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Ice melt is creating many geopolitical dangers, thanks largely to a familiar foe.
The Arctic is becoming dangerously destabilized.
This is true in a literal sense. The north’s precipitous loss in glacial ice sheets, permafrost, and sea ice will have global ripple effects. Should the “Earth’s air conditioner” become perennially iceless, as scientists fear could happen as early as 2050, the fallout has the power to trigger worst-case scenarios around the world: Sea levels could rise in New York City, monsoon rains could swamp Lagos, Nigeria, and precious forest cover in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, could dwindle to nubs. Each glacier that collapses is another tick of the time-bomb.
But it’s also true in a more metaphorical sense: Arctic ice melt is creating many geopolitical dangers, thanks largely to a familiar foe: Russia.
The Kremlin controls 50 percent of the Arctic coastline. But isolated from the other countries encircling the North Pole due to its war of aggression in Ukraine, Russia has retreated from any sort of Arctic cooperation. That has left experts fearful not only of scientists’ ability to stay on top of the impacts of climate change, but also that the warming region might give Russian President Vladimir Putin a pretext to break more international rules.
For the last 15 years, Russia has jockeyed for Arctic control — from aggressively building its military capabilities, to scaling up its shipping capacity, to even unlawfully planting a flag along the North Pole seabed and claiming the land as its own. But it was still hemmed in by the Arctic’s web of laws and accords.
These laws, unfortunately, are quite vulnerable to ice melt.
Maritime claims, upheld by entities like the International Maritime Organization, for example, are one way for states to protest rule-breaking in the region. But melting sea ice has opened up previously frozen zones, threatening to undermine laws like Article 234 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which gives coastal states special rights to ice covered areas. “If the ice melts, do you still have that legal basis?” said Rebecca Pincus, the director of the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center.
Valuable shipping lanes are also emerging in the north, encouraging Russia to further engage in a two-fold strategy: mass resource extraction to underpin its national wealth and taking “the most extreme position possible on its right to control all foreign navigation through the internal waters of the [Northern Sea Route],” as Cornell Overfield wrote recently in Foreign Policy. However, this state of affairs might not last long. “As sea ice continues to retreat in the Arctic, it will become possible for ships to navigate outside of the Russian zone through the central Arctic Ocean and bypass the Russian coastline entirely,” Pincus said. “That will shift the balance of the, I guess you could say, ‘power’ to a certain extent.”
These central Arctic Ocean shipping routes will not be open for decades and pose a number of operational challenges along the way, she explained. But when they do, it would allow ships to navigate outside Russian waters, reducing the potency of Russia’s de facto control along the Northern Sea Route, further isolating a country that sees the icy region as a part of its power projection.
Meanwhile, Russia is essentially alone among its neighbors.
Mathieu Boulègue, a consulting fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, told me a bifurcation is emerging in the north, where a singled-out Russia has recused itself from the Nordic-North American camp — a once-staid Arctic 8 now made into an awkward, asterisked Arctic 7. With Finland having joined NATO this month, and Sweden close behind, Russia might see itself as not just alone, but surrounded. Experts fear that spells trouble.
“More human activity and more military activity will lead to more accidents, more incidents, more miscalculation, and therefore more tension,” said Boulègue. “Now that the signs are on the wall, we can't really ignore them anymore.”
The United States and other countries rimming the Arctic are carefully initiating exploratory military exercises in the region to see how they can navigate safely and effectively in newly-melted territories. Because of how remote the Arctic is, accidents and emergencies are exponentially harder and more expensive to triage. The latest U.S. Arctic strategy promises to increase its military presence there, too, in order to keep pace with the Russian military presence. But experts warn that neither technology nor policy in a territorially hostile area could keep up with the speed of these melting passages. Indeed, they say it would take the West at least 10 years to catch up with Russia’s military in the region. This opens up dangers for Russia to do just about anything it’d like to, including seizing new territory and setting up military bases in contested areas.
“We're seeing some pretty aggressive, unprofessional, and unsafe behavior by the Russian military in regards to American military assets [in the Arctic],” said the Wilson Center’s Pincus. “Think about that level of risk-taking and aggression on the part of the Russian military and now extrapolate that to, for example, a naval exercise that is contesting Russian claims to waters in the Arctic. That gives me pause and argues for great care.”
