October 31, 2023 • 43 mins
Alaska has been an object of fascination, exploration, and exploitation for nearly two centuries, but its most inhospitable reaches – those that creep toward the Arctic Circle mile by frozen mile – have managed to hold on to their secrets for a very long time. Ice, plunging temperatures, and brutal tundras have kept outsiders at bay. That’s all shifting now: Climate change has warmed the Arctic’s formidable barriers, sparking a geopolitical and commercial footrace. Liam Denning is an energy and climate columnist for Bloomberg Opinion who has repeatedly traveled to the Arctic to report on the military, oil and gas, and fisheries.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Tim O'Brien. Today's crash Course. The race to control the Arctic.
Alaska has been an object of fascination, exploration, and exploitation
for nearly two centuries, but its most inhospitable reaches. Those
(00:23):
that creep toward the Arctic circle mile by frozen mile,
have managed to hold onto their secrets for a very
long time. Ice, plunging temperatures and brutal tundras have kept
outsiders at bay. That's all shifting now. Climate change is
warmly Arctics formidable barriers sparking at geopolitical and commercial foot race.
The US, China, and Russia are scrambling for access to
(00:46):
precious resources like oil, gold, and rare earth metals. Russia
is ramping up its military presence in the region, China
is now a self described near Arctic nation, and the
US is rushing to gain what its military describes as
Arctic dominance. Conoco Phillips, the US oil giant that is
Alaska's largest producer of crude oil, recently won White House
(01:07):
approval to forge ahead with its Willow drilling project on
Alaska's North slope. Meanwhile, Alaska's fisheries, which account for more
annual catch than the rest of the US's other coastlines combined,
are becoming increasingly stressed. Average Alaskans, wrestling with the twin
threats of food insecurity and their attachment to storied livelihoods
(01:28):
tied to fishing, are balking at further entrenchment of large
commercial operators. There is, as they say, a story here.
Joining me today is Liam Denning. Liam is an energy
and climate columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, and he's pulled off
something very rare and very hard to do. He has
repeatedly traveled to the Arctic to tell this tale. Liam
(01:49):
is a wonderful writer and a keen observer of money,
power and people. Liam, welcome to crash Course, great spage.
So work on all this has so far resulted in
three stellar features adorned with beautiful photos from Louis Palou,
an award winning photographer who has spent years covering the region.
You've written one about the military ramp up in the Arctic,
(02:11):
one about energy exploration, and another recently published about Alaska's fisheries.
So we'll follow suit and build this episode around that troika.
But first things first, how and when did you decide
to go to the Arctic and nail down all of this?
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Well, Tim, as you know, this goes back quite a
long way. Louis and I, who've known each other for
I guess about fifteen years now, first began discussing this
seven or eight years ago, I believe, and I began
discussing it with you and Bloomberg in general, I think
in twenty eighteen, and we actually had it teed up
just before COVID hit, which then inevitably shut everything down.
(02:51):
And then about a year ago, thinking we could pull
it off once again, we began to reach out to
the US Army and other key players in Alaska. And
to be honest, I'm pinching myself thinking that we actually
managed to pull it off. It's been quite the logistical lift.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Well, and you had to reach out to all of
those stakeholders, the military, the energy companies, local fishing communities
in order to embed yourself to sort of get there,
buy in to have you come up there and spend time.
And then you had to figure out how to get there,
how to fly there, how to arrange all the various
legs of each flight that took you there, which was
its own sort of logistical nightmare, wasn't it. That's right?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I mean, I think one of the things you learned
quite quickly is that Alaska is a US state, but
it's not the kind of place you can just rock
up to and look around. You know, it's vast. A
lot of it isn't covered by a road network, particularly
for example, the North Slope where the oil operations are,
you physically just can't get there. You have to, you know,
negotiate access, and similar with a lot of the Alaska
(03:53):
Native villages out in the west of the state. You
need to get buy in before you really show up.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
And why was it important you to go through all that?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Well, I think this goes back to the original reason,
you know, Louis and I wanted to do this project was,
you know, we felt that the Arctic is in some
ways a kind of a grand blank canvas where we
tend to project our narratives onto it, our ideas of
what the Arctic is, and we felt that really to
do it justice and to show our readers what it's
(04:22):
really like there, you have to get on the ground.
You have to go and see what it's like just
to even get to the place, what it's like to
feel the cold and the extreme temperatures there, what it's like, frankly,
just to bulk up in five layers of clothing and
try to do anything there. And so that element of
reality was what we were going for.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I'll just make a note to our listeners here. We'll
have links all of Liam's stories in the notes to
the episode. There. You'll find Louis Polo's gorgeous photography there,
which will really give you a sense of the land
and the environment that Liam covered and that they work
very hard to overcome in order to get these incredible stories.
So let's talk about the military foot race that's in
(05:07):
motion there. You embedded with one of the airborne divisions
of the US Army and watch them train. You talk
with them about their strategy in the region. Talk a
little bit about that. What is on the US military's
mind right now and why are they ramping up their
commitment to the Arctic.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Well, I think one of the things you realize about
Alaska's relationship with the rest of the US is that
the Lower forty eight tends to remember that Alaska's there
when it's feeling frightened about something. The classic example is
the oil shock of the nineteen seventies when suddenly we decided,
you know, we had to develop Alaskan oil. And similarly
with the Cold War, and what's happened with Alaska so
(05:48):
far this century is it became kind of a military
backwater during the War on Terror, kind of a staging post, frankly,
for divisions that were cycling in and out of Afghanistan.
And a few things have changed that in recent times.
One is China's assertion of what it euphemistically calls near
Arctic status, which I just think is a gorgeous phrase.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
China is so big it could probably be near almost anything.
I mean, exactly near South China, see near Japan, exactly
near India, Russia.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
And I think that began to ring alarm bells in Washington.
And at the same time the War on Terror itself
was winding down for various reasons, we also saw Russia
reopening its military bases, a lot of which had closed down.
These are the ones in the Arctic, as part of
President Vladimir Putin's general kind of turn northward towards the Arctic,
(06:46):
particularly for its energy resources, and so I think the
US is undergoing something of a Sputnik moment. It's remembering
that Alaska is there, that it's a strategic salient, and
that it is surrounded by potential ad or outright adversaries,
you know, who might want to mess with that region.
And so they've decided to reconstitute a division there, an
(07:07):
army division. The eleventh their born, and those are the
guys we went and spent time on a mountain side
with earlier this year.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I want to ask you some more specifics about that.
But you know, as you're describing all of these forces
in motion around the Arctic right now, it's very reminiscent
of the Great Game of the nineteenth century when European
powers with scrambled to control Africa and parts of Asia.
Of course, a game made it seem far less consequential
than it was, but it was this sort of jostling
(07:36):
for geographic power that hasn't really occurred very baldly like
that since then. And it's certainly in play right now
in the Arctic, and it does sort of capture the
imagination on so many levels, because it's fast, because it's unknown,
because it's so far away because there's this idea that
there are riches at stake, because there's local populations who
(07:57):
are going to get displaced inevitably, or one hopes at
least not brutally or tragically. And it's unusual to me
in that regard. There aren't that many forums left like
this on the planet, that's right.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I mean, Alaska is called the last Frontier for a reason,
and in some ways it is kind of a throwback
to an earlier rage. I mean, Alaska as a state
has existed, particularly in the imagination of the Lower forty eight.
Let's face it, really on two strategic dimensions. One is
as a frontier facing other nations. It was obviously territory
(08:31):
that was purchased from the Russians originally, but also as
basically as a storehouse for commodities, you know, lumber, fish, zinc,
oil especially, And that's generally how we've tended to think
of Alaska in the Lower forty eight. And we have
to remember it is the least visited state of all fifty.
For most Americans, it's a place they will never go to.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
And originally it was Seward's folly when Lincoln, Secretary of State,
made the purchase. Everyone thought that the Lincoln White House
overspent and they'd never get the money back, so that
proved be wrong. Yeah, it took about a century, gets
a century, but there's still some unknown. So tell me
what is the US military's goal there?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So this is interesting because when I was there, I
tried to pin them down, you know, from privates right
the way up to Major General Brian Eifler, who commands
the eleventh there born on what the exact mission was.
This is an unsatisfying answer, somewhat vacant broad because you
really don't know what the threat to Alaska might be.
