Is air travel getting worse? Yes, Maxwell Tabarrok reports, in some important ways:
In his commencement address at Portland State University in 1998, President Bill Clinton told the crowd, “Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California“:
“In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude over so short a time.”
[…]
The white majority crowd cheered at this statement, apparently thrilled at the prospect of living in a country that was no longer theirs. The clip shocked conservative X users. It seemed so brazen for the president and his audience to celebrate the Great Replacement. Nearly 30 years later, America is bearing out the truth in Clinton’s observations. It’s most likely that America will be minority white sooner than 2050, and whites are already a minority in several states.
[…]
While immigration has certainly changed much, it hasn’t quite “Balkanized” the country. One reason is that immigrants are now everywhere. One can encounter Hispanics and Indians in rural Arkansas. They’re too dispersed to form something along the lines of a Spanish or Hindi Quebec. They’re also too inclined to assimilate to America’s modern consumer identity.
[…]
“Demographics is destiny” became a powerful catchphrase to warn conservatives of what the future will look like without a white majority. Both liberals and the “far right” believed that demographic change would lead to a permanent Democratic majority. It was expected that non-whites would band together as a rainbow coalition against whiteness. That hasn’t panned out. Trump did extraordinarily well among minorities in the last election — while running on one of the most-race charged platforms in recent memory.
[…]
White nationalists were once confident that a diverse America would make whites embrace racial consciousness. That event has yet to happen. Just 15 percent of whites say their racial identity is important to them, which stands in stark contrast to the majority of every other group who say that identity is important to them. Nearly 95 percent of Americans approve of interracial marriage.
[…]
As [Pat Buchanan] acknowledged in a conversation with Ralph Nader 14 years ago, consumerism and sports fandom may be enough to keep this country together even with dramatic demographic change and a declining quality of life.
When his best friend in Austin quips, “It’s great living in a blue city in a red state,” Bryan Caplan is tempted to reply, “ We really don’t know what it would be like to live in a red city in a red state — or even a red city in a blue state.”
Why? Because they barely exist. Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors.
From the standpoint of the textbook Median Voter Model, this is awfully puzzling. Even if urbanites are extremely left-wing, you would expect urban Republicans to move sharply left to accommodate them. Once they do so, the standard prediction is that Republicans will win half the time. But plainly they don’t.
One possibility is that Republican politicians are too stubbornly ideological to moderate. But the idea that virtually no one in the Republican Party is power-hungry enough to tell urban voters what they want to hear is deeply implausible.
The better explanation, as I’ve explained before, is that urban voters have party preferences as well as policy preferences. They don’t just want left-wing policies; they want left-wing policies delivered by the Democrats.
In Western Europe, Peter Frost notes, a consensus emerged on the need to execute violent males so that law-abiding people could live in peace:
By the Late Middle Ages, courts were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1% of all men in each generation, with perhaps just as many dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication or extreme stress. As a result, the homicide rate fell from 20–40 homicides per 100,000 in the Late Middle Ages to 0.5–1 per 100,000 in the mid-20th century.
People could now get ahead through trade and work, rather than through theft and plunder. This new, pacified environment favored the growth of the market economy and the success of those who possessed the necessary skills, especially literacy, numeracy and budgeting. They would become the middle class.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson told General Groves that the Manhattan Engineer District should be overseen by a committee of nine or possibly seven men, as Groves explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project:
I objected quite vigorously on the grounds that such a large committee would be unwieldy; it would cause delays in taking action; and some, if not the majority, of its members would tend to treat it as a secondary responsibility, to the detriment of our progress. I felt that a committee of three was ideal and that any more members would be a hindrance rather than a benefit. I pointed out that I could keep three people reasonably well informed on our major problems, and, furthermore, that I would be able to obtain advice from them much more readily than I could from a larger group. In the end, my views were accepted.
[…]
There followed some general conversation, in the midst of which, and with no small amount of embarrassment on my part, for I was by far the most junior person present, I asked to be excused if I were no longer needed, for I wanted to catch the train to Tennessee and inspect the proposed production plant site, so that the land acquisition could proceed. With this, the meeting broke up. I was a bit relieved when Somervell told me several days later that my request could not have been better timed, because it convinced everyone that he had not overemphasized my urgent desire to get a job moving.