Beyond the threat of Russia’s mounting military capabilities in the region, Arctic cooperation has also suffered more generally from Russia’s absence. The Arctic Council is a Nobel Prize-nominated diplomatic forum that convenes the Arctic 8, six non-Arctic states, and a cadre of non-governmental observers which include Arctic Indigenous communities. This preeminent intergovernmental venue had to suspend all of its programming after the start of the war in Ukraine. It has only picked up projects since June of last year that do not require cooperation with Russia. Norway is set to assume the chair of this forum come May, but will have to tread delicately if it means to keep Russia within the Council’s orbit.
“The accession by Finland and Sweden to NATO will strengthen security and stability in Northern Europe, including in the Arctic. While security related aspects will understandably become more important, we must ensure that we do not lose sight of the broader issues in Arctic cooperation,” said Finnish Ambassadors Petteri Vuorimäki and Anne Mutanen in a statement to Heatmap.
These so-called broader issues not only impact high-level powers in the Arctic, but also those who are native to the region. Today, six Arctic Indigenous NGOs hold a non-voting status in the Arctic Council, making it one of the world’s only multilateral forums where national government officials sit at the same table as Native leaders.
Many of the six Arctic Indigenous communities who participate in the Arctic Council have ancestral lands that extend into Russia. Leaders among the Indigenous Saami people, for instance, fear that while Arctic states are busy ironing out tension spurred by Russia and its war, their priorities — from phasing out ecologically harmful heavy fuel oil, to prioritizing climate-resilient infrastructure, to recognizing land rights agreements which enable important climate science research, to triaging the potential displacement of Indigenous communities amid coastal erosion and sea ice melt — may take a back seat. “It's not said straight; it's a feeling underlying there that they have more important things to deal with,” said Gunn Britt-Retter, head of the Arctic Environment Unit of the Saami Council, which represents the Saami people spread across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and parts of Russia.
And then there’s another way Russian isolation is punishing the world: science. The world’s leading scientists desperately need access to this corner of the world to establish what they call a “ground truthing,” — basically an up-close understanding of what they’re only seeing now via satellites.
As Tim Lydon warned in The Atlantic last April, “cooperation with Russian scientists has ground to a halt.” Things haven’t improved over the past year. In February, French scientist Jérôme Chappellaz told the Arctic Institute that Russia’s absence from the international scientific community has led to an “environmental emergency.” Field sites have been cut off, data can’t be shared among climate experts based elsewhere, and scientific endeavors have been significantly scaled down.
Russian isolation is being felt everywhere in the Arctic. With global shipping, climate science, international cooperation, and adversarial militaries involved, the rest of the world might also feel the repercussions if something doesn’t change soon.
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Current conditions: States left flooded from recent severe storms are now facing freezing temperatures • Firefighters are battling blazes in Scotland due to unusually warm and dry weather • Hospitals in India are reporting a 25% rise in heat-related illnesses compared to last year. Yesterday the country’s northern state of Rajasthan reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, about 13 degrees higher than seasonal norms.
President Trump’s sweeping new tariffs came into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, rattling the world’s markets and raising the risk of a global trade war. The levies, which include a 104% tariff on Chinese imports, triggered a mass sell-off in U.S. Treasury bonds, hiking yields as investors worry about a potential recession and flock to alternative safe-haven investments. The price of oil fell for the fifth day in a row to its lowest since 2021, with Brent futures at about $61 per barrel, well below the $65 level that oil producers need in order to turn a profit drilling new wells nationwide. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained recently, the tariffs are an outright catastrophe for the oil industry because they threaten a global downturn that would hurt oil demand at a time when oil cartel OPEC+ is increasing its output. Trump’s slate of tariffs will impact the cost of just about everything, from gasoline to e-bikes to LNG to cars. China imposed retaliatory tariffs, increasing them from 34% to 84% in response to the U.S. escalation. Meanwhile, the European Union will vote today on whether to impose its own retaliatory fees. European shares plummeted, as did Asian and Australian stocks.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported today, a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told Pontecorvo. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The White House issued several executive orders on Tuesday aimed at boosting U.S. coal production and use, pointing to rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence. The series of orders direct federal agencies to:
Trump also said he plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to spur mining operations, “a move that could put the federal purse behind reviving the fading industry,” Reutersreported. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, and its use has been in decline since 2007. As of last year, wind and solar combined surpassed coal for U.S. electricity generation.