(09:37):
It seems incomprehensible that anyone would actually try to invade
Alaska or take territory. It would probably end up being
the biggest search and rescue operation in the history of
the planet, just in terms of surviving. And that gets
to really what their mission is at this moment. It's
to train troops to survive. You know, when you get
(09:58):
there and you see the not just the grandeur of
the place, but just the sheer desolate aspect of it,
the emptiness, it becomes clear to you that having anyone
operate there requires all sorts of training just to live,
not just to manage the cold and wearing your clothes
(10:19):
properly and all that kind of thing, but making sure
you eat enough, making sure you drink enough, making sure
you don't use fingernail polish on your fingernails, because that's
how you check for frostbite, and you can't do that
if you're wearing lacquer. There are all sorts of things,
and Louie and I, to a very minimal extent, compared
to the soldiers who were training, had to do a
(10:40):
little bit of that ourselves. You have to reimagine how
you're living day to day and take care of the basics.
And I think that is the army's mission right now.
It's to regain a muscle that was lost maybe twenty
or thirty years ago, around the time of the end
of the Cold War. So that as and when something happens,
whether it's sabotage, whether it's a foreign fishing fleet showing
(11:04):
up where they're not supposed to, whether it's a spy
balloon showing up when it's not supposed to, that they
have people on the ground both acting as a credible
deterrent but able to deal with those things as they arise.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
So is the strategy reactive or proactive? In other words,
is the military responding to what they perceive as Chinese
and Russian incursions or are they anticipating that Russia and
China are going to continue to scramble for stakeholdings in
the north around the Arctic, and the US better get
(11:38):
busy and build its foundations out in Alaska.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
It leans much towards the latter, I think. I think
the third element that's happening here, and you'll see this
in the Army's public documents on the strategy, is climate change.
The ground is literally shifting beneath their feet. The Arctic
is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and
you know, when you're there, you can see it almost
happening in real time. I visited coastal villages where you
(12:04):
can see chunks of the land just falling into the
river or falling into the bearing sea and sitting there
almost like gravestones. You can see like.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Big chunks of like glacial flows fracturing and falling off
into the sea.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Not glacial flows, I mean, what I saw was literally
riverbank and coastal earth that had fallen into the water,
you know, And that's because we're seeing a combination of
sea level rising but also the perma frost gradually melting
and melting and melting. And since most of these places,
(12:39):
particularly in the western and northern part of the state,
are built on permafrost, I mean when you go there,
you see the houses all up on stilts. I saw
an entire basketball court constructed on stilts in this village
for the children to enjoy.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
So it's more like a landslide, yes into the water.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yes, And actually, I think you bring up an important point.
We often see commentary on the Arctic portrayed as a
scramble for things, you know, a scramble for resources, a
scramble for influence. No one scrambles in the Arctic. It
takes a long time to do anything. I think the
better analogy is subsidence or encroachment. Things are changing, the
(13:20):
physical landscape is changing. The pressures on the people there
are changing. The great powers around the region are changing
their stance, And that's really what Not only the army
is trying to plan for it, or at least ready
itself for but frankly, everyone who lives there.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
How many troops does the US have up there.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Now has roughly twelve thousand.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Twelve thousand seems to me like a relatively modest commitment,
but it's nonetheless more significant than having ten people sitting
in a house somewhere.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
That's true, and I think, you know, one way of
thinking about it is the entire population of Alaska is
smaller than San Francisco. It's about seven hundred and fifty
thousand people, so in terms of troops to population, it's
pretty high. I also found out that Alaska has the
highest number of veterans related to the population. It is
a military outpost in so many respects. The Army ran
(14:12):
it for the first ten years when it became part
of the United States, and everywhere you go, you know,
you land at Fairbanks, the first people you see are
troops getting off planes going to the nearby bases. It
was obviously a frontline for the Cold War and is
emerging once again as a potential frontline.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
And as you accompanied the troops on some of their
training runs, I remember from one of the stories you
described that some of them were just learning how to
basically embed themselves in the snow in white camouflage gear
so they could look invisible. So they were learning how
to become invisible in a landscape that almost invites invisibility,
and it had this kind of redundant quality to it
(14:50):
but also necessary.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
That's right. And one of the really interesting aspects about
it is if you go to a country like Finland,
which basically wrote the book on winter warfare, they actually
select their Arctic troops from certain regions of the country
to better align with natural skills around skiing and that
sort of thing. That is not the case with Alaska.
I met troops the woman you mentioned who I attracted
(15:15):
when she was doing camouflage training. She was from Florida.
I met a sergeant from South Texas who says that
when he first got stationed there, he would get frostbite
all the time wandering around outside, like picking up tools
and that sort of thing. These are, in many ways
really raw recruits for that environment. Half them had never
even put on a set of skis before.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
So what's the attraction to them to go there.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
It's interesting for most of them. Certainly, the people I
met on that training course, most of them had volunteered.
They hadn't been told you have to go here. They
had volunteered for this leadership course. And I think It's
that classic attraction of going somewhere that's out of the
way that otherwise you would never get to, and putting
(16:00):
your body through that kind of environment, frankly, putting your
mind through that kind of environment. And that was another
thing that you know, I really gathered by being there
on the ground. Even during my six days there, the
isolation and the darkness kind of began to get to
me by the end of it. If you're stationed there
for months on end, the isolation, the darkness, and the
(16:22):
unrelenting nature of the weather, you know, the wind just
whipping through you every day, it really starts to prey
on the mind. And it was certainly something that came
up in a lot of conversations, the need to manage
that and to not sort of draw into a cocoon,
which I think is what can happen with a lot
of these troops. You know, when I was speaking to
(16:43):
Steve Decker, who is a retired US soldier who now
operates as a civilian trainer at the Northern Warfare Training Center,
he related a story from some years back, you know,
where he saw on the ground not just a soldier,
but an entire platoon. Mentally to the rigors of the place.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Let's listen to that sound bite.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
And I come walking back to where my platoon was
and I look at him and there they're like maybe
fifty yards away from me, and all three of our
Occio sleds were sitting there, but the whole tune was
standing around them, just staring at them. And I'm looking
at them and I'm like, why aren't they setting up
their tents? And so I'm walking over there and they're
(17:28):
all just kind of just staring at it. It's like,
this is the means to take all this away, but
I cannot break out of this cocoon that I'm in
right now to do this. And I was just about
to say something when one of my more forceful squad
(17:49):
leaders blindsided me from the side and he comes like.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
Froll people around, get their shit like that, and then
they started getting moving. But I watched it at a
lot that withdraw where people just they just withdraw within
themselves and they will not make.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Efforts to alleviate the pain that they're going through whatever.
And I've done it myself.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
What kind of a military presence do the Chinese and
Russians have?
Speaker 2 (18:20):
So Russia in so many ways is the Arctic whale.
It has the most territory, the most people, the most
economic activity, and the biggest military presence in the Arctic.
And in a way that's understandable. They have the biggest
physical presence in the arc.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
They truly are in our nation.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Absolutely, whereas we are more a southern nation with an
Arctic fringe the best way to put it. So, their
military presence is big, both in scale and its elements.
For example, you know a lot of the strategic nuclear
fleet is based up in the Cola Peninsula close to Finland.
So Russia's presence is huge and is only going to
(19:04):
get bigger, in part because Putin has made it such
a central plank of his vision for what Russia will
be as a great power over the coming decades. You know,
that need to open up a northern sea route as
the ice melts, That need to export more oil and
gas from the Arctic coast as the old West Siberian
(19:27):
fields go into terminal decline. China, well, China's a bit different.
China isn't an Arctic nation. It's forays into the Arctic
right now mainly consist of the odd naval patrol, the
odd joint exercise with the Russians. They do have scientific
outposts throughout the Arctic, and you know, it's widely thought
(19:52):
that those are essentially dual use. But China clearly has
designs on the Arctic as an undergoverned space, to use
that phrase, particularly as waters that are outside of economic
zones become more navigable. China sees that as a place
where it can stake out a position, maybe send its
(20:12):
famous fishing fleets, and you know, become more of an
Arctic power.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
But as of yet this isn't something that anyone sees turning.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Heart no, but certainly if you read the Army's strategic papers,
I mean, the word China comes up more often than
your average Trump rally. It's very much front of mind.