As an experienced whey protein consumer, I was surprised to hear that Sparkling Protein was a thing, but I can now confirm Cremieux Recueil’s assessment that it does in fact look and taste like diet soda:
The development process for clear whey is fascinating. I’m going to stylize it, so bear with me.
A beverage team wanted protein that could disappear in a fruit drink—no milkiness, no haze (i.e., low turbidity)—at a tart pH. But there’s a problem with most protein sources, and it’s that they clump and throw a fog at the pH fruit drinks live at, around the protein’s isoelectric point. So in the early development of clear whey, everything looked like watered-down yoghurt.
So, researchers worked the problem the way any process-oriented person would: they tightened the loop between hypotheses, trials, and measurements, and gave the whole thing a few passes.
In the first pass, they swapped the protein. Whey protein concentrate was out because it had too many minerals and residuals that encourage haze. Whey protein isolate was swapped in— it’s cleaner, lower ash—and this helped, but only a little. Turbidity meters still screamed “cloudy” and the human eye could usually tell, too.
In the second pass, they controlled the ions. They dialed down calcium and phosphate, tested deionized water, played with ionic strength… clarity improved, but still not enough.
In the third pass, they changed when the acid hits. Dumping citric or malic acid into a neutral protein slurry was creating localized pH shocks and microaggregates that never fully redispersed. Pre-acidifying the protein and then spray-drying it—so the powder arrived ‘at pH’—produced a much better first mix. You might actually drink this stuff at this point.
In the fourth pass, the researchers tried to tame the heat. Heat is required for safety (see: pasteurization), but it denatures and links proteins. This isn’t a bioavailability issue, but more of a clumping one. They mapped time-temperature curves, shaved seconds off of their high-temperature short-time pasteurization steps, minimized hold times, and did anything they could to avoid shear/heat combinations that built up irreversible aggregates.
In the fifth pass, they fine-cut the protein itself. Light enzymatic hydrolysis (peptide cuts!) knocked down viscosity and reduced the tendency to form visible aggregates, but made the mix more bitter. That forced a second project: set a narrow ‘degree of hydrolysis’ window and pair it with flavor systems that mask any remaining protein notes without slipping into clearly ‘diet drink’ aftertastes.
In the sixth pass, the idea was to stress the mixture like the real world: run centrifuge clarity checks, catalogue particle-size distributions, do cold/ambient/40C holds, freeze-thaw, check carbonation compatibility, and do bottle trials. If the mixture had sufficiently low turbidity with meaningful protein load and stability for a few weeks, it would be ready to go. Fail, adjust, and repeat this process until the goal is achieved.
At the end of the day, clear whey was the product of a robust process window and an iterative discovery process. Since the discovery was trial-and-error with a clear goal in mind, it might even be more appropriate to say that clear whey wasn’t discovered, but was instead, ‘de-risked’: a finicky protein had its manufacturing controls tightened until it started behaving like a cooperative beverage input. Huzzah!
I preferred it watered down with unsweetened (but flavored) sparkling water.
DNA from human remains is showing us how different populations have evolved over time, Peter Frost explains, not only during prehistory but also well into recorded history:
This evolution has affected a wide range of mental and behavioral traits: cognitive ability, time preference, propensity for violence, monotony avoidance, rule following and empathy, among others.
[…]
Why did the North Sea overtake the Mediterranean in international trade? Certainly, the latter region was adversely affected by the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa. But the economic decline began much earlier. Shipwrecks on the bottom of the Mediterranean have been dated overwhelmingly to the time between the first century BC and the first century AD. Silver mining in Spain and Cyprus likewise fell sharply after the first century AD, as shown by lead contamination of Greenland’s ice sheet.
This decline occurred not only before the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, but also before the barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth and the Imperial Crisis of the third. And it seems inconsistent with modern economic thinking: bigger markets should create economies of scale, as well as a better match between supply and demand. So what caused things to go wrong?
[…]
One cause was the low level of social trust. People trusted only their close friends and relatives, keeping everyone else at arm’s length. As a result, economic activity was bottled up within family networks, the major exception being physical marketplaces where buyer and seller could meet face to face. Because the market principle remained trapped within small pockets of space and time, it could not generalize to all transactions in Roman society. An economy of markets never evolved into a true market economy.
[…]
One [other cause] was a deterioration of physical health, as indicated by the length of long bones belonging to over 10,000 adult men and women born between 500 BC and 750 AD. The data show a steady decrease from the second century BC, reaching a low point in the second half of the first century AD, followed by a slow recovery and then a dramatic recovery from the fifth century AD.
