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Arctic

85% Of Greenland Oppose Joining USA, But Trump Wants To Colonize It

March 19, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , ,
The vast majority of people in Greenland oppose becoming part of the United States, despite Donald Trump’s threats to colonize their land. A staggering 85% of Greenlanders do not want to join the US, according to a poll published in January by a Greenlandic newspaper. Just 6% of people in Greenland support Trump’s proposal to annex their homeland. (The remaining 9% are undecided.) Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, although polls have long shown that the majority of people there, who are of indigenous Inuit descent, consider themselves to be a separate country and want formal independence.

Greenland’s Self-Determination Can Be Exercised Only From Nuuk

March 6, 2025 Workers World. , , , ,
Greenland and the Greenlandic people have been brutally thrown into the political scene. Trump’s repeated statements that the U.S. wants to control and own Greenland — by military means if necessary — come at a time of great upheaval in the imperialist system. These statements are part of U.S. imperialism’s desperate attempt to maintain its declining political and economic power. They are an expression of pure imperialist superpower politics against the Greenlandic people. That Trump is prepared to start an imperialist war is an unprecedented provocation. It is a war of conquest and plunder to control Greenland in an attempt to create a Fortress USA from Greenland and Canada across Mexico to Panama.

Summer 2024 Was World’s Hottest Ever Recorded

September 8, 2024 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. , , ,
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the summer of 2024 was the planet’s warmest on record for the Northern Hemisphere. The extreme heat of this year’s boreal summer — June to August — means it is more likely that the average global temperature for the entire year will be hotter than that of 2023. “During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record. This string of record temperatures is increasing the likelihood of 2024 being the hottest year on record,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, in a press release from C3S.

The Global South In The Arctic North

May 14, 2024 Renate Bridenthal, Geopolitical Economy. , , , ,
In January, three months into Israel’s attack on Gaza, a group people in the Inuit city of Iqaluit, the capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, rallied and called for a ceasefire. One demonstrator said, “I think Palestinian rights are Indigenous rights to those lands, and we’re on Indigenous land here, and if we’re fighting for the rights of Indigenous people in Canada, in Nunavut, we should be doing the same worldwide.” Bigger rallies took place in the more populated cities of Whitehorse, Yukon, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. More than 200 people gathered at the Whitehorse waterfront, some of them descendants of Palestinian refugees from the Nakba of 1948.

War Games In Arctic: What’s Driving The West’s New Passion?

March 15, 2024 Bruce K. Gagnon, Space for Peace. , , ,
Two unprecedented military exercises are being conducted by the US and its NATO allies simultaneously in various parts of the Arctic, signaling a new aggressive stance by the West in the region. Thirteen NATO countries participated this week in the Nordic Response 2024 exercise held in Finland and Sweden, near the border with Russia. Additionally, the US Army recently conducted a training event near Fairbanks, Alaska, also close to Russia's borders. The US exercise was conducted within the framework of the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) and involved 8,000 American servicemen from the 11th Airborne Division and an unspecified smaller number of “foreign allies.”

The New Cold War In The Arctic

October 30, 2023 Adam Federman, In These Times. , , ,
In the spring of 1953, when Regina Kristiansen was 14, she and her family were forced to leave their village of Uummannaq in northwestern Greenland, hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle. At the behest of Danish authorities, who promised them new homes, they were given just a few days to gather their belongings. Kristiansen drove a dogsled across the ice for two days before reaching a barren island in Baffin Bay. Along with seven other families, they lived in makeshift tents for months as storms lashed the shore and winter approached. One woman gave birth in the tents. Another, a village elder, died before Denmark finished building their homes.

The Arctic Is The Next Frontier In The New Cold War

March 1, 2023 Renate Bridenthal, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , , ,
The Arctic had once been a largely peaceful zone, harboring cooperative international scientific research. But today, it is swiftly becoming one of militarized power politics. Heavily armed nations surround the melting Arctic Ocean, with its unstable environment of eroding shorelines, accessible natural resources, and contested maritime passages. This February, the U.S. launched little publicized, month-long military exercises in the Arctic, hosted by Finland and Norway. The Pentagon’s European Command described the exercises – named Arctic Forge 23, Defense Exercise North, and Joint Viking – as a way “to demonstrate readiness by deploying a combat-credible force to enhance power in NATO’s northern flank”.