President Trump signed a separate executive order on Tuesday that targets climate laws at the state level and seeks to remove threats to U.S. “energy dominance,” including “illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources — particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” The order references “state overreach” and suggests that some state and local governments are overstepping their constitutional authority in regulating energy through interstate trade barriers or fines on energy producers. It calls out New York and Vermont for their climate change superfund laws that require fossil fuel companies to pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. And it mentions California’s carbon cap-and-trade system.
The executive order directs the U.S. attorney general to compile a list of all state and local laws “purporting to address ‘climate change,’” along with ESG, environmental justice, carbon taxes, and anything involving “carbon or ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions,” and put a stop to their enforcement. “The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “We are a nation of states — and laws — and we will not be deterred. We will keep advancing solutions to the climate crisis that safeguard Americans’ fundamental right to clean air and water, create good-paying jobs, grow the clean energy economy, and make our future healthier and safer.”
Wood Mackenzie issued its annual U.S. wind energy report this week. It finds that 2024 marked the worst year for new onshore wind capacity in the past decade, with just 3.9 gigawatts installed. Through 2029, the firm expects developers to install another 33 gigawatts of onshore capacity, 6.6 gigawatts of offshore capacity, and carry out 5.5 gigawatts of upgrades and refurbishings. The five-year outlook marks “a 40% decrease quarter-on-quarter from a previous total of 75.8 gigawatts.” The report warns of enduring “uncertainty” thanks to the Trump administration’s attacks on the wind industry. “Growth will happen, but it’s going to be slower,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek. “[Trump] has managed to get some projects canceled, and he’ll make things more of a slog over the next few years.”
President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of international talks to decarbonize the shipping industry and vowed to reciprocate against any fees on U.S. ships, Politicoreported. The International Maritime Organization's Maritime Environmental Protection Conference is unfolding this week in London, where negotiators are trying to agree on a policy to curb shipping pollution through carbon taxation. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Trump reportedly sent a letter to the conference saying “the U.S. rejects any and all efforts to impose economic measures against its ships based on GHG emissions or fuel choice. Should such a blatantly unfair measure go forward, our government will consider reciprocal measures so as to offset any fees charged to U.S. ships and compensate the American people for any other economic harm from any adopted GHG emissions measures.”
“What’s next, a mandate that Americans must commute by horse and buggy?”
–Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to Trump’s executive orders aimed at revitalizing the U.S. coal industry.
Rob and Jesse get into the nitty gritty on China’s energy policy with Joanna Lewis and John Paul Helveston.
China’s industrial policy for clean energy has turned the country into a powerhouse of solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturing.
But long before the country’s factories moved global markets — and invited Trump’s self-destructive tariffs — the country implemented energy and technology policy to level up its domestic industry. How did those policies work? Which tools worked best? And if the United States needs to rebuild in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, what should this country learn?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with two scholars who have been studying Chinese industrial policy since the Great Recession. Joanna Lewis is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She’s also the author of Green Innovation in China. John Paul Helveston is an assistant professor in engineering management and systems engineering at George Washington University. He studies consumer preferences and market demand for new technologies, as well as China’s longstanding gasoline car and EV industrial policy. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: One kind of classical hard problem about industrial policy is selecting the technology that is going to eventually be a winner. And there’s a few ways to get around this problem. One is to just make lots of bets.
One thing that’s been a little unclear to me about the set of technology bets that China has made is that it has seemed to pick a set of technologies that are now extremely competitive globally, and it did seem to pick up on those technologies before Western governments or firms really got to them. Is that entirely because China just made a bunch of technology bets and it happened that these are the ones that worked out? Is it because China could look ahead to the environmental needs of the world and the clean development needs of the world and say, well, there’s probably going to be a need for solar? There’s probably going to be a need for wind? There’s probably going to be a need for EVs? Or is it a third thing, which is that China’s domestic needs, its domestic energy security needs, just happen to align really well with the direction of development that the world is kind of interested in moving in anyway.
John Paul Helveston: All of the above. I don’t know — like, that’s the answer here. I’ll add one thing that’s a little bit nuanced: There’s been tremendous waste. I’ll just put that out there. There’s been all kinds of investments that did not pan out at all, like semiconductors for a long, long time. Just things that didn’t work.
I think where China has had a lot of success is in areas where … It’s like the inverse of what the United States innovation ecosystem does well. China’s ecosystem is really driven around production, and a lot of that is part of the way the government’s set up, that local provinces have a ton of power over how money gets spent, and often repurpose funds for export-oriented production. So that’s been a piece of the engine of China’s economic miracle, is mass producing everything.