[…]
The study’s authors concluded that the Romans created not only an integrated Mediterranean economy but also “the first integrated disease regime”.
[…]
The other cause was a decrease in average cognitive ability. Fewer people could master the skills of numeracy, literacy and budgeting that are so essential to economic activity.
This decline was driven by an uncoupling of reproductive success from economic success—as I argued in a previous article. The wealthy were no longer using their wealth to bring children into the world. A rich man might prefer to leave his wife for a younger woman of low social status, often adopting her children. Or he might never marry. The resulting fall in cognitive ability can be seen in DNA retrieved from the human remains of that period.
[…]
The North Sea and the Baltic form the core zone of certain tendencies that, for at least a millennium, have prevailed north and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg, i.e., the “Hajnal line.” These are tendencies toward individualism, the nuclear family, late marriage and solitary living, as well as a greater willingness to trust strangers and form bonds of impersonal prosociality.
Such tendencies didn’t come into being with the market economy — they arose long before for an unrelated reason. But they did provide the best behavioral conditions for a market economy once the possibility of creating one emerged.
Given the reality of mixed loyalties, Arctotherium notes, it shouldn’t be surprising that skilled immigrants often constitute an espionage risk:
Take the infamous Pakistani nuclear physicist AQ Khan. In 1961, he moved to West Berlin as a foreign student, then to the Netherlands and finally Belgium to finish his education, graduating with a Doctorate in Engineering in 1972. Khan was undoubtedly among the best and brightest of Pakistan, the sort of high-agency STEM genius that brain drain advocates hold up as America’s greatest strength. Was allowing A.Q. Khan into the West a good decision? No.
Khan got a position at the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory, a Dutch firm specializing in uranium enrichment via centrifuge. He stole centrifuge designs and blueprints, and after returning to Pakistan set up an international network of illicit suppliers for centrifuge parts using his contacts, leading to the 1998 Pakistani nuclear bomb. From there, he diffused nuclear technology further. The North Korean, Iranian and Libyan nuclear programs all trace back to A.Q. Khan. Pakistan has had multiple serious nuclear war scares with India in the last five years. North Korea, which has a history of doing things like axe-murder Americans, can act with relative impunity thanks to its nuclear arsenal, and Israel and the US recently bombed Iran over their nuclear program.
There are many examples from the US. For instance, Noshir Gowadia, an Indian Parsi designer of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, and Chi Mak, who worked on nuclear submarines, both sold secrets to China.
If you want to join Britain’s thriving cocaine smuggling industry, Arctotherium notes, you have to be Albanian:
There’s no a priori reason why this should be the case. Albanians do not have a racial, cultural, geographic or political affinity for Colombian narcotics. A reasonable and informed observer in 2000 would not have predicted that they would come to dominate the industry. Yet such an obsever would have predicted that some ethnic minority would because organized crime is almost always organized along ethnic lines. This is true even when the ethnic minority is less criminal on average than society at large, as with the Jewish mafia in early 20th century America.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to criminal enterprises. Chaldeans control 90% of the grocery stores in Detroit. 40% of the truck drivers in California are Sikh, and about a third of US Sikhs are truck drivers. About 95% of the Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Chicago and the Midwest are owned by Indians, mostly Gujarati Patels. In New England and New York, 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores are operated by Portuguese immigrants. 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans.
[…]
The key point is that immigration fractures national markets. Once a niche is taken over, outsiders can no longer compete in that niche.
There is still competition within ethnic groups inside the niches, but these groups are tiny fractions of the population and often have informal institutions and kinship structures that allow them to act as cartels.
[…]
Cambodians run about 80% of the donut shops in Southern California (despite being only 0.17% of the state’s population). The Cambodian donut empire got its start with refugee Ted Ngoy, who first learned the trade thanks to an affirmative action program to increase minority hiring at Winchell’s Donuts. The Cambodians were able to completely dominate this traditional American culinary sector through a mix of extended family credit and the use of tong tines, an informal lending club.
[…]
This ability to borrow money cheaply made financing much easier for them than for their American competitors. Once the business was purchased, Cambodians could also keep operating costs down through informal employment of family labor, allowing them to get around expensive income taxes, not to mention labor laws and regulations — including ones around child labor.