New Climate Research From A Year-Long Arctic Expedition Raises An Ozone Alarm

June 24, 2021 Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News. , , ,
After sampling the atmosphere above the Arctic for more than a year during the MOSAiC research voyage, climate scientists say the ozone layer, Earth’s protection against intense ultraviolet radiation, is at risk, despite the progress made in protecting atmospheric ozone by the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the global treaty that banned ozone-harming chemicals. As greenhouse gases heated the surface of the planet, the researchers said, they have also, during the past 50 years, cooled the upper layers of the atmosphere over the Arctic. In the colder stratosphere, long-lived pollutants like chlorofluorocarbons and halons from refrigerants and industrial solvents break down and release chlorine and bromine, which react with sunlight to destroy ozone.

US Troop Build Up Threatens Resource War In The Arctic

April 28, 2021 Sam Carliner, Left Voice. , , ,
While plenty of headlines are being dedicated to the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, an increase of U.S. forces in another area has gone under the radar. This area is the Arctic. Back in March, the U.S. Army announced its strategy for “Regaining Arctic Dominance,” signaling that the region long devastated by climate change may soon also be devastated by great power competition and U.S. imperialism. This focus on the Arctic comes as a result of the climate crisis. The Arctic is melting three times faster than the rest of the world, but rather than treating this as the existential threat that it is, capitalists view it as an opportunity to expand their regional influence, a move which will fuel the crisis even more.

Freakish Arctic Fires Alarmingly Intensify

August 14, 2020 Robert Hunziker, Counterpunch. , , ,
NASA satellite images of fires in eastern Siberia depict an inferno of monstrous proportions, nothing in modern history compares. And, as of July, it’s intensifying. Should people be concerned? Answer: Yes, and double yes. According to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts: “What has been surprising is the rapid increase in the scale and intensity of the fires through July, largely driven by a large cluster of active fires in the northern Sakha Republic.”

The Struggle To Protect The Sacred Place Where Life Begins

June 28, 2020 Nick Engelfried, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
As the Trump administration neared the end of its first year in office in 2017, it seemed environmental activists had lost one of the most hard-fought battles in the movement’s history. Thanks to a last-minute maneuver by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Congressional Republicans succeeded in passing legislation allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. Some of the worst fears of environmental and Indigenous rights groups for what might happen under the administration appeared to be coming true. However, two and a half years later, no drilling or seismic testing has taken place in the refuge — and there is a very real chance it might never happen. A nationwide grassroots movement led by the Indigenous Gwich’in people has repeatedly delayed the oil leasing process and made the prospect of drilling less attractive to major companies.

The Arctic: World War III’s Newest Battlefield

February 11, 2020 By Michael Klare, Tomdispatch.com , ,
When I first met Michael Klare in the late Neolithic age (it was actually the early 1970s), he was already researching the U.S. military in a way no one else was doing. His first book on the subject, War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, had just been published. The title remains eerily apt, given Washington’s twenty-first-century “forever wars.” Almost 50 years later, he’s still ahead of the curve and his newest book on that military, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, has only recently come out.

Goldman Sachs Sees Stranded Assets: Rules Out Investment In Coal And Arctic Oil

December 18, 2019 Staff, Ran.org , ,
San Francisco– Today, Goldman Sachs announced the strongest fossil finance restrictions of any major U.S. bank, though it still lags behind its leading global competitors. It also remains far from alignment with what is needed to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Goldman Sachs has ruled out direct finance for new or expanding thermal coal mines and coal-fired power plant projects worldwide, as well as direct finance for new Arctic oil exploration and production. The policy makes explicit mention of protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Judge Says Trump’s Plan To Allow Drilling In Arctic Ocean Is ‘Unlawful And Invalid’

April 3, 2019 Olivia Rosane, Ecowatch.com , , ,
A federal judge in Alaska ruled on Friday that President Donald Trump "exceeded the president's authority" when he signed an executive order to allow offshore oil drilling in around 125 million acres of the Arctic Ocean, CNN reported. U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason's decision restores a ban on drilling in 98 percent of the U.S.-controlled Arctic Ocean, according to Earthjustice, which sued to stop Trump's order on behalf of several environmental groups and Alaska Native communities.

NATO’s Upcoming 40,000-soldier Arctic Drill Is A Message To Russia And China

October 23, 2018 Andrew Korybko, Orientalreview.org , , , , , ,
The US and its allies have been making a big deal about Russia’s Arctic interests for over the past decade since the country planted its flag under the North Pole in 2007, which was Moscow’s dramatic way of asserting its UN-submitted claims to the region on the basis that the Siberian-originating undersea Lomonosov Ridge’s extension all the way to that point makes it Russian territory. The Arctic is poised to become increasingly important in world affairs over the coming decades because the progressive melting of polar ice is allowing for the year-round establishment of the Northern Sea Route between Western and Eastern Eurasia that will cut traditional shipping times in half.
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