In some ways. It's kind of strange. Although Russia is
the very present power, in some ways, China has feared more.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
All right, on that noe, Let's take a break, Liam,
We'll hear from a sponsor, and then we'll come back
and talk about some of the commercial war games going
on up there. We're back with William Denning, a Bloomberg
opinion columnist who's been charting the rush to control the Arctic,
as told through his repeat visits to Alaska. So oil, oil, oil,
(21:03):
A lot of contemporary Alaskan history and geopolitics can be
looked at through that lens canon Liam.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, and I think it's particularly poignant right now, given
what's going on in the Middle East for us to
remember that Alaska's oil boom really is owed to the
Yong Kapo War. It was the Arab oil embargo that
followed that that essentially persuaded Congress and then President Nixon
to force through the construction of the transk Alaska Pipeline
(21:32):
and kick off a boom that you know eventually led
to Alaska during the nineteen eight is becoming the kind
of the shale power of that period, accounting for about
a quarter of US oil production.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
As you noted one of your pieces, there's an ocean
of oil and gas rosen in place beneath the Arctic,
and I suppose the logic for the energy companies exploring
up there is that climate change is going to make
that less hard to get to or am I oversimplifying?
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, there is that horrible kind of doom loop going on.
As the ice melts, you open up more resources to exploit,
which then help more of the ice melt. That's definitely
going on. But I think it's important to remember that
the oil resources up there, and don't get me wrong,
all the estimates indicate there is a lot of oil
and gas in the Arctic. It's frozen in place, not
(22:23):
just by ice, but by its sheer remoteness. Going back
to that idea I had earlier on about the lower
forty eight, remembering Alaska when it's feeling anxious about the world.
That is what led to the oil boom in Alaska.
This is not a place that you would ordinarily really
(22:43):
want to go to get oil. It's really hard, it's
really expensive. Only the biggest players can go there. If
you get it wrong, it can be catastrophic. Shell famously
wrote off seven or eight billion dollar last decade trying
to get oil out of the Chuchise and got nothing.
(23:05):
So it's not just a question of as the ice melts,
we will develop more of it. It's also does it
make economic sense? Does it make sense on some other axes,
for example energy security.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
You have this interesting little statistic in your piece that
I think onshore projects in Alaska can take about fifteen
years to sort of come to fruition offshore when you're
out in the water can take thirty years, and projects
elsewhere unless threatening climates can be anywhere from several months
(23:39):
to five years, depending on the scope of the project.
Is that right more or less?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, that's an estimate for the National Petroleum Council. That
is one of the things that I think prevents what
some people would call it a scramble for oil in
the Arctic. You know, if you're looking at a project
that's going to take fifty years or thirty years to
come to fruition, particularly at this moment in time, when
(24:07):
you know some people are estimating oil demand could peak
this decade or next decade, it's very hard to get
a financier to sign off on that.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
You spend a lot of time at Kuparak, a Carnico
Phillips project site, given all of these challenges. Why is
Carnical Phillips there.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, this will sound perhaps a little banal, it's there
because it's already there. With a lot of these big
oil provinces that were developed in response to the oil
shocks of the nineteen seventies, they were developed under a
very specific set of pressures and circumstances. Oil prices were
super high, so you could justify pretty much anything, and
(24:47):
you had governments prodding you in the back to get
this done in order to bring about energy security. Now,
the fact is Conico is already the largest player there,
and if you think about the Willow project, as you mentioned,
which is the new one that's being developed. You know,
if you think about that, Konko is going to spend
something like seven or eight billion dollars on that project.
It's a reasonably sized oil project, but certainly it's not
(25:09):
a giant project. But the reason they can do it
is because it's only a few miles from where they
already have investments made in pipelines, gravel minds, that sort
of thing.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
So it's incremental.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Right. If you were a new player, it would be
almost unfathomable to think that you might just go in
there and develop that from scratch.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
You also noted in your piece that the energy companies
face the same environmental and climactic challenges that the military faces.
Equipment breaks down, it's hard to get people to live there,
et cetera, et cetera. Another thing that's in play, obviously too,
is that there has been this sense that the fossil
fuel industry has plateaued or has been peaking as there's
(25:52):
a push toward green The irony in Alaska is the
climate change that fossil fuels help engender is making it
easier for fossil fuel exploration to proceed apace in Alaska.
But is there any thinking, even a veteran player like Conico,
that all of the money they're spending and all these
projects they're working on now have a shorter half life
(26:16):
than maybe they did a decade ago because of the
green energy push? Or is the oil that's being extracted
up there going to continue to be necessary and desired
and purchased for a long time.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
I think if you ask the oil companies, they will
say yes, for a couple of reasons. One is, generally
they view oil's longevity in the local energy system as
being longer than some others, particularly environmentalists would think, or
like I think. The other thing is it comes back
to that issue of incumbency. You know, a company like
Conico can produce a barrel of oil from Alaska for
(26:50):
thirty bucks or less. You know, the oil price right
now is ninety bucks. So for them, they look at
that it's in a politically stable part of the world,
the US, And they say, okay, well, even if oil
demand does peak and plateau and decline, who's going to
be the last producer standing? Is it going to be
(27:12):
US in Alaska or some high cost producer in some
unstable part of the world.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
They can still do it profitably, so they'll still.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Do it, that's right. And I think, you know, as
President Biden's approval of the project earlier this year, the
Willow Project, which was controversial, I think as even he
recognized with his Green Agenda, you still need stable incumbent
energy supplies to get you to the point where the
new energy systems we're building now can take over.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
And as the US's own strategic reserve WANs as other
wars are gang fought, what about the indigenous communities that
are sort of caught in the crosshairs of either military
incursions or commercial exploration. We'll talk about that more as
we transition to the next segment. But what kind of
fissures is that And raising.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
This in some ways was the most fascinating aspect of
not just the energy feature, but also the fisheries feature.
Is I think coming from the lower forty eight. We
tend to have this rather outdated, almost colonial view of
Alaska Natives as these subsistence fishers and hunters living off
(28:26):
the land and entirely separated from you know what, we
would call it westernized or industrialized economy, and that's really
far from the truth. If you go to the North
Slope where the ore production is. So the North Slope
is an area, it's bigger than thirty nine states, it's
only got about eleven thousand people living in it, which
would feel about half a Madison Square garden. Ninety percent
(28:50):
of their borough revenue comes from taxing oil production. Their
whole lifestyle, everything from the fuel to running the snow
machines they use to hunt or to fuel the boats
they use to go fishing, the revenue to build housing,
to run healthcare programs, it all comes from oil. And
(29:13):
that's what makes the energy transition in a place like
that particularly acute as an issue. They recognize that the
warming climate is changing their physical environment. They recognize it's
affecting the fish, it's affecting the caribou, but they also
recognize that without that revenue, their way of life is
(29:37):
pretty much over. They would probably have to evacuate a
lot of those people if you switched off the oil
revenue tomorrow. So it's just a very difficult tension that
they have to deal with.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
We're going to dig into that deeper after the break
and want to just stop for a moment. How to
hear from one of our sponsors, and we'll come right back.
We're back with William Denning, who's educating us about the Arctic.
Liam we focused on the military and energy consideration shaping
the new Arctic land rush. Let's now talk about fish.
(30:12):
Why do fish figure so prominently in Alaska's economy and
cultural identity.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Well, you know what's really interesting is when we first
conceived this project, fishing was something in the back of
our mind, but it was not one of the topics
we were really going to address up front. But as
we did reporting on the other features, all sorts of
people said, you've got to write about fish. Fishing is
a big topic here. It's important to Alaska for a
(30:40):
few reasons. One is it's just a very big industry.
It's the biggest private sector employer in the state. It's
the biggest coastal fishery in the US by a large margin.
But also it's integral to the way of life, particularly
in rural Alaska, particularly in Native villages, simply because they
(31:02):
rely on fishing to eat, to live in some ways,
to give meaning to their life and provide a sense.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Of community, as they have for yards.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
For at least ten thousand years. And that really came
home to me in a meeting with elders and village
members in a little village called Quatlook in western Alaska,
where one of the elder is a woman named Liz Dylan,
quite simply and poignantly laid out the importance of fishing
as told to her by her ancestors, by her elders
(31:31):
back in the day.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
And you've got a clip of that, so let's have
a quick listen.