[…]
Gujaratis, mostly with the surname Patel, run an estimated 42% of the hotels and motels in the United States — despite being only 0.3% of the US population (and an even lower percentage back in 1999 when this was first noticed). Their dominance rises to 80–90% of motels in small town America. The Patel motel cartel got its start with an illegal immigrant, Kanjibhai Desai, in the 1940s. The initial attraction for Patels was that motel ownership did not require English proficiency, and as with the Cambodians, Patel motel owners were able to use informal ethnic loan networks and immigrant family labor brought in via family reunification to undercut their American competitors. Patels now totally dominate the hospitality industry in the US outside of the big chains.
Over half the nail salons in the US are run by Vietnamese, which rises to more than 80% in California (they are only 0.7% of the US population). Just like the Patels and the Cambodians, Vietnamese immigrants were able to finance nail salons more easily than American competitors because they had access to below-market credit from family and friends.
[…]
After the ethnic network was established, Vietnamese owners gained another advantage over non-Vietnamese competitors: better access to workers and training. The language barrier is part of this; once most salon owners spoke primarily Vietnamese, prospective workers had to as well, and cosmetology schools began teaching courses in Vietnamese rather than English.
Dungeons & Dragons started with small groups of friends playing at home, but now it is entering its stadium era:
But in the past decade or so, D&D has emerged as a popular form of spectator entertainment, with comedians, actors and podcasters playing the game for other people to watch. “Actual play,” as it’s known, has attracted millions of viewers online and has even spilled out into the real world, with D&D shows playing in movie theaters, touring globally and selling out stadiums.
One of the most iconic examples of this phenomenon came earlier this year when the show Dimension 20 sold out Madison Square Garden in New York. Roughly 20,000 fans showed up to watch seven comedians perform D&D, with a few rock show flourishes — like gouts of butane fire around the stage to simulate the wrath of the dragon Kalvaxis, the big villain of the night.
[…]
In 2018, Mulligan and six other comedians launched Dimension 20 on the streaming platform Dropout. The stories they tell are mashups: Game of Thrones meets Candyland, Lord of the Rings meets The Breakfast Club, Jane Austen meets A Court of Thorns and Roses.
[…]
That first episode, which is nearly two hours long, has 7.7 million views on YouTube. A representative for Dropout says its subscribers number “in the mid-6 figures,” and that Dimension 20 is one of its most watched shows.
[…]
Fans of D&D started recording their games in the early 2000s, but actual play didn’t pick up as a genre until around a decade later.
The Adventure Zone, which launched in 2014, featured the hosts of the popular advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me playing with their dad. In 2015, a group of voice actors started posting their home D&D games online as the show Critical Role. The first episode of Critical Role on YouTube has nearly 25 million views today.
[…]
They’re also touring globally — Critical Role has performances scheduled at London’s The O2 and Edinburgh Castle in Scotland next year. Fans who can’t make it can watch the live games in around 800 movie theaters in North America. After Madison Square Garden, Dimension 20‘s tour continued on to Los Angeles and Seattle. A show is planned for Las Vegas later this year
If you look up the word stymie, Google will tell you that it means prevent or hinder the progress of — no surprise there — and it will show you a small graph of its use over time:
So, it’s a relatively new word that peaked in popularity in the early 1950s before growing again. Why would that be? Wikipedia explains:
A stymie was a situation in greens play in golf where one player’s ball blocked the path of another’s to the cup, governed by a now obsolete rule of golf. Formerly, the blocked player was not afforded relief, and had to chip over or putt around the obstructing ball. Today, the blocking ball is temporarily removed to afford a clear line to the hole without penalty to the putter or advantage to the player whose ball is moved.
Various changes to the stymie rule were attempted or enacted by the United States Golf Association (USGA) between 1920 and 1941. Finally, in 1952, the stymie was eliminated when the USGA and Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews (R&A) established a joint set of rules.
Vannevar Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War 2, and General Groves admits that Dr. Bush was quite disturbed at Groves’ appointment as head of the Manhattan Project, as he explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, because he felt Groves was too aggressive and might have difficulty with the scientific people. After their first inauspicious meeting, Groves went back to his office:
Finding my secretary, Mrs. O’Leary, there, I told her I was being reassigned and that if she wanted to come along, I would be glad to have her. I added, in what proved to be a great understatement, that this would be a very quiet and easy job for her and she should be sure to bring along some knitting to keep herself occupied. This prediction proved valid for about two days.
