioner said that autumn was getting noticeably later, and that they were having difficulties forecasting weather and ice conditions; now there were only six seasons rather than the traditional eight. She showed us slides of her homeland and put a cassette into a boom box to play some throat-singing music for us.

After the music stopped, I walked down the hall and found Sergeant Strong once again promoting his plan for the Hans Island dispute with Denmark. “It could be something as simple as putting a couple of guys up there with a trailer,” he told a reporter from one of the in-flight magazines. “How much would that cost? The problem would just go away.”

 • • • 

THAT OCTOBER, I
traveled to Vancouver to meet the legal scholar Michael Byers, the former director of Duke University’s Canadian Studies Program and a widely respected expert on Canadian security and sovereignty. Byers, who was a young-looking forty years old and wore the same two days’ worth of beard he seemed to display every day, had recently returned home, surrendering his U.S. green card to a border guard in a burst of patriotism. He had taken a position at the University of British Columbia, and I was invited to sit in on his graduate seminar on climate change, a ten-person class held in a corner room with tall windows looking out on tall fir trees. When I walked in fifteen minutes late, a lanky student named Ryder McKeown was delivering a PowerPoint presentation called “Climate Change and National Security.” He wore jeans and glasses and Puma sneakers that happened to be red, white, and blue.

“Given the choice between starving and raiding,” one of McKeown’s slides read, “people raid.” He wasn’t talking about refugees from the tropics—at least not just them. The United States has a worsening water shortage, he said, and Canada has 20 percent of the world’s freshwater. He described “fantastic schemes” to export it across the border in bulk, including NAWAPA, the North American Water and Power Alliance, a 1960s proposal by the Los Angeles engineering firm Parsons to divert Canadian rivers to run southward rather than northward. In another plan, fjords in British Columbia would be dammed at one end and filled with freshwater; tankers would arrive, top up, and chug south to California. “We have it,” he said. “They want it.” Byers jumped in. “We are talking about 300 million people”—ten times the population of Canada—“with the world’s largest military and with a desperate need for water,” he said. “To some degree the constraints of international law will fade into the background. But luckily, water conservation is much cheaper than enormous engineering projects. They’ll find it hard to justify the expense.”

The discussion turned to the Northwest Passage, where the United States has twice enraged Canadian nationalists by sending ships through without asking permission. The 1969 voyage of the SS
Manhattan,
an ice-strengthened supertanker that tested the frozen route’s viability for transporting North Slope oil (the verdict: not yet), led to 1970 legislation in the Canadian Parliament that asserted Ottawa’s right to control Arctic traffic, which in turn led to failed eleventh-hour maneuvering to forestall the new law by Henry Kissinger and the U.S. State Department, then to a retaliatory cut in U.S. imports of Canadian oil. The 1985 crossing of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker
Polar Sea
led to more uproar and the negotiation of an informal “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy: Before making any transits of the passage, the coast guard now notifies Canada (without exactly asking); Canada agrees never to tell its neighbor no. American submarines already use the passage to travel between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and I had heard unprovable tales of Inuit hunters mistaking those subs for whales and shooting at them, only to have their bullets bounce off.

“We are talking about moving from a country that, in practical terms, had two coastlines, to one that now has three coastlines,” Byers said. “And we’re being told that our new third coastline isn’t subject to full Canadian jurisdiction—that it’s the Wild, Wild West.” He said that drug smuggling, gun smuggling, illegal immigration, and environmental damage could go unchecked if Canada didn’t take control. McKeown suggested there was a deeper threat as well. As divisive as the Northwest Passage may be, he said, Canada and the United States are drawn together in times of crisis—not pulled apart. He rattled off examples of cross-border cooperation: the Permanent Joint Board on Defense in 1940, NATO in 1949, NORAD in 1958, the Smart Border Declaration in 2001. In the mid-1950s, when it mattered that the shortest flight path from the Soviet Union to the United States was over the Arctic, the fifty-eight radar posts constituting the Distant Early Warning Line were built with mostly American money on mostly Canadian land. If climate change is truly as disruptive as both world wars, might Canada be drawn into an inescapable embrace with America?