Speaker 5 (31:35):
Our elders shoes to say, fish will be always living
in the waters. They come once a year and they
come back the next year. But the fish will be
in the waters for us to catch and to eat
and harvest, and they will never they will never disuppair
(32:04):
until the end of the world.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
What are some of the mean species of fish that
inhabit the waters around Alaska, because that's actually a factor
in all of this.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Right, absolutely, so, the big one economically is actually fished
far out of sight of land in Alaska, and that's
Alaskan pollock. Pollock is a sort of a codlike pretty
low value but fairly an offensive white fish, which you'll
find in things like McDonald's Phillia fish sandwiches. The other
(32:34):
big I think more iconic species that people would tend
to think of as king salmon, snow crab, king crab, halibut.
These are the fish that you might buy in the
supermarket anywhere in the US.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
So Alaska is essentially the fishery that feeds fish to
the lower forty eight.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
States, absolutely, and Alaskan pollock is interesting partly because you
will find it in things like school meals, that kind
of thing where you need a relatively cheap fish protein
just for sustenance. And the fisheries in Alaska are under
stress right now too, right, That's right, and that's why
so many people brought it up to us as we
were doing our reporting. It's also big reason why Representative
(33:15):
Mary Peltola was elected in twenty twenty two in an upset,
you know, the first Democrat that Alaska had sent to
the House in fifty years, the first Alaska Native representative. Ever,
a big part of her platform was protecting the fisheries,
and she was also a pro willow She was pro
willow yes in part because she recognizes the importance of
(33:37):
that revenue for native communities.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
So she's juggling these sort of tensions between one kind
of economic development and another one that also can overshadow
traditions and lifestyles and needs. That's right.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
I mean it gets to that issue around Alaska, which
is I think, particularly in the lower forty eight, we
tend to think of Alaska as a giant national park
where you know, there's just polar bears roaming around and
nothing really happens. But you get there and you realize that,
you know, industrialization is a key feature of the Arctic economy,
in the Alaskan economy, it's hard to separate those things
(34:13):
out neatly.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Talk to me about the tensions between local and indigenous
fissures and big commercial operations. The troll, as you note
in one of your pieces, and I quote catching and
killing your own dinner, is one of the many things
that set Alaska's apart from the residents of most other states.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Absolutely. So you know, when you go to these villages
This comes home to you just on the plane we
flew from Anchorage out to Bethel, which is the hub
of the Yukon cousco Quim Delta in western Alaska, and
on the plane there's more boxes of groceries than there
are suitcases. Because it costs a hell of a lot
(34:51):
to live out in western Alaska. I paid a visit
to the supermarket one day, and you can be paying
fifteen dollars for a lot for bread, ten dollars for
a quarter of milk, eighty dollars for a box of diapers.
Living there without living off the land is frankly impossible.
So as we've seen in the past, beginning about a
(35:15):
decade ago, when regulators come into these villages and say
the salmon run is very low this year, you're going
to have to stop fishing for a couple of weeks,
a month, a whole season. It's an existential threat. It's
not just oh my hobby got blocked off for the summer.
What am I going to do now? This is people
(35:36):
who fish the dinner literally out of their backyards and
then smoke it, store it up for the winter to
get them through those months. And if that is taken away,
they lose a sense of food security, they lose importantly
a sense of food sovereignty and that idea of controlling
(35:57):
their own destiny. I think it's particularly important in these
alaskaative communities, and they lose a sense of community. You know,
you travel along the cosco Quin River and all along
the banks, you see these fish camps, and it's where
families and neighbors gathered sometimes for weeks on end during
the summer to fish and process the fish that they
(36:18):
would need to get them through that.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
And now are those communities evaporating as commercial fishing continues
to sprawl.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
The impression I get is that physically their landscape is
kind of crumbling into the rivers and the oceans.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
That is happening because of global warming, because.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Of climate change, absolutely, and climate change is also having
an impact on the fish. It's a controversial topic exactly
how much it's having an impact, but you can see
how in a delicate ecological web that changes in water
temperature can affect not just salmon themselves, which are the
fish they prize, but also the fish that the salmon
(36:57):
feed on, and that can have all sorts of cascading effects.
But you also see in just the encroachment of the
outside world. One woman I spoke with at a village meeting,
she was very upset about the impact on fishing, but
you also got a sense that she was worried about
the young people in their village losing their connection to
(37:17):
the land and playing video games instead and not learning
how to subsist. And I think in some ways that's
the thing that's really gutting these communities. It's that sense
that they're breaking decisively from their past.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
And how do the large commercial fisheries see all of this.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
I think the sense you get from the commercial fisheries
is that Alaska pollock is a giant money maker. It
is the second biggest wild fishery on the planet, and
that they are providing an important source of protein for
a world in which demand for fishes going up. But
(37:54):
essentially wildfishing peaked in the nineteen nineties. A lot of
the growth we've seen since then is farmed fish, and
that really the issue is climate change. It's not really
their issue. They're not the ones who are, you know,
fishing out the salmon runs from western Alaska, and that
it's kind of up to society to address climate change,
(38:16):
not then, So.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
As you noted at the top, you and I began
talking about this as a project for you about five
years ago or so. And you've looked at the military,
You've looked at the energy exploration, You've looked at the
local communities and fisheries. What have you learned over the
course of your reporting that you didn't know before you
set out to do this? What are some of the
big AHAs for you?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
The biggest AHA for me is that the Arctic is
a and this may sound a little weird, is a
complex human society. Because, as I say, like it doesn't
sound weird like many in the Lower forty eight. I
thought of the Arctic in kind of symbols and images,
you know, frozen landscapes, polar bear as, the odd oil rig,
(39:01):
that sort of thing. But you get there and you realize,
you know, there are nations living there. They live complex lives,
and they're just as fragmented as we are in the
Lower forty eight. For example, with the fishing issue, there
are these things called community development quotas, so sixty five
coastal villages actually get a portion of revenue from the
(39:24):
pollock troll. Now they don't want to see the pollock
troll ending, but their neighbors just up river who don't
get that money are complaining that those trollers are fishing
them out, destroying their way of life. And similarly with
the oil.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Are those differences because of the way the various populations
were expropriated when outsiders came in, where there's just different
deals cut in order to give commercial interest access to
the land when indigenous peoples were appropriated.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
I think there is a long history of that, you know,
and it goes back to the Alaska Native Claimed Settlement
Act in nine in seventy one, and then the Magnus
and Stephens Fisheries Act of nineteen seventy six. There have
been various attempts to square the circle in Alaska of
balancing indigenous rights with the desire, particularly from the outside
(40:14):
to exploit Alaska's rich resources, and with the community development
quotas in particular. I think in some ways that came
from a good place. It was a sense that these
native villages should be getting some portion of the revenue
from the waters off the coast, But it also cleaved
them from some of their neighbors. And you see this
(40:36):
also in land division. You know, one of the villages.
I went to a place called Quagillingock, which means place
of no river, which is sort of ironic because it's
sinking into the water. They are, as we speak, trying
to work out how they can buy parcels of land
further away to eventually move that village to higher ground
(40:57):
because they know it's daser kind of numbered.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
So before we wrap up any other things you've learned.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
I would go back to this idea of the imagined
narrative that Alaska and the wider Arctic is an area
that I think is in some ways fixed in our mind,
but it's also a place where we project narratives. China
is projecting a narrative of becoming a great power. The
US is projecting a narrative of being suddenly beset by enemies.
(41:28):
Russia is projecting a narrative that even as its armed
forces are chewed up in Ukraine, it's going to emerge
as a powerful Arctic nation. All these things are clashing,
and the people who live there are frankly caught in
the middle.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Liam, thank you for wrapping things up for us. We're
out of time. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
William Denning is a calumnist with Bloomberg Opinion. You can
find his work at the Bloomberg Opinion website and on
the Bloomberg Terminal. You can find Liam himself on Twitter
at Denning Here at crash Course, we believe that collisions
can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In
today's Crash Course, I learned that the title that I
(42:12):
gave to this episode, the Race to Control the Arctic,
actually might not be the right title given everything that
Liam just told me. What's going on for both commercial operators,
the military, and everyone else up in Alaska is a long, cold,
challenging slog. What did you learn? We'd love to hear
from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion handle
(42:35):
at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag
Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show
wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review.
