The Artic is not faring well

– Learn how the Artic is suffering in Tamara Rosenfeld’s documentary “100 Women: Life on Thin Ice.”
– Learn how oil & gas firms are planning to drill in the Artic.
– Learn how “black swan” events might be happening in the Artic with unknown viruses and nuclear waste.

Start with this BBC News article entitled “Climate change: Arctic’s unknown viruses’ and nuclear waste” (I got there from this note from Marcus Wimmer). Then here is a note from Jennifer Motles of Phillip Morris International:

I don’t make this kind of recommendation often, but I recently watched Tamara Rosenfeld’s documentary ‘100 Women: Life on Thin Ice’, and it’s equally parts beautiful and heartbreaking.
For thousands of years the Inuit people lived off the land. Nomadic hunters, chasing targets depending on the seasons. Because of climate crisis, those weather patterns have now utterly and irreversibly shifted.

The Arctic is now warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the globe, according to the NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Program Report Card. Climate change is threatening Inuit’s survival. Both physically and mentally.

Inuit women are trying to hold their families together through it all and this documentary follows three generations of Inuit women: a grandmother, mother, and daughter to see what direct human impact climate change has had on the community and what else have they lost, along with the ice.

And then there’s this excerpt from this newsletter from Sasja Beslik:

As it turns out, oil and gas firms are planning to ramp up their fossil-fuel extraction in the Arctic by more than 20 per cent over the next five years, partly thanks to the financial support they receive from the banking sector, according to a new report by Reclaim Finance. The report lists France’s Total as the leading European energy firm when it comes to oil and gas expansion in the fragile polar region – with its production expected to increase by 28 percent over the next decade. But the Russian energy giant Gazprom is considered the biggest Arctic predator, since 74 percent of its reserves are based there.

Other energy companies with short-term expansion plans in the Arctic are the US’s ConocoPhillips, Norway’s Equinor, Spain’s Repsol and Dutch Shell. From 2016 to 2020, commercial banks have channeled more than $314 bn to the leading companies developing new oil and gas projects in the Arctic. The top backers of Arctic expansionists include banks who have committed to restricting oil and gas financing in the Arctic: JPMorgan Chase (top globally with $18.6bn between 2016-2020), Barclays (4th largest, $13.2bn) Citigroup (6th, $12.2bn) and BNP Paribas (7th, $11.8bn).
European banks account for more than a quarter of the global underwriting and loans to Arctic developers, with increasing support from 2016 ($16.6bn) to 2020 ($28.4bn). Two European banks – HSBC and BNP Paribas – were top bankers of Arctic expansionists in 2020.