McKeown was running out of time, so he raced through his last slides, laying out a climate-change scenario designed to “stretch our way of thinking”: First, rising seas flood Bangladesh, Mumbai, and Shanghai. Refugee applications then flood Canada. A terrorist group based in Canada soon attacks America. The United States closes its borders. In retaliation, Canada ceases water exports. But then, as immigrants sneak in from the Arctic and Russian and Chinese subs cruise the Northwest Passage, Canada asks for America’s help. It offers unfettered access to its resources in return for security. “Canada,” McKeown concluded, “remains an independent country in name only.”

Byers let that sink in. “If we’re in a
Mad Max
world, when things are increasingly dangerous and it’s survival of the fittest,” he said, “it’s not implausible to argue that our future is bound to the United States.” He was playing devil’s advocate. It worked. The class erupted. “Integration is a slippery slope,” said McKeown. A student on the far side of the room agreed. “We could lose our central-banking independence, our monetary independence, our social democratic Canadianism,” he said. “Our sovereignty is us, right? Without it we lose independent policy all over the board.”

“Has anyone here been to Puerto Rico?” Byers asked. “Is it part of the United States?” The students answered that it was a commonwealth, a protectorate. “They’re American citizens—sort of—but they can’t vote,” one said. “They don’t have minimum-wage standards,” said another. “There are a lot of people who support greater integration with the United States,” Byers concluded, “and they’re all under the assumption that we would become the next California—that we would become a state. But someone once told me that we Canadians need to pay more attention to Puerto Rico.”

I was reminded of a Canadian radio contest some years earlier in which listeners were challenged to come up with a national slogan equivalent to “as American as apple pie.” The winning entry: “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.” The conversation was far from the bravado of Operation Lancaster, but it was a flip side of the same coin. Canada was maneuvering to become one of the winners in a warming world, but a separate and equal goal, which I would soon see mirrored across the planet, was to avoid becoming one of the losers.

 • • • 

OUR INSERTION ONTO
Devon Island began with a frenzy of packing and map reading and sorting through food rations in the helicopter hangar. A rope ladder was soon thrown over the side of the
Montreal,
and we put on black life jackets and climbed down to a Zodiac raft that was pitching on six-foot seas. The Vandoos’ sergeant went first. The surprisingly graceful Bradley, all three hundred or so pounds of him, came last. We filled the front of the Zodiac with rucksacks and ration packs and weapons, and then we zipped across the ocean until the
Moncton,
a small warship just shorter than a hockey rink and supposedly better than the
Montreal
at landings, appeared out of the haze. We scaled its ladder and formed a bucket brigade to unload the gear. The
Moncton
was homey—its crew consisted of forty reservists—and so tight on space that the Vandoos had to set up cots in the hallways. Most of its sailors were as new to the Arctic as we were.

I’d known Devon Island only as the site of NASA’s Mars on Earth project, in which investigators attempted to live on a rocky, frigid, arid analogue to the red planet, and its beauty surprised me when we approached the next day. It loomed large even from thirty miles out, its glaciers pouring down from desolate three-thousand-foot peaks. The fog was gone, the sun was high, and icebergs kept floating past. The water was milky, glacial. An Aurora surveillance plane appeared and made a triple pass above us, plumes of smoke trailing behind its four props.