When I returned home that evening I told my wife and daughter and wrote to my son, a cadet at West Point, that I had a new job, that it involved secret matters and for that reason was never to be mentioned. The answer to be given if they were asked what I was doing was, “I don’t know, I never know what he’s doing.” To my son, I added, “If it is an officer who knows me well, and he is persistent, you can add, ‘I think it’s something secret.’”
[…]
Unlikely as it may seem to many people, they first learned of the nature of my assignment at the same moment, three years later, that the bombing of Hiroshima was announced to the rest of the world.
Is warfare becoming more performative?
In the span of three weeks this June, the world witnessed three extraordinary military operations: Ukraine’s decimation of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, Israel’s sweeping overnight key leader and air defense neutralization in Iran, and America’s ultra long-range bunker busting at Fordo and other Iranian nuclear sites. Each operation shared commonality in audacity, scale, and something surprising: detailed and immediate operational disclosure. These weren’t the limited scope press briefings or carefully circumscribed military reports seen in other high profile missions, like the raid that killed Osama bin Laden or the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani. Instead, presidential statements were quickly augmented by comprehensive overviews from that nation’s senior defense officials, complete with easily distributed media: drone footage, confirmational imagery, and mission graphics.
[…]
Like the “shock and awe” of the 2003 Iraq War or CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War, the June operations captured global attention using novel tools — social media, real-time distribution, and comprehensive disclosure.
[…]
While precedents like Desert Storm showed conflict in real time, they did not bring the viewer into the metaphorical planning room. The June operations showed both conflict and the means and methods used to wage it. Details disclosed were not guessed at by talking heads or pundits, but were officially relayed by the highest levels of national authority. Rather than achieving tactical objectives through one channel and strategic communication through established signaling formats, Ukraine, Israel, and the United States integrated tactical execution with strategic messaging into single operational frameworks.
[…]
Ukraine, Israel, and the United States all sacrificed valuable military information — details that might limit similar methods, capabilities, and flexibility in future missions — in exchange for immediate strategic communication gains.
[…]
In many ways, the evolution of performative warfare is predictable within modern information operations. Even highly successful influence campaigns face the challenge of retaining attention in today’s saturated information environments, and the natural method of recapturing audience focus is through increasingly dramatic and credible demonstrations.
Posting on Instagram, the Aalborg Zoo in Denmark has made a modest proposal to feed its large predators:
A zoo in Denmark has appealed to the public to donate their healthy unwanted pets as part of a unique effort to provide food for its predators.
Aalborg Zoo has asked for donations of live chickens, rabbits, and guinea pigs, which it says are “gently euthanised” by trained staff.
The zoo also accepts donations of live horses — with owners able to benefit from a potential tax break.Posting on Instagram, the zoo explains it has a “responsibility to imitate the natural food chain of the animals” and smaller livestock “make up an important part of the diet of our predators”.
The zoo says the food provided in this way is “reminiscent of what it would naturally hunt in the wild” – and that this is especially true for the Eurasian lynx.
Other predators being kept at the zoo include lions and tigers.
The small animals can be donated on weekdays, with no more than four at a time without an appointment.
[…]
In a statement, the zoo’s deputy director, Pia Nielsen, said the zoo’s carnivores had been fed smaller livestock “for many years”.
“When keeping carnivores, it is necessary to provide them with meat, preferably with fur, bones etc to give them as natural a diet as possible,” she explained.
“Therefore, it makes sense to allow animals that need to be euthanised for various reasons to be of use in this way. In Denmark, this practice is common, and many of our guests and partners appreciate the opportunity to contribute. The livestock we receive as donations are chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs, and horses.”
The word arctic comes from the Greek arktikos, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), which means “near the bear,” Ursa Major, whose last two stars point toward the North Star:
The Arctic Ocean is 5.4 million square miles; this might make it the world’s smallest ocean but it is still almost as big as Russia, and one and a half times the size of the United States.
[…]
The Arctic region includes land in parts of Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States (Alaska). It is a land of extremes: for brief periods in the summer the temperature can reach 26 degrees Celsius in some places, but for long periods in winter it plunges to below minus 45. There are expanses of rock scoured by the freezing winds, spectacular fjords, polar deserts, and even rivers.
