While territorial claims are and will likely be heated, what struck me is that the area is right near the Drake Passage, in the Weddell Sea (which is fundamental to the world’s ocean currents AFAIU).
I don’t know how oil drilling in the antarctic could affect the passage, but still, I’m not sure I would trust human oil hunger with a 10ft pole on that one.
Also interestingly, the discovery was made by Russia, which is a somewhat ominous clue about where the current “multi-polar” world and climate change are heading. Antarctica, being an actual continent that thrived with life up until only about 10-30 M yrs ago, is almost certainly full of resources.
US and Russia are the only countries exempt from the ban on new territorial claims under the UN Antarctic Treaty. Drilling is also banned but thanks to carbon credits, you don’t need to drill to monetize oil: you just need to threaten that you will.
“You know us: we have violated international law before. You can pay us $5/ton to leave some of the oil behind on the off-chance that we do it again. New low for carbon credits!”
Well, this is how a large part of how carbon credits “work”. You can pay someone to not cut down their tree, for example, and get a certificate in return. However, the demand for wood will likely just get satisfied elsewhere and there is little stopping people from selling multiple carbon credits per tree, or just including trees that would not get cut down anyway.
In the best case scenario, actual carbon gets stored so that it won’t decompose (like dead trees or other biomass in oxygen, maybe even plastic someday) or burned (like coal that future people can reach); however, that’s energy-intensive (hydrocarbons release energy when turned into oxides and vice versa) and difficult. Obviously, such carbon credits are expensive and they would probably cost an airline as much as fuel for your flight. Sealing an oil reservoir instead of using it, as I suggest, would be the easiest way to effectively accomplish this but oil producers don’t want to miss out on the fields they operate.
Unless the “carbon neutral” option for your flight ticket is a large percentage of its price, they are probably using dubious carbon credits - in the typical case, they are like saying your crypto mining rig is zero-emission because it’s next to an existing hydroelectric dam. The energy from that could have been used to offset some carbon-intensive production elsewhere (unless all your energy demand is already satisfied by clean electricity and you cannot export, like Iceland some islands).
At worst, it’s a pure scam that offsets no carbon and is pushed by Big Oil to prevent buyers from considering systemic changes to their carbon-heavy operation.
Edit: Iceand indeed has an overproduction of clean energy and they use it to extract and export aluminum, which is energy-intensive. Still, as long as there are gas furnaces and combustion engines on the island, there is room for improvement. However, small tropical islands (which cannot host aluminum factories) mostly use solar panels and some storage solution, and computationally heavy tasks are a legitimate use for any excess electricity production.
I don’t know man, in the US people pay insurance companies money to have access to life saving medications like insulin. So in a way we pay people so we don’t die from medical neglect… which could be considered negligent homicide depending on how you argue it.
This sort of bullshit is normalized in the US. I dont like that our country operates like the mafia, but here we are.
