93
Arctic Yearbook 2015
North America’s largest oil field, extraction peaked in 1988 (Energy Information Administration
Alaska 2014). Coupled with Alaska’s present US$3.6 billion budget deficit (State of Alaska 2015), and
high wage-earning potential that averaged US$127,148 in 2012 (Fried 2013), the desire for offshore
exploration is considerable. To that end, in August 2015 Royal Dutch Shell received final approval
from U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to resume work
in the Chukchi Sea halted in 2012 when its main drilling rig ran aground. Shell has already invested
US$7 billion in exploration for oil in the Arctic (Gardner 2015).
But the consequences of offshore oil extraction are considerable. Only months before BOEMs
approval of Shell’s project, the agency’s own Environmental Impact Report (2015) reported that in a
scenario based on the lifetime of a drilling project in the Chukchi Sea that there is a “75% chance of
one or more large oil spills,” and also estimates the chance for 800 small oil spills. “Even under the
best of conditions,” NPC (2015: 44) acknowledged, “one can never expect to recover all of the oil
from a large spill on water.”
Indeed, the potential, if not likelihood, of future oil spills are clearly exemplified by the 1989 Exxon
Valdez accident and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, but seem not to deter expansion of
offshore drilling. In the aftermath of the latter Walter Parker, chair of the Alaska Oil Spill Commission
responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill investigation said, “It’s as though we had never written the
report” (Struzik 2015: 156).
Despite past oil spills, government reports and vast scientific study, efforts to drill in the Arctic are
ongoing. A scientific study published in Nature (McGlade & Ekins 2015) said: “We show that
development of resources in the Arctic and any increase in unconventional oil production are
incommensurate with efforts to limit average global warming to 2 °C. Our results show that policy
makers’ instincts to exploit rapidly and completely their territorial fossil fuels are, in aggregate,
inconsistent with their commitments to this temperature limit.”
As the case of Alaska shows, the fledgling development of renewable energies juxtaposed with fossil
fuels represents the dueling perspectives. In what is known as the ‘energy paradox’, Jaffe and Stavins
wrote in 1994, “In the long run, the development and widespread adoption of new technologies can
greatly ameliorate what, in the short run, sometimes appear to be overwhelming conflicts between
economic well-being and environmental quality” (92). This brings to the forefront the question of
governance. What is the state of environmental governance when Arctic warming, and broadly climate
change are up against the economics and availability of fossil fuels?
Unraveling governance
The concept of governance for the changing Arctic is a challenging question for even the most
seasoned of Arctic experts (Koivurova 2012; Young 2013). What are the possibilities and limits of the
Arctic Council? What roles do international fora and national policy play in the governance of Arctic
development and conservation? For purposes here, I propose that the AC needs to govern for
conservation while national policy, writ large, must compliment the principle of environmental
protection. If in fact the object of des