Unfreezing Arctic Assets

A bloc of countries above the 45th parallel is poised to dominate the next century.

Welcome to the New North.

By LAURENCE C. SMITH
WSJ

Imagine the Arctic in 2050 as a frigid version of Nevada—an empty landscape dotted with gleaming boom towns. Gas pipelines fan across the tundra, fueling fast-growing cities to the south like Calgary and Moscow, the coveted destinations for millions of global immigrants. It's a busy web for global commerce, as the world's ships advance each summer as the seasonal sea ice retreats, or even briefly disappears.

Much of the planet's northern quarter of latitude, including the Arctic, is poised to undergo tremendous transformation over the next century. As a booming population increases the demand for the Earth's natural resources, and as lands closer to the equator face the prospect of rising water demand, droughts and other likely changes, the prominence of northern countries will rise along with their projected milder winters.

If Florida coasts become uninsurable and California enters a long-term drought, might people consider moving to Minnesota or Alberta? Will Spaniards eye Sweden? Might Russia one day, its population falling and needful of immigrants, decide a smarter alternative to resurrecting old Soviet plans for a 1,600-mile Siberia-Aral canal is to simply invite former Kazakh and Uzbek cotton farmers to abandon their dusty fields and resettle Siberia, to work in the gas fields?

European explorers first started pressing north five centuries ago, searching for an alternate passage to the Orient. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, urban donors around the world were funding expeditions to the Northwest Passage and North Pole. Fears of Japanese invasion and communist ideology opened up the region as military spending poured in during World War II. During the Cold War, American and Russian forces played cat-and-mouse war games there with spy planes and nuclear-armed subs.

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