It helps more people find the show. This episode was
produced by the indispensable Ona masurakas Moses on Dom and Me.
Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing
(42:56):
help from Sagebauman. Jeff Grocott, Mike Nize and Christine Danden
Bylark Blake. Maple says, our sound engineering and our original
theme song was composed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien.
We'll be back next week with another Crash course
Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Tim O'Brien. Today's crash Course. The race to control the Arctic.
Alaska has been an object of fascination, exploration, and exploitation
for nearly two centuries, but its most inhospitable reaches. Those
(00:23):
that creep toward the Arctic circle mile by frozen mile,
have managed to hold onto their secrets for a very
long time. Ice, plunging temperatures and brutal tundras have kept
outsiders at bay. That's all shifting now. Climate change is
warmly Arctics formidable barriers sparking at geopolitical and commercial foot race.
The US, China, and Russia are scrambling for access to
(00:46):
precious resources like oil, gold, and rare earth metals. Russia
is ramping up its military presence in the region, China
is now a self described near Arctic nation, and the
US is rushing to gain what its military describes as
Arctic dominance. Conoco Phillips, the US oil giant that is
Alaska's largest producer of crude oil, recently won White House
(01:07):
approval to forge ahead with its Willow drilling project on
Alaska's North slope. Meanwhile, Alaska's fisheries, which account for more
annual catch than the rest of the US's other coastlines combined,
are becoming increasingly stressed. Average Alaskans, wrestling with the twin
threats of food insecurity and their attachment to storied livelihoods
(01:28):
tied to fishing, are balking at further entrenchment of large
commercial operators. There is, as they say, a story here.
Joining me today is Liam Denning. Liam is an energy
and climate columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, and he's pulled off
something very rare and very hard to do. He has
repeatedly traveled to the Arctic to tell this tale. Liam
(01:49):
is a wonderful writer and a keen observer of money,
power and people. Liam, welcome to crash Course, great spage.
So work on all this has so far resulted in
three stellar features adorned with beautiful photos from Louis Palou,
an award winning photographer who has spent years covering the region.
You've written one about the military ramp up in the Arctic,
(02:11):
one about energy exploration, and another recently published about Alaska's fisheries.
So we'll follow suit and build this episode around that troika.
But first things first, how and when did you decide
to go to the Arctic and nail down all of this?
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Well, Tim, as you know, this goes back quite a
long way. Louis and I, who've known each other for
I guess about fifteen years now, first began discussing this
seven or eight years ago, I believe, and I began
discussing it with you and Bloomberg in general, I think
in twenty eighteen, and we actually had it teed up
just before COVID hit, which then inevitably shut everything down.
(02:51):
And then about a year ago, thinking we could pull
it off once again, we began to reach out to
the US Army and other key players in Alaska. And
to be honest, I'm pinching myself thinking that we actually
managed to pull it off. It's been quite the logistical lift.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Well, and you had to reach out to all of
those stakeholders, the military, the energy companies, local fishing communities
in order to embed yourself to sort of get there,
buy in to have you come up there and spend time.
And then you had to figure out how to get there,
how to fly there, how to arrange all the various
legs of each flight that took you there, which was
its own sort of logistical nightmare, wasn't it. That's right?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I mean, I think one of the things you learned
quite quickly is that Alaska is a US state, but
it's not the kind of place you can just rock
up to and look around. You know, it's vast. A
lot of it isn't covered by a road network, particularly
for example, the North Slope where the oil operations are,
you physically just can't get there. You have to, you know,
negotiate access, and similar with a lot of the Alaska
(03:53):
Native villages out in the west of the state. You
need to get buy in before you really show up.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
And why was it important you to go through all that?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Well, I think this goes back to the original reason,
you know, Louis and I wanted to do this project was,
you know, we felt that the Arctic is in some
ways a kind of a grand blank canvas where we
tend to project our narratives onto it, our ideas of
what the Arctic is, and we felt that really to
do it justice and to show our readers what it's
(04:22):
really like there, you have to get on the ground.
You have to go and see what it's like just
to even get to the place, what it's like to
feel the cold and the extreme temperatures there, what it's like, frankly,
just to bulk up in five layers of clothing and
try to do anything there. And so that element of
reality was what we were going for.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I'll just make a note to our listeners here. We'll
have links all of Liam's stories in the notes to
the episode. There. You'll find Louis Polo's gorgeous photography there,
which will really give you a sense of the land
and the environment that Liam covered and that they work
very hard to overcome in order to get these incredible stories.
So let's talk about the military foot race that's in
(05:07):
motion there. You embedded with one of the airborne divisions
of the US Army and watch them train. You talk
with them about their strategy in the region. Talk a
little bit about that. What is on the US military's
mind right now and why are they ramping up their
commitment to the Arctic.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Well, I think one of the things you realize about
Alaska's relationship with the rest of the US is that
the Lower forty eight tends to remember that Alaska's there
when it's feeling frightened about something. The classic example is
the oil shock of the nineteen seventies when suddenly we decided,
you know, we had to develop Alaskan oil. And similarly
with the Cold War, and what's happened with Alaska so
(05:48):
far this century is it became kind of a military
backwater during the War on Terror, kind of a staging post, frankly,
for divisions that were cycling in and out of Afghanistan.
And a few things have changed that in recent times.
One is China's assertion of what it euphemistically calls near
Arctic status, which I just think is a gorgeous phrase.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
China is so big it could probably be near almost anything.
I mean, exactly near South China, see near Japan, exactly
near India, Russia.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
And I think that began to ring alarm bells in Washington.
And at the same time the War on Terror itself
was winding down for various reasons, we also saw Russia
reopening its military bases, a lot of which had closed down.
These are the ones in the Arctic, as part of
President Vladimir Putin's general kind of turn northward towards the Arctic,
(06:46):
particularly for its energy resources, and so I think the
US is undergoing something of a Sputnik moment. It's remembering
that Alaska is there, that it's a strategic salient, and
that it is surrounded by potential ad or outright adversaries,
you know, who might want to mess with that region.
And so they've decided to reconstitute a division there, an
(07:07):
army division. The eleventh their born, and those are the
guys we went and spent time on a mountain side
with earlier this year.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I want to ask you some more specifics about that.
But you know, as you're describing all of these forces
in motion around the Arctic right now, it's very reminiscent
of the Great Game of the nineteenth century when European
powers with scrambled to control Africa and parts of Asia.
Of course, a game made it seem far less consequential
than it was, but it was this sort of jostling
(07:36):
for geographic power that hasn't really occurred very baldly like
that since then. And it's certainly in play right now
in the Arctic, and it does sort of capture the
imagination on so many levels, because it's fast, because it's unknown,
because it's so far away because there's this idea that
there are riches at stake, because there's local populations who
(07:57):
are going to get displaced inevitably, or one hopes at
least not brutally or tragically. And it's unusual to me
in that regard. There aren't that many forums left like
this on the planet, that's right.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I mean, Alaska is called the last Frontier for a reason,
and in some ways it is kind of a throwback
to an earlier rage. I mean, Alaska as a state
has existed, particularly in the imagination of the Lower forty eight.
Let's face it, really on two strategic dimensions. One is
as a frontier facing other nations. It was obviously territory
(08:31):
that was purchased from the Russians originally, but also as
basically as a storehouse for commodities, you know, lumber, fish, zinc,
oil especially, And that's generally how we've tended to think
of Alaska in the Lower forty eight. And we have
to remember it is the least visited state of all fifty.
For most Americans, it's a place they will never go to.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
And originally it was Seward's folly when Lincoln, Secretary of State,
made the purchase. Everyone thought that the Lincoln White House
overspent and they'd never get the money back, so that
proved be wrong. Yeah, it took about a century, gets
a century, but there's still some unknown. So tell me
what is the US military's goal there?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
So this is interesting because when I was there, I
tried to pin them down, you know, from privates right
the way up to Major General Brian Eifler, who commands
the eleventh there born on what the exact mission was.
This is an unsatisfying answer, somewhat vacant broad because you
really don't know what the threat to Alaska might be.
