Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (10 page)

The scientists had come to retrieve an instrument left on the ice cap at seventy-six degrees north—some two hundred miles and two hours of flying time away. It was a ten-foot-tall metal tripod with a hard drive, a solar panel, and various sensors meant to track glacial melt. It had stopped working, but this patch of the otherwise shrinking ice sheet wasn’t moving particularly quickly. GEUS was nevertheless spending tens of thousands of dollars to get it back, and because they had extra seats, I, too, was given a chance to benefit from Denmark’s largesse. Helicopter charters in Greenland were otherwise expensive and near impossible to find: Oil and mining firms had booked them all up.

The helicopter was a single-rotor Bell 212, immaculately red like the rest of the Air Greenland fleet. One morning, just after dawn, we climbed in, and it lifted us above the town, above the fjords. Out the window were fog banks and empty islands, then a single iceberg in a windswept bay, then hundreds of icebergs, then thousands. The pilot, a Norwegian, flew between them, yards above the water. Then we climbed again and followed the ice cap north. Where glaciers were calving, spilling into the ocean, the seawater had frozen over during the night. On the ice cap itself, the surface was heavily crevassed and endless, a pattern of thousands of parallel cuts. I saw blues and grays and whites and browns, the red of the rocks, the orange of the rising sun. What I didn’t see were people: On various islands were remnants of villages, stone walls and abandoned buildings, but the landscape had been further emptied as hunters moved to the cities.

I shared my window with a Dane who’d also heard about the helicopter’s free seats. His name was Nikolaj, and he was a lab tech at the Upernavik hospital. He and the pilot also co-owned a kayaking business that rented out boats, dry bags, satellite phones, and polar bear protection in the form of .30-06 rifles. Business was good. That summer, fifteen foreigners had come, including two Israelis who camped out on an island for a month.

We stopped for a mandatory refuel in the village of Kullorsuaq—the only sign of life was the howling of sled dogs—and I quizzed Nikolaj about the hospital. The doctors were all foreigners, he said. “They come for one month at a time. Obstetricians, maybe one week. It’s like a vacation for them.” I asked what he thought about the referendum. “People here are spoiled,” he said. “They have no idea how much things really cost.” Greenland should stick with Denmark but find a way to keep the oil money, the pilot suggested. I wondered aloud if Denmark was really so enlightened as to give up all that oil. “That just tells you something about the Danish people,” said one of the GEUS guys. We spent ninety minutes on the ice cap, just long enough for the tripod to be taken apart and stuffed into a wooden crate, then flew back to Upernavik just in time for me to make the next leg of the road show.

In Uummannaq, a thirteen-hundred-person island town that was famous as the home of Siissisoq, a metal band that sang in Greenlandic about the slaughter of African mammals, the road show was joined by Greenland’s then premier, Hans Enoksen, a fierce secessionist and unlikely mentor to Minik. He was a former town grocer who rose to power in 2002 after serving as hunting and fisheries minister. In a high school auditorium, I watched him take part in a four-on-one smack down of the only anti-secession politician. The school’s main hall was bright and angular and modern, with vaulted ceilings and walls of art—triptychs of icebergs, a painting of bananas and grapes. Enoksen was stern and relentless, slowly pumping his fist in the air as he spoke. It was a full house, eighty or more citizens. “We have been a colonized people for three hundred years,” he rumbled. “Now that we have this opportunity, how can we say no?”

The premier hired a blue powerboat the next day, and we headed off to visit nearby settlements. We pulled out of Uummannaq’s harbor, past its helipad and heart-shaped, thirty-eight-hundred-foot landmark mountain, and into a broad channel between sheer cliffs of stratified granite. After a while the premier turned to me. “The American ambassador in Copenhagen has been very supportive of self-governance,” he said, Minik translating. “Much more than any before him.” (In a leaked cable, the ambassador, James P. Cain, bragged of introducing Enoksen and a future premier, Aleqa Hammond, “to some of our top U.S. financial institutions in New York.”)

America’s support was unsurprising. In 1946, Washington was so impressed with Greenland’s strategic potential that America secretly tried to buy the island from Denmark for $100 million. The U.S. military still ran Thule Air Base, a cold-war-era installation in Greenland’s far north that had more recently been used for the CIA’s extraordinary-rendition flights. Before that, we’d apparently lost a nuclear warhead there—leaving local hunters eating radioactive fish and seals. Now that we’d learned Greenland had a lot of oil, our companies were buying exploration blocks.

I wondered if giving up Denmark meant embracing America. Not necessarily America as overlord—indeed, China would soon make a play for Greenland’s minerals—but America as capitalist ideal. Americanism—the free market, the need for growth, the never-ending quest for oil. I put the question to the premier: Was replacing Denmark’s money with other foreigners’ money really independence? He didn’t quite answer. “If oil is discovered, foreigners will come no matter what,” he said. “But after we vote yes, they will be working for us.” He pounded his fist against his chest three times, then raised it to the sky. “This is what will change under me,” he said.

 • • • 

MONTHS EARLIER, I
had attended the first annual Greenland Sustainable Mineral and Petroleum Development Conference, held in a Radisson in Copenhagen in May 2008. Only one native Greenlander gave a talk, and he was almost indistinguishable from the other attendees, nearly all of them middle-aged men, nearly all of them in blue or white dress shirts. He presented the Greenland Secretariat of Ice and Water’s market research from Los Angeles and Tokyo. It was extremely promising. Bottled-water buyers knew next to nothing about his island, he said, but they knew all they needed to know. “Their knowledge of Greenland is limited to ‘ice’ and ‘cold,’” he explained.

