As the US and Russia fight over Syria and the Middle East, while China, the US and almost the whole of Asia claw it out over who owns a few islands in the South China Sea, there is a third region of contention that hasn’t garnered quite so much attention as of yet.
That region is near the North Pole, where a 1000 mile-long underwater mountain range called the Lomonosov Ridge holds some 13% of the world’s remaining oil, worth 17.2 trillion dollars.
Since 1975, 65% of the ice that had kept this precious bounty safe has melted… and ironically none of the countries involved have called this a sign of the need to combat climate change.
Instead, they’ve rushed in to claim this wealth of greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuels.
The nautical territory of the area happens to be under the administration of the UN, based on the Convention on the Law of the Sea. For any one of the five countries (Russia, The United States, Canada, Denmark, and Norway) that border this region to claim it, they will need to petition the UN and prove that they own it.
During the ratification of the above agreement, US President Ronald Reagon refused to sign it; in 2001, Russia had sent a submarine to the “peak” of the underwater mountain to plant a gigantic flag; Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper even declared that Santa Claus was a Canadian citizen… rendering the entire region Canadian territory… based on a fictional character…
It’s safe to say that the five countries all have their eyes on the prize… literally, as they have extensive spy programs keeping watch on the region… watching the ice melt… watching each other watch each other… yawn.
Another COLD war, hehe, is brewing over there and so we have a third front for potential conflict… for the usual reasons.
It seems the US might have the strongest claim of the ridge, as they had refused to sign the above-mentioned treaty to begin with and don’t “have” to petition the UN… yet another example of how they’ve benefited from NOT agreeing to a treaty… for a completely irrelevant history of a few of these, read below.
(The US is the only country other than Somalia that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, It is one of only seven countries-together with Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan and Tonga- that has failed to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the Mine Ban Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, the Kyoto Protocol…
Basically it is a champion of child rights, female equality, disabled equality, not causing people to disappear, not using mines or cluster bombs that could kill civilians, not torturing people, reducing Greenhouse emissions… until it really really needs to do the opposite, of course)
Sources: Deepcor, Human Rights Watch
This Article (How Climate Change Has Unveiled A Third Potential Front For WW3) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
how is this title even possible? what does it sound to you? propaganda? anyone awake?
Polar bears can swim…
so can we, but we cant survive there can we?
Basically it is a champion of child rights, female equality, disabled equality, not causing people to disappear, not using mines or cluster bombs that could kill civilians, not torturing people, reducing Greenhouse emissions… until it really really needs to do the opposite, of course)
I hope this was meant to be some kind of sarcastic joke that I’m not catching up on.. Otherwise you should try to truly inform yourself before writing such a statement.
They never really really needed to do anything, most of this is about making more money and not caring about their own citizens enough to grant them rights at the cost of money or intel.
And they don’t have any rational claim to the north pole, not signing the above mentioned agreement would be more of a reason to decrease their claim.
If 5 countries create agreements over a certain area and one country bails out and doesn’t sign they don’t get more claim to said area because they chose not to participate. It would be seen as far more hostile and provoking if the USA would just claim it over such a reason than when Russia would just claim it for planting a big flag everyone knew about first.