(09:37):
It seems incomprehensible that anyone would actually try to invade
Alaska or take territory. It would probably end up being
the biggest search and rescue operation in the history of
the planet, just in terms of surviving. And that gets
to really what their mission is at this moment. It's
to train troops to survive. You know, when you get
(09:58):
there and you see the not just the grandeur of
the place, but just the sheer desolate aspect of it,
the emptiness, it becomes clear to you that having anyone
operate there requires all sorts of training just to live,
not just to manage the cold and wearing your clothes
(10:19):
properly and all that kind of thing, but making sure
you eat enough, making sure you drink enough, making sure
you don't use fingernail polish on your fingernails, because that's
how you check for frostbite, and you can't do that
if you're wearing lacquer. There are all sorts of things,
and Louie and I, to a very minimal extent, compared
to the soldiers who were training, had to do a
(10:40):
little bit of that ourselves. You have to reimagine how
you're living day to day and take care of the basics.
And I think that is the army's mission right now.
It's to regain a muscle that was lost maybe twenty
or thirty years ago, around the time of the end
of the Cold War. So that as and when something happens,
whether it's sabotage, whether it's a foreign fishing fleet showing
(11:04):
up where they're not supposed to, whether it's a spy
balloon showing up when it's not supposed to, that they
have people on the ground both acting as a credible
deterrent but able to deal with those things as they arise.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
So is the strategy reactive or proactive? In other words,
is the military responding to what they perceive as Chinese
and Russian incursions or are they anticipating that Russia and
China are going to continue to scramble for stakeholdings in
the north around the Arctic, and the US better get
(11:38):
busy and build its foundations out in Alaska.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
It leans much towards the latter, I think. I think
the third element that's happening here, and you'll see this
in the Army's public documents on the strategy, is climate change.
The ground is literally shifting beneath their feet. The Arctic
is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and
you know, when you're there, you can see it almost
happening in real time. I visited coastal villages where you
(12:04):
can see chunks of the land just falling into the
river or falling into the bearing sea and sitting there
almost like gravestones. You can see like.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Big chunks of like glacial flows fracturing and falling off
into the sea.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Not glacial flows, I mean, what I saw was literally
riverbank and coastal earth that had fallen into the water,
you know, And that's because we're seeing a combination of
sea level rising but also the perma frost gradually melting
and melting and melting. And since most of these places,
(12:39):
particularly in the western and northern part of the state,
are built on permafrost, I mean when you go there,
you see the houses all up on stilts. I saw
an entire basketball court constructed on stilts in this village
for the children to enjoy.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
So it's more like a landslide, yes into the water.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yes, And actually, I think you bring up an important point.
We often see commentary on the Arctic portrayed as a
scramble for things, you know, a scramble for resources, a
scramble for influence. No one scrambles in the Arctic. It
takes a long time to do anything. I think the
better analogy is subsidence or encroachment. Things are changing, the
(13:20):
physical landscape is changing. The pressures on the people there
are changing. The great powers around the region are changing
their stance, And that's really what Not only the army
is trying to plan for it, or at least ready
itself for but frankly, everyone who lives there.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
How many troops does the US have up there.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Now has roughly twelve thousand.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Twelve thousand seems to me like a relatively modest commitment,
but it's nonetheless more significant than having ten people sitting
in a house somewhere.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
That's true, and I think, you know, one way of
thinking about it is the entire population of Alaska is
smaller than San Francisco. It's about seven hundred and fifty
thousand people, so in terms of troops to population, it's
pretty high. I also found out that Alaska has the
highest number of veterans related to the population. It is
a military outpost in so many respects. The Army ran
(14:12):
it for the first ten years when it became part
of the United States, and everywhere you go, you know,
you land at Fairbanks, the first people you see are
troops getting off planes going to the nearby bases. It
was obviously a frontline for the Cold War and is
emerging once again as a potential frontline.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
And as you accompanied the troops on some of their
training runs, I remember from one of the stories you
described that some of them were just learning how to
basically embed themselves in the snow in white camouflage gear
so they could look invisible. So they were learning how
to become invisible in a landscape that almost invites invisibility,
and it had this kind of redundant quality to it
(14:50):
but also necessary.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
That's right. And one of the really interesting aspects about
it is if you go to a country like Finland,
which basically wrote the book on winter warfare, they actually
select their Arctic troops from certain regions of the country
to better align with natural skills around skiing and that
sort of thing. That is not the case with Alaska.
I met troops the woman you mentioned who I attracted
(15:15):
when she was doing camouflage training. She was from Florida.
I met a sergeant from South Texas who says that
when he first got stationed there, he would get frostbite
all the time wandering around outside, like picking up tools
and that sort of thing. These are, in many ways
really raw recruits for that environment. Half them had never
even put on a set of skis before.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
So what's the attraction to them to go there.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
It's interesting for most of them. Certainly, the people I
met on that training course, most of them had volunteered.
They hadn't been told you have to go here. They
had volunteered for this leadership course. And I think It's
that classic attraction of going somewhere that's out of the
way that otherwise you would never get to, and putting
(16:00):
your body through that kind of environment, frankly, putting your
mind through that kind of environment. And that was another
thing that you know, I really gathered by being there
on the ground. Even during my six days there, the
isolation and the darkness kind of began to get to
me by the end of it. If you're stationed there
for months on end, the isolation, the darkness, and the
(16:22):
unrelenting nature of the weather, you know, the wind just
whipping through you every day, it really starts to prey
on the mind. And it was certainly something that came
up in a lot of conversations, the need to manage
that and to not sort of draw into a cocoon,
which I think is what can happen with a lot
of these troops. You know, when I was speaking to
(16:43):
Steve Decker, who is a retired US soldier who now
operates as a civilian trainer at the Northern Warfare Training Center,
he related a story from some years back, you know,
where he saw on the ground not just a soldier,
but an entire platoon. Mentally to the rigors of the place.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Let's listen to that sound bite.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
And I come walking back to where my platoon was
and I look at him and there they're like maybe
fifty yards away from me, and all three of our
Occio sleds were sitting there, but the whole tune was
standing around them, just staring at them. And I'm looking
at them and I'm like, why aren't they setting up
their tents? And so I'm walking over there and they're
(17:28):
all just kind of just staring at it. It's like,
this is the means to take all this away, but
I cannot break out of this cocoon that I'm in
right now to do this. And I was just about
to say something when one of my more forceful squad
(17:49):
leaders blindsided me from the side and he comes like.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
Froll people around, get their shit like that, and then
they started getting moving. But I watched it at a
lot that withdraw where people just they just withdraw within
themselves and they will not make.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Efforts to alleviate the pain that they're going through whatever.
And I've done it myself.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
What kind of a military presence do the Chinese and
Russians have?
Speaker 2 (18:20):
So Russia in so many ways is the Arctic whale.
It has the most territory, the most people, the most
economic activity, and the biggest military presence in the Arctic.
And in a way that's understandable. They have the biggest
physical presence in the arc.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
They truly are in our nation.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Absolutely, whereas we are more a southern nation with an
Arctic fringe the best way to put it. So, their
military presence is big, both in scale and its elements.
For example, you know a lot of the strategic nuclear
fleet is based up in the Cola Peninsula close to Finland.
So Russia's presence is huge and is only going to
(19:04):
get bigger, in part because Putin has made it such
a central plank of his vision for what Russia will
be as a great power over the coming decades. You know,
that need to open up a northern sea route as
the ice melts, That need to export more oil and
gas from the Arctic coast as the old West Siberian
(19:27):
fields go into terminal decline. China, well, China's a bit different.
China isn't an Arctic nation. It's forays into the Arctic
right now mainly consist of the odd naval patrol, the
odd joint exercise with the Russians. They do have scientific
outposts throughout the Arctic, and you know, it's widely thought
(19:52):
that those are essentially dual use. But China clearly has
designs on the Arctic as an undergoverned space, to use
that phrase, particularly as waters that are outside of economic
zones become more navigable. China sees that as a place
where it can stake out a position, maybe send its
(20:12):
famous fishing fleets, and you know, become more of an
Arctic power.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
But as of yet this isn't something that anyone sees turning.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Heart no, but certainly if you read the Army's strategic papers,
I mean, the word China comes up more often than
your average Trump rally. It's very much front of mind.