[…]
The first recorded expedition was by a Greek mariner named Pytheas of Massalia in 330 BCE who found a strange land called Thule. Back home in the Mediterranean, few believed his startling tales of pure white landscapes, frozen seas, and strange creatures, including great white bears; but Pytheas was just the first of many people over the centuries to record the wonder of the Arctic and to succumb to the emotions it evokes.
[…]
As for the first person to reach the North Pole, well, that’s a tricky one, given that even though there is a fixed point on the globe denoting its position, below it, the ice you are standing on is moving, and without GPS equipment it is hard to tell exactly where you are. Sir William Edward Parry, minus a GPS, tried in 1827, but the ice was moving south faster than he could move north and he ended up going backward; but he did at least survive.
Captain Sir John Franklin had less luck when he attempted to cross the last non-navigated section of the Northwest Passage in 1848. His two ships became stuck in the ice near King William Island in the Canadian archipelago. All 129 members of the expedition perished, some on board the ships, others after they abandoned the vessels and began walking south. Several expeditions were sent to search for survivors, but they found only a handful of skeletons and heard stories from Inuit hunters about dozens of white men who had died walking through the frozen landscape. The ships had vanished completely, but in 2014, technology caught up with geography and a Canadian search team using sonar located one of the vessels, HMS Erebus, on the seabed of the Northwest Passage and brought up the ship’s bell.
The fate of Franklin’s expedition did not deter many more adventurers from trying to find their way through the archipelago, but it wasn’t until 1905 that the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen charted his way across in a smaller ship with just five other crew. He passed King William Island, went through the Bering Strait and into the Pacific. He knew he’d made it when he spotted a whaling ship from San Francisco coming from the other direction. In his diary he confessed his emotions got the better of him, an occurrence perhaps almost as rare as his great achievement: “The Northwest Passage was done. My boyhood dream—at that moment it was accomplished. A strange feeling welled up in my throat; I was somewhat overstrained and worn—it was weakness in me—but I felt tears in my eyes.”
Twenty years later, he decided he wanted to be the first man to fly over the North Pole, which, although easier than walking across it, is no mean feat. Along with his Italian pilot, Umberto Nobile, and fourteen crew, he flew a semirigid airship over the ice and dropped Norwegian, Italian, and American flags from a height of three hundred feet. A heroic effort this may have been, but in the twenty-first century it was not seen as one giving much legal basis to any claims of ownership of the region by those three countries.
[…]
The melting of the ice cap already allows cargo ships to make the journey through the Northwest Passage in the Canadian archipelago for several summer weeks a year, thus cutting at least a week from the transit time from Europe to China. The first cargo ship not to be escorted by an icebreaker went through in 2014. The Nunavik carried twenty-three thousand tons of nickel ore from Canada to China. The polar route was 40 percent shorter and used deeper waters than if it had gone through the Panama Canal. This allowed the ship to carry more cargo, save tens of thousands of dollars in fuel costs, and reduced the ship’s greenhouse emissions by 1,300 metric tons.
[…]
The northeast route, or Northern Sea Route as the Russians call it, which hugs the Siberian coastline, is also now open for several months a year and is becoming an increasingly popular sea highway.
[…]
In 2009, the US Geological Survey estimated that 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, and 90 billion barrels of oil are in the Arctic, with the vast majority of it offshore. As more territory becomes accessible, extra reserves of the gold, zinc, nickel, and iron already found in part of the Arctic may be discovered.
ExxonMobil, Shell, and Rosneft are among the energy giants that are applying for licenses and beginning exploratory drilling. Countries and companies prepared to make the effort to get at the riches will have to brave a climate where for much of the year the days are endless night, where for the majority of the year the sea freezes to a depth of more than six feet, and where, in open water, the waves can reach forty feet high.
[…]
The claims to sovereignty are not based on the flags of the early explorers but on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This affirms that a signatory to the convention has exclusive economic rights from its shore to a limit of two hundred nautical miles (unless this conflicts with another country’s limits), and can declare it an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The oil and gas in the zone are therefore considered to belong to the state. In certain circumstances, and subject to scientific evidence concerning a country’s continental shelf, that country can apply to extend the EEZ to 350 nautical miles from its coast.