We sailed in from the east, and as we turned the corner into the fjord, we were surprised by a ship sneaking up from the west: the Russian-flagged, Australian-chartered, sixty-six-hundred-ton
Akademik Ioffe
. It was a tour boat. I recognized it from the watchman’s picture book, in which its photograph was sandwiched between images of Danish warships and surveillance aircraft. The
Ioffe
’s ice pilot radioed over. “Good afternoon, Warship 708, this is the
Akademik Ioffe
. We are a small passenger ship, an expedition ship. We have many Canadians—myself included—on board.” His voice had a slight tremor to it. “It looks like you’ll be into Dundas Harbor before us, so we’ll be sure to stay out of your way.” The officers on the
Moncton
snickered and rolled their eyes, pleased at the fear they generated. “You’re damn right,” one said. “I can’t believe he called us before we called him,” said another. It was reminiscent of the confrontation with the
Killer Bee,
only this time with a real, albeit Canadian, foe.

Our warship surged past the tour boat and arced a dramatic right turn into the fjord. We then slowed to a crawl. Our fifty-year-old charts couldn’t tell us how deep the harbor was, and the captain was worried that we might run aground. We took depth soundings and peered into the silty water. The charts said it was thirty feet deep. Our sonar said it was more than two hundred. Best to stay put. We dropped anchor a mile offshore and began the slow process of readying the Zodiacs. The
Akademik Ioffe
steamed past us and anchored a half mile closer. As the Vandoos put on orange survival suits and the crew of the
Moncton
put on baby-blue helmets, the
Ioffe
put boats in the water. “They’re beating us!” someone yelled. A hundred tourists made it to shore before our dozen soldiers were off the ship.

The Canadian Forces reached the narrow, rocky beach just as the
Ioffe
’s tourists were finishing their stroll. The tourists were white-haired and frail and dressed in matching blue-and-yellow Gore-Tex jackets. They had paid as much as $8,845 apiece to see the vast, empty Arctic. Cameras and binoculars hung from their necks. They seemed confused. The Vandoos shouldered their hundred-pound packs and struggled mightily up the beach, grunting, assault rifles in hand. They proceeded across the soggy tundra, their boots sinking into the mud with every step. One of the guides from the
Ioffe,
a man from Seattle with a bushy beard and a brown fedora, interrupted one march to remind us to “leave no trace”—Devon’s environment was fragile. Sergeant Strong looked at the American. “A lot of us have spent a lot of time in the north,” he said. “We’re actually here to protect it.”

 • • • 

DOWN IN AMERICA,
it was the tail end of the second Bush administration, and Arctic policy and climate policy had both been adrift, the former because national-security priorities had shifted (no longer did we fear a Soviet attack from the north), the latter because economic priorities had not (to cut carbon was to cut fossil fuels was to cut the engine of a century of meteoric growth). But when I made visits to Washington in the winter and spring of 2007, I found the beginnings of another shift. Now the Arctic was becoming an issue again—an economic issue—and climate change was becoming a national-security issue.

The first report to explore the link between climate and security was commissioned by the Pentagon and written by the futurist Peter Schwartz, the former head of scenario planning for Royal Dutch Shell, where he foresaw such world-shaking events as the collapse of the Soviet Union. His twenty-two-page
An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
was released publicly in 2004, and among its recommendations were that the nation “ensure reliable access to food supply and water,” “prepare for inevitable climate driven events such as massive migration, disease, and epidemics,” and research means to reengineer the global climate to our liking, known as geoengineering. In one two-month period in the spring of 2007, Schwartz would publish a second report (for an unnamed agency), the Senate would direct the sixteen main spy agencies to help the National Intelligence Council produce its own classified report, and eleven prominent retired generals and admirals with the Center for Naval Analyses would release yet another landmark study,
National Security and the Threat of Climate Change
. Soon, such studies would be as frequent and predictable in Washington as the May rains, a reliable source of employment for think tankers, and most effectively said the same thing: While climate change was not an existential threat for America, not in the way it was for Kiribati or Bangladesh, it portended endless mop-up. The Pentagon’s fears, Schwartz told me, could be boiled down to a single word: Mogadishu. “Massive drought led to famine, which led to the collapse of Somalia, which led to the UN intervention, which led to the U.S. intervention, which led to a military disaster,” he said. “They see a string of Mogadishus rolling off into the future.”