In some ways. It's kind of strange. Although Russia is
the very present power, in some ways, China has feared more.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
All right, on that noe, Let's take a break, Liam,
We'll hear from a sponsor, and then we'll come back
and talk about some of the commercial war games going
on up there. We're back with William Denning, a Bloomberg
opinion columnist who's been charting the rush to control the Arctic,
as told through his repeat visits to Alaska. So oil, oil, oil,
(21:03):
A lot of contemporary Alaskan history and geopolitics can be
looked at through that lens canon Liam.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, and I think it's particularly poignant right now, given
what's going on in the Middle East for us to
remember that Alaska's oil boom really is owed to the
Yong Kapo War. It was the Arab oil embargo that
followed that that essentially persuaded Congress and then President Nixon
to force through the construction of the transk Alaska Pipeline
(21:32):
and kick off a boom that you know eventually led
to Alaska during the nineteen eight is becoming the kind
of the shale power of that period, accounting for about
a quarter of US oil production.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
As you noted one of your pieces, there's an ocean
of oil and gas rosen in place beneath the Arctic,
and I suppose the logic for the energy companies exploring
up there is that climate change is going to make
that less hard to get to or am I oversimplifying?
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, there is that horrible kind of doom loop going on.
As the ice melts, you open up more resources to exploit,
which then help more of the ice melt. That's definitely
going on. But I think it's important to remember that
the oil resources up there, and don't get me wrong,
all the estimates indicate there is a lot of oil
and gas in the Arctic. It's frozen in place, not
(22:23):
just by ice, but by its sheer remoteness. Going back
to that idea I had earlier on about the lower
forty eight, remembering Alaska when it's feeling anxious about the world.
That is what led to the oil boom in Alaska.
This is not a place that you would ordinarily really
(22:43):
want to go to get oil. It's really hard, it's
really expensive. Only the biggest players can go there. If
you get it wrong, it can be catastrophic. Shell famously
wrote off seven or eight billion dollar last decade trying
to get oil out of the Chuchise and got nothing.
(23:05):
So it's not just a question of as the ice melts,
we will develop more of it. It's also does it
make economic sense? Does it make sense on some other axes,
for example energy security.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
You have this interesting little statistic in your piece that
I think onshore projects in Alaska can take about fifteen
years to sort of come to fruition offshore when you're
out in the water can take thirty years, and projects
elsewhere unless threatening climates can be anywhere from several months
(23:39):
to five years, depending on the scope of the project.
Is that right more or less?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, that's an estimate for the National Petroleum Council. That
is one of the things that I think prevents what
some people would call it a scramble for oil in
the Arctic. You know, if you're looking at a project
that's going to take fifty years or thirty years to
come to fruition, particularly at this moment in time, when
(24:07):
you know some people are estimating oil demand could peak
this decade or next decade, it's very hard to get
a financier to sign off on that.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
You spend a lot of time at Kuparak, a Carnico
Phillips project site, given all of these challenges. Why is
Carnical Phillips there.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, this will sound perhaps a little banal, it's there
because it's already there. With a lot of these big
oil provinces that were developed in response to the oil
shocks of the nineteen seventies, they were developed under a
very specific set of pressures and circumstances. Oil prices were
super high, so you could justify pretty much anything, and
(24:47):
you had governments prodding you in the back to get
this done in order to bring about energy security. Now,
the fact is Conico is already the largest player there,
and if you think about the Willow project, as you mentioned,
which is the new one that's being developed. You know,
if you think about that, Konko is going to spend
something like seven or eight billion dollars on that project.
It's a reasonably sized oil project, but certainly it's not
(25:09):
a giant project. But the reason they can do it
is because it's only a few miles from where they
already have investments made in pipelines, gravel minds, that sort
of thing.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
So it's incremental.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Right. If you were a new player, it would be
almost unfathomable to think that you might just go in
there and develop that from scratch.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
You also noted in your piece that the energy companies
face the same environmental and climactic challenges that the military faces.
Equipment breaks down, it's hard to get people to live there,
et cetera, et cetera. Another thing that's in play, obviously too,
is that there has been this sense that the fossil
fuel industry has plateaued or has been peaking as there's
(25:52):
a push toward green The irony in Alaska is the
climate change that fossil fuels help engender is making it
easier for fossil fuel exploration to proceed apace in Alaska.
But is there any thinking, even a veteran player like Conico,
that all of the money they're spending and all these
projects they're working on now have a shorter half life
(26:16):
than maybe they did a decade ago because of the
green energy push? Or is the oil that's being extracted
up there going to continue to be necessary and desired
and purchased for a long time.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
I think if you ask the oil companies, they will
say yes, for a couple of reasons. One is, generally
they view oil's longevity in the local energy system as
being longer than some others, particularly environmentalists would think, or
like I think. The other thing is it comes back
to that issue of incumbency. You know, a company like
Conico can produce a barrel of oil from Alaska for
(26:50):
thirty bucks or less. You know, the oil price right
now is ninety bucks. So for them, they look at
that it's in a politically stable part of the world,
the US, And they say, okay, well, even if oil
demand does peak and plateau and decline, who's going to
be the last producer standing? Is it going to be
(27:12):
US in Alaska or some high cost producer in some
unstable part of the world.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
They can still do it profitably, so they'll still.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Do it, that's right. And I think, you know, as
President Biden's approval of the project earlier this year, the
Willow Project, which was controversial, I think as even he
recognized with his Green Agenda, you still need stable incumbent
energy supplies to get you to the point where the
new energy systems we're building now can take over.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
And as the US's own strategic reserve WANs as other
wars are gang fought, what about the indigenous communities that
are sort of caught in the crosshairs of either military
incursions or commercial exploration. We'll talk about that more as
we transition to the next segment. But what kind of
fissures is that And raising.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
This in some ways was the most fascinating aspect of
not just the energy feature, but also the fisheries feature.
Is I think coming from the lower forty eight. We
tend to have this rather outdated, almost colonial view of
Alaska Natives as these subsistence fishers and hunters living off
(28:26):
the land and entirely separated from you know what, we
would call it westernized or industrialized economy, and that's really
far from the truth. If you go to the North
Slope where the ore production is. So the North Slope
is an area, it's bigger than thirty nine states, it's
only got about eleven thousand people living in it, which
would feel about half a Madison Square garden. Ninety percent
(28:50):
of their borough revenue comes from taxing oil production. Their
whole lifestyle, everything from the fuel to running the snow
machines they use to hunt or to fuel the boats
they use to go fishing, the revenue to build housing,
to run healthcare programs, it all comes from oil. And
(29:13):
that's what makes the energy transition in a place like
that particularly acute as an issue. They recognize that the
warming climate is changing their physical environment. They recognize it's
affecting the fish, it's affecting the caribou, but they also
recognize that without that revenue, their way of life is
(29:37):
pretty much over. They would probably have to evacuate a
lot of those people if you switched off the oil
revenue tomorrow. So it's just a very difficult tension that
they have to deal with.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
We're going to dig into that deeper after the break
and want to just stop for a moment. How to
hear from one of our sponsors, and we'll come right back.
We're back with William Denning, who's educating us about the Arctic.
Liam we focused on the military and energy consideration shaping
the new Arctic land rush. Let's now talk about fish.
(30:12):
Why do fish figure so prominently in Alaska's economy and
cultural identity.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Well, you know what's really interesting is when we first
conceived this project, fishing was something in the back of
our mind, but it was not one of the topics
we were really going to address up front. But as
we did reporting on the other features, all sorts of
people said, you've got to write about fish. Fishing is
a big topic here. It's important to Alaska for a
(30:40):
few reasons. One is it's just a very big industry.
It's the biggest private sector employer in the state. It's
the biggest coastal fishery in the US by a large margin.
But also it's integral to the way of life, particularly
in rural Alaska, particularly in Native villages, simply because they
(31:02):
rely on fishing to eat, to live in some ways,
to give meaning to their life and provide a sense.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Of community, as they have for yards.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
For at least ten thousand years. And that really came
home to me in a meeting with elders and village
members in a little village called Quatlook in western Alaska,
where one of the elder is a woman named Liz Dylan,
quite simply and poignantly laid out the importance of fishing
as told to her by her ancestors, by her elders
(31:31):
back in the day.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
And you've got a clip of that, so let's have
a quick listen.
