Greenland’s Most Valuable Resource Isn’t Its Minerals

Billions of dollars that were earmarked to support climate-related programs at the UN have been canceled by the State Department, and cuts have hit USAID, which has been a leader in projects around the world such as installing solar panels on hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa.

So far, in the first 30 days of his administration, thousands of people have been fired from their jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, and the Department of the Interior. Even Forest Service workers, whose main job was working on trails but had been diverted to fighting wildfires, were let go. Employees at the Chicago office of the EPA, some of whom worked to enforce clean water regulations, were locked out of their laptops and fired with no advance warning. At the Justice Department, lawyers who had been assigned to work on enforcement of environmental laws are now having to work on retribution against cities that buck the president’s immigration policies, according to E&E News. USA Today reports that there is no official count of how many federal workers from all agencies have been laid off, but the number could be more than 100,000.

Funds to build public charging stations for electric vehicles have been frozen by the administration in a move that is viewed as an open refusal to follow the law and court orders. The online news service Elektrek reports that Trump is getting rid of about 8,000 EV charging stations at federal office buildings. An email sent inside the General Services Administration obtained by Inside Climate News says that the stations are not “mission critical” and will be “turned off at the breaker.”

The new Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, expressed the administration’s views on climate change to a group of conservatives in London last week, saying that the goal of attaining net zero carbon emissions by 2050 was sinister and terrible. He added that the UK’s aggressive pursuit of that goal had delivered not any benefits but instead tremendous costs.

E&E News reports that the EPA is soon expected to release a list of regulations to be trashed, possibly including the finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health, which is the basis for various rules issued under the Clean Air Act. The administration is also targeting any research that contains the word “climate” and will withdraw grants and other support for science using the term.

Writing in The Conversation, Paul Bierman of the University of Vermont explains that rapid global warming increases what is already a substantial personal and economic risk for those who would work there extracting resources, not to mention to the nearly 60,000 people who currently live there. A recent study by the University of Durham shows that the ice sheet is falling apart because of climate change, which threatens Greenland’s infrastructure. Record floods have destroyed 50-year-old bridges.

Bierman, a geoscientist explains that the coastline is prone to rockslides, and because ice, which stabilized nearly vertical walls has now melted, the deep fjords are prone to collapse. Also, with no system of paved roads, the only way to transport minerals, fuels, and equipment is by sea, which is vulnerable to tsunamis triggered by the slides. Global warming has also thawed permafrost underneath the island, destabilizing the landscape and weakening steep slopes. More melting leads to more icebergs calving, which pose risks to oil rigs at sea.

Bierman states that Greenland’s value to the world is not its fossil fuels and minerals, but its ice, which if melts in entirety, could raise global sea levels up to 23 feet.

H2O Radio spoke with the lead author, Gan Zhang, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He said that reduced wind speed, known as “stilling,” is happening as Earth’s land and troposphere (the part of the atmosphere closest to the planet’s surface) heat up. Zhang explained that winds are driven in part by the temperature difference between the cold air at the poles and warmer air at midlatitudes. As Arctic air warms because of climate change, the temperature gap between the poles and lower latitudes is shrinking, causing wind speeds to weaken.

How much? The study projects that wind speeds in Europe could decline by five percent between now and 2050. While that might not sound like much, it could be enough to affect wind power generation. If climate change goes unchecked, output from wind turbines during the summer months in the latter part of the century could drop by 25 percent. Zhang said that the phenomenon is also occurring in the other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including North America and East Asia. The study emphasizes the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible so clean wind power can be deployed to its full potential.

The study was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Meanwhile, as Radio Prague International reported, seemingly overnight and without permits, plans, or patience for red tape—dams got built. Not by humans but by a colony of eight beavers who constructed several barriers exactly where humans wanted them—and for free.

Scientists often call beavers “ecosystem engineers” and Jaroslav Obermajer, head of the Central Bohemian office of the Czech Nature and Landscape Protection Agency, agreed, saying the rodents had intuitively selected the best location for their dams—better than what engineers had planned.

The Eurasian beavers, which were once hunted nearly to extinction, are being celebrated by environmentalists who say the wetlands and pools the beavers created will be excellent habitat for the rare stone crayfish, as well as numerous insects, fish, amphibians, birds, and other wildlife. Leave it to beavers.