But there’s a lot of knowledge that goes along with that. When you look at things like solar, that technology goes back many, many decades for, you know, satellites. But making it a mass produced product for energy applications requires production innovations. You need to get costs down. You need to figure out how to make the machine that makes the machine. And that is something that the Chinese ecosystem does very well.
So that’s one throughline across all of these things, is that the technology got to a certain level of maturity where production improvements and cost decreases were the bigger things that made them globally competitive. I don’t think anyone would be considering an EV if we were still looking at $1,000 a kilowatt hour — and we were there just 15 years ago. And so that’s the big thing. It’s just production. I don’t know if they’ve been exceptionally good at just picking winners, but they’re good at picking things that can be mass produced.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
That’s according to new research published today analyzing flows of minerals and metals vs. fossil fuels.
Among fossil fuel companies and clean energy developers, almost no one has been spared from the effects of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. But the good news is that in general, the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today.
That’s according to a timely study published in Nature Climate Change on Wednesday. The authors compared countries’ trade risks under a fossil fuel-based energy economy to a net-zero emissions economy, focusing on the electricity and transportation sectors. The question was whether relying on oil, gas, and coal for energy left countries more or less exposed than relying on the minerals and metals that go into clean energy technologies, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and uranium.
First the researchers identified which countries have known reserves of which resources as well as those countries’ established trading partners. Then they evaluated more than a thousand pathways for how the world could achieve net-zero emissions, each with different amounts or configurations of wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, and electric vehicles, and measured how exposed to trade risks each country would be under each scenario.
Ultimately, they found that most countries’ overall trade risks decreased under net-zero emissions scenarios relative to today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told me. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The authors’ metric for trade risk is a combination of how dependent a given country is on imports and how many trading partners it has for a given resource, i.e. how diverse its sourcing is. “If you have a large domestic supply of a resource, or you have a large trade network, and you can get that resource from lots of different trading partners, you're in a relatively better spot,” Davis said.
Of course, this is a weird time to conclude that clean energy is better equipped to withstand trade shocks. As my colleagues at Heatmap have reported, Trump’s tariffs are hurting the economics of batteries, renewables, and minerals production, whether domestic or not. The paper considers risks from “random and isolated trade shocks,” Davis told me, like losing access to Bolivian lithium due to military conflict or a natural disaster. Trump’s tariffs, by contrast, are impacting everything, everywhere, all at once.
Davis embarked on the study almost two years ago after working as a lead author of the mitigation section of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a report delivered to Congress every four years. A lot of the chapter focused on the economics of switching to solar and wind and trying to electrify as many end uses of energy as possible, but it also touched on considerations such as environmental justice, water, land, and trade. “There's this concern of having access to some of these more exotic materials, and whether that could be a vulnerability,” he told me. “So we said, okay, but we also know we're going to be trading a lot less fossil fuels, and that is probably going to be a huge benefit. So let's try to figure out what the net effect is.”
The study found that some more affluent countries, including the United States, could see their energy security decline in net-zero scenarios unless their trade networks expand. The U.S. owns 23% of the fossil reserves used for electricity generation, but only 4% of the critical materials needed for solar panels and wind turbines.
One conclusion for Davis was that the U.S. should be much more strategic about its trade partnerships with countries in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Companies are already starting to invest in developing mineral resources in those regions, but policymakers should make a concerted effort to develop those trade relationships, as well. The study also discusses how governments can reduce trade risks by investing in recycling infrastructure and in research to reduce the material intensity of clean energy technologies.
Davis also acknowledged that focusing on the raw materials alone oversimplifies the security question. It also matters where the minerals are processed, and today, a lot of that processing happens in China, even for minerals that don’t originate there. That means it will also be important to build up processing capacity elsewhere.
One caveat to the paper is that comparing the trade risks of fossil fuels and clean energy is sort of apples and oranges. A fossil fuel-based energy system requires the raw resource — fuel — to operate. But a clean energy system mostly requires the raw materials in the manufacturing and construction phase. Once you have solar panels and wind turbines, you don’t need continuous commodity inputs to get energy out of them. Ultimately, Davis said, the study’s conclusions about the comparative trade risks are probably conservative.
“Interrupting the flow of some of these transition materials could slow our progress in getting to the net zero future, but it would have much less of an impact on the actual cost of energy to Americans,” he said. “If we can successfully get a lot of these things built, then I think that's going to be a very secure situation.”