Speaker 5 (31:35):
Our elders shoes to say, fish will be always living
in the waters. They come once a year and they
come back the next year. But the fish will be
in the waters for us to catch and to eat
and harvest, and they will never they will never disuppair
(32:04):
until the end of the world.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
What are some of the mean species of fish that
inhabit the waters around Alaska, because that's actually a factor
in all of this.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Right, absolutely, so, the big one economically is actually fished
far out of sight of land in Alaska, and that's
Alaskan pollock. Pollock is a sort of a codlike pretty
low value but fairly an offensive white fish, which you'll
find in things like McDonald's Phillia fish sandwiches. The other
(32:34):
big I think more iconic species that people would tend
to think of as king salmon, snow crab, king crab, halibut.
These are the fish that you might buy in the
supermarket anywhere in the US.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
So Alaska is essentially the fishery that feeds fish to
the lower forty eight.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
States, absolutely, and Alaskan pollock is interesting partly because you
will find it in things like school meals, that kind
of thing where you need a relatively cheap fish protein
just for sustenance. And the fisheries in Alaska are under
stress right now too, right, That's right, and that's why
so many people brought it up to us as we
were doing our reporting. It's also big reason why Representative
(33:15):
Mary Peltola was elected in twenty twenty two in an upset,
you know, the first Democrat that Alaska had sent to
the House in fifty years, the first Alaska Native representative. Ever,
a big part of her platform was protecting the fisheries,
and she was also a pro willow She was pro
willow yes in part because she recognizes the importance of
(33:37):
that revenue for native communities.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
So she's juggling these sort of tensions between one kind
of economic development and another one that also can overshadow
traditions and lifestyles and needs. That's right.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
I mean it gets to that issue around Alaska, which
is I think, particularly in the lower forty eight, we
tend to think of Alaska as a giant national park
where you know, there's just polar bears roaming around and
nothing really happens. But you get there and you realize that,
you know, industrialization is a key feature of the Arctic economy,
in the Alaskan economy, it's hard to separate those things
(34:13):
out neatly.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Talk to me about the tensions between local and indigenous
fissures and big commercial operations. The troll, as you note
in one of your pieces, and I quote catching and
killing your own dinner, is one of the many things
that set Alaska's apart from the residents of most other states.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Absolutely. So you know, when you go to these villages
This comes home to you just on the plane we
flew from Anchorage out to Bethel, which is the hub
of the Yukon cousco Quim Delta in western Alaska, and
on the plane there's more boxes of groceries than there
are suitcases. Because it costs a hell of a lot
(34:51):
to live out in western Alaska. I paid a visit
to the supermarket one day, and you can be paying
fifteen dollars for a lot for bread, ten dollars for
a quarter of milk, eighty dollars for a box of diapers.
Living there without living off the land is frankly impossible.
So as we've seen in the past, beginning about a
(35:15):
decade ago, when regulators come into these villages and say
the salmon run is very low this year, you're going
to have to stop fishing for a couple of weeks,
a month, a whole season. It's an existential threat. It's
not just oh my hobby got blocked off for the summer.
What am I going to do now? This is people
(35:36):
who fish the dinner literally out of their backyards and
then smoke it, store it up for the winter to
get them through those months. And if that is taken away,
they lose a sense of food security, they lose importantly
a sense of food sovereignty and that idea of controlling
(35:57):
their own destiny. I think it's particularly important in these
alaskaative communities, and they lose a sense of community. You know,
you travel along the cosco Quin River and all along
the banks, you see these fish camps, and it's where
families and neighbors gathered sometimes for weeks on end during
the summer to fish and process the fish that they
(36:18):
would need to get them through that.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
And now are those communities evaporating as commercial fishing continues
to sprawl.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
The impression I get is that physically their landscape is
kind of crumbling into the rivers and the oceans.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
That is happening because of global warming, because.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Of climate change, absolutely, and climate change is also having
an impact on the fish. It's a controversial topic exactly
how much it's having an impact, but you can see
how in a delicate ecological web that changes in water
temperature can affect not just salmon themselves, which are the
fish they prize, but also the fish that the salmon
(36:57):
feed on, and that can have all sorts of cascading effects.
But you also see in just the encroachment of the
outside world. One woman I spoke with at a village meeting,
she was very upset about the impact on fishing, but
you also got a sense that she was worried about
the young people in their village losing their connection to
(37:17):
the land and playing video games instead and not learning
how to subsist. And I think in some ways that's
the thing that's really gutting these communities. It's that sense
that they're breaking decisively from their past.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
And how do the large commercial fisheries see all of this.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
I think the sense you get from the commercial fisheries
is that Alaska pollock is a giant money maker. It
is the second biggest wild fishery on the planet, and
that they are providing an important source of protein for
a world in which demand for fishes going up. But
(37:54):
essentially wildfishing peaked in the nineteen nineties. A lot of
the growth we've seen since then is farmed fish, and
that really the issue is climate change. It's not really
their issue. They're not the ones who are, you know,
fishing out the salmon runs from western Alaska, and that
it's kind of up to society to address climate change,
(38:16):
not then, So.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
As you noted at the top, you and I began
talking about this as a project for you about five
years ago or so. And you've looked at the military,
You've looked at the energy exploration, You've looked at the
local communities and fisheries. What have you learned over the
course of your reporting that you didn't know before you
set out to do this? What are some of the
big AHAs for you?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
The biggest AHA for me is that the Arctic is
a and this may sound a little weird, is a
complex human society. Because, as I say, like it doesn't
sound weird like many in the Lower forty eight. I
thought of the Arctic in kind of symbols and images,
you know, frozen landscapes, polar bear as, the odd oil rig,
(39:01):
that sort of thing. But you get there and you realize,
you know, there are nations living there. They live complex lives,
and they're just as fragmented as we are in the
Lower forty eight. For example, with the fishing issue, there
are these things called community development quotas, so sixty five
coastal villages actually get a portion of revenue from the
(39:24):
pollock troll. Now they don't want to see the pollock
troll ending, but their neighbors just up river who don't
get that money are complaining that those trollers are fishing
them out, destroying their way of life. And similarly with
the oil.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Are those differences because of the way the various populations
were expropriated when outsiders came in, where there's just different
deals cut in order to give commercial interest access to
the land when indigenous peoples were appropriated.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
I think there is a long history of that, you know,
and it goes back to the Alaska Native Claimed Settlement
Act in nine in seventy one, and then the Magnus
and Stephens Fisheries Act of nineteen seventy six. There have
been various attempts to square the circle in Alaska of
balancing indigenous rights with the desire, particularly from the outside
(40:14):
to exploit Alaska's rich resources, and with the community development
quotas in particular. I think in some ways that came
from a good place. It was a sense that these
native villages should be getting some portion of the revenue
from the waters off the coast, But it also cleaved
them from some of their neighbors. And you see this
(40:36):
also in land division. You know, one of the villages.
I went to a place called Quagillingock, which means place
of no river, which is sort of ironic because it's
sinking into the water. They are, as we speak, trying
to work out how they can buy parcels of land
further away to eventually move that village to higher ground
(40:57):
because they know it's daser kind of numbered.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
So before we wrap up any other things you've learned.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
I would go back to this idea of the imagined
narrative that Alaska and the wider Arctic is an area
that I think is in some ways fixed in our mind,
but it's also a place where we project narratives. China
is projecting a narrative of becoming a great power. The
US is projecting a narrative of being suddenly beset by enemies.
(41:28):
Russia is projecting a narrative that even as its armed
forces are chewed up in Ukraine, it's going to emerge
as a powerful Arctic nation. All these things are clashing,
and the people who live there are frankly caught in
the middle.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Liam, thank you for wrapping things up for us. We're
out of time. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
William Denning is a calumnist with Bloomberg Opinion. You can
find his work at the Bloomberg Opinion website and on
the Bloomberg Terminal. You can find Liam himself on Twitter
at Denning Here at crash Course, we believe that collisions
can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In
today's Crash Course, I learned that the title that I
(42:12):
gave to this episode, the Race to Control the Arctic,
actually might not be the right title given everything that
Liam just told me. What's going on for both commercial operators,
the military, and everyone else up in Alaska is a long, cold,
challenging slog. What did you learn? We'd love to hear
from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion handle
(42:35):
at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag
Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show
wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review.
It helps more people find the show. This episode was
produced by the indispensable Ona masurakas Moses on Dom and Me.
Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing
(42:56):
help from Sagebauman. Jeff Grocott, Mike Nize and Christine Danden
Bylark Blake. Maple says, our sound engineering and our original
theme song was composed by Luis Gara. I'm Tim O'Brien.
We'll be back next week with another Crash course
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