The melting of the Arctic ice is bringing with it a hardening of attitude from the eight members of the Arctic Council, the forum where geopolitics becomes geopolarctics. The “Arctic Five,” those states with borders on the Arctic, are Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway, and Denmark (due to its responsibility for Greenland). They are joined by Iceland, Finland, and Sweden, which are also full members. There are twelve other nations with Permanent Observer status, having recognized the “Arctic States’ sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” in the region, among other criteria. For example, at the 2013 Arctic Council, Japan and India, which have sponsored Arctic scientific expeditions, and China, which has a science base on a Norwegian island as well as a modern icebreaker, were granted Observer status.
[…]
Moscow has already put a marker down—a long way down. In 2007, it sent two manned submersibles 13,980 feet below the waves to the seabed of the North Pole and planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag as a statement of ambition. As far as is known, it still “flies” down there today. A Russian think tank followed this up by suggesting that the Arctic be renamed. After not much thought, they came up with an alternative: “the Russian Ocean.”
[…]
Russia and Norway have particular difficulty in the Barents Sea. Norway claims the Gakkel Ridge in the Barents as an extension of its Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ), but the Russians dispute this, and they have a particular dispute over the Svalbard Islands, the northernmost point on earth with a settled population. Most countries and international organizations recognize the islands as being under (limited) Norwegian sovereignty, but the biggest island, Svalbard, formerly known as Spitsbergen, has a growing population of Russian migrants who have assembled around the coal-mining industry there. The mines are not profitable, but the Russian community serves as a useful tool in furthering Moscow’s claims on all of the Svalbard Islands.
[…]
Norway, a NATO state, knows what is coming and has made the High North its foreign policy priority. Its air force regularly intercepts Russian fighter jets approaching its borders; the heightened tensions have caused it to move its center of military operations from the south of the country to the north, and it is building an Arctic battalion.
Canada is reinforcing its cold-weather military capabilities, which includes five new navy warships with moderate ice-breaking capability to be delivered between 2018 and 2022. Announcing the increase in the spring of 2015, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it.”
[…]
Russia meanwhile is building an Arctic army. Six new military bases are being constructed and several mothballed Cold War installations—such as those on the Novosibirsk Islands—are reopening, and airstrips are being renovated. A force of at least six thousand combat soldiers is being readied for the Murmansk region and will include two mechanized infantry brigades equipped with snowmobiles and hovercraft.
[…]
The Murmansk brigades will be Moscow’s minimum permanent Arctic force, but Russia demonstrated its full cold-weather fighting ability in 2014 with an exercise that involved 155,000 men and thousands of tanks, jets, and ships. The Russian Defense Ministry said it was bigger than exercises it had carried out during the Cold War.
[…]
As Melissa Bert, a US Coast Guard captain, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC: “They have cities in the Arctic, we only have villages.”
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The Russians know that NATO can bottle up their Baltic Fleet by blockading the Skagerrak Strait. This potential blockade is complicated by the fact that up in the Arctic their Northern Fleet has only 180 miles of open water from the Kola coastline until it hits the Arctic ice pack. From this narrow corridor it must also come down through the Norwegian Sea and then run the potential gauntlet of the GIUK gap to reach the Atlantic Ocean. During the Cold War, the area was known by NATO as the Kill Zone, as this was where NATO’s planes, ships, and submarines expected to catch the Soviet fleet.
Fast-forward to the new cold war and the strategies remain the same, even if now the Americans have withdrawn their forces from their NATO ally Iceland. Iceland has no armed forces of its own and the American withdrawal was described by the Icelandic government as “short-sighted.” In a speech to the Swedish Atlantic Council, Iceland’s Justice Minister Björn Bjarnason said: “A certain military presence should be maintained in the region, sending a signal about a nation’s interests and ambitions in a given area, since a military vacuum could be misinterpreted as a lack of national interest and priority.”
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It takes up to $ 1 billion and ten years to build an icebreaker. Russia is clearly the leading Arctic power with the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, thirty-two in total, according to the US Coast Guard Review of 2013. Six of those are nuclear-powered, the only such versions in the world, and Russia also plans to launch the world’s most powerful icebreaker by 2018. It will be able to smash through ice more than ten feet deep and tow oil tankers with a displacement of up to seventy thousand tons through the ice fields.
By contrast, the United States has a fleet of one functioning heavy icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star, down from the eight it possessed in the 1960s, and has no plans to build another. In 2012, it had to rely on a Russian ship to resupply its research base in Antarctica, which was a triumph for great-power cooperation, but simultaneously a demonstration of how far behind the United States has fallen.