The other speakers, Canadians and Australians and Brits and Swedes, veteran operators in Rajasthan and Guinea and Mongolia and the Philippines, described the mineral rush: West Greenland gold discoveries and South Greenland gold mining; two-and-a-half-carat diamonds found by the Canadian firm Hudson Resources; rubies drilled by the Canadian firm True North Gems; open-pit molybdenum mines proposed by the Canadian firm Quadra Mining; and uranium and rare earth minerals finds by an Australian-owned, eventually Chinese-backed company with a local name, Greenland Minerals and Energy. A representative of GEUS spelled out Greenland’s petroleum prospects. The miners discussed the island’s tough logistics but “world-class commercial terms.” If you could get there, they implied, these Inuit would let you drill anywhere. The prospect of having mining underwrite their independence from Denmark had made Greenlanders very agreeable.

The speaker who most explicitly linked his mine’s fortunes to climate change was Nick Hall, CEO of the British company Angus and Ross, who showed the room a photograph of a mountain of marble above a giant fjord: the Black Angel. The zinc deposit here is one of the richest on the planet. It was discovered in the 1930s, explored in the 1960s, and mined between 1973 and 1990 via tunnels dug high above the fjord. Then it was abandoned. Hall’s company took over the lease in 2003, when zinc prices were about to rise, and in 2006 two geologists on a day hike discovered a deposit as pure as the original at the edge of the retreating South Lakes Glacier. Before the melt, it had been hidden by a hundred-foot-thick wall of glacial ice. Along with the extended shipping season, it was, Hall had admitted, the “upside of global warming.”

After he finished, Hall was surrounded by financiers: Australians in pressed suits representing British money, handing him business cards. A Canadian approached to offer the services of her logistics company: nurses, medics, and other camp staff. I approached him, too, and asked if I could visit the mine when in Greenland. Angus and Ross, by all accounts responsible and well-meaning, represented the uncomfortable reality faced by the northern “winners” of global warming, be they Inupiat, Greenlandic, Icelandic, or Canadian: Local residents did not have the capital, expertise, or population base to transform the Arctic on their own. There was the danger that they would get most of the change and most of the degradation, and wealthier outsiders would get most of the profits.

When I set out to reach the mine from Uummannaq, I sped out of the same harbor as I had with Premier Enoksen and into the same broad channel, but this time the boat captain was Danish, and he was working for the British. We left the channel and crossed a choppy stretch of open water, then hugged another set of cliffs. Entering a long fjord, we waved at fishermen and slowed down to watch a village woman butcher a seal on a rock. The fjord narrowed, and the water became glassy. After two hours, the namesake Angel rose before us: a Rorschach blot of ghostly black zinc two thousand feet up a mostly white cliff.

It was the end of the summer work season, and the mining camp was nearly empty. It was a series of prefab buildings on a man-made plateau, surrounded by the crumbling concrete and rusting machines of the original operation. Next to the harbor was a cable car—purchased secondhand from the Swiss ski area Disentis, in the melting Alps—that would someday span the mile-wide fjord to the mine. The buildings contained bunk rooms and a lounge with comfortable couches, a wide-screen TV, and a fast Wi-Fi connection. Inside the lounge, Tim Daffern, the mine’s Australian operations manager, told me his company’s game plan.

After pulling out the two tons of zinc left in the original mine—the support pillars, mainly, which they’d replace with cement pillars—they would focus on the deposit at South Lakes Glacier. It was certain to keep retreating: They’d commissioned a study by GEUS and some British scientists to be extra sure. If the original mine would last five years, South Lakes would buy them another decade. A third deposit they had identified could buy two more years, a fourth, three more—glaciers shrinking all the while. “Anywhere the ice retreats,” Daffern said, “we’ll explore.”

Daffern’s predecessors had dumped their tailings in the fjord. The waste was 0.2 percent lead and 1 percent zinc, and it had rusted before it could sink into the anoxic depths. Every spring, a rush of melting water had spread the waste farther. It had been ingested by blue mussels, and fish had eaten the mussels, and seals had eaten the fish, and on it had gone up the food chain. After seventeen years of mining, it had taken another seventeen years for the fjord to recover.

Daffern and I took a walk in the rain, climbing above the mining camp until we had views of the entire fjord, the fog banks, the seracs of the Alfred Wegener Glacier. I ventured into an old mine shaft until its slope steepened and became a sheet of ice. Daffern pointed out another shaft, where they’d found bags of chemicals that had been dumped and then sealed in by a bulldozer sometime in the 1980s. Daffern promised to do things differently. He also promised, just as everyone had at the mining conference, to hire as many locals as possible. When we returned, we ate an incredible, five-course lunch prepared by the camp cook, a guy named Johnny, who was Filipino.

 • • • 

ON DAY SEVEN
of Minik’s self-governance tour, after seven meetings in seven villages and towns, the politicians relaxed in a government guesthouse outside the Qaarsut Airport, waiting to go home. Our flight wasn’t until 4:30 p.m., and we had the entire day off. There was a buffet with muesli, yogurt, and fresh-baked bread. The TV was on; we pulled out cell phones and laptops and flipped through the newspaper. Then the premier walked in and announced that a hunter’s boat was ready to take us on a quick visit to the village of Niaqornat, population sixty-eight, more than an hour up the Nuussuaq Peninsula. Going out again was masochism. Only Minik and I agreed to join him.

The open boat was maybe fifteen feet long. We hopped in at a gravelly beach below the airstrip, timing the surf so our feet didn’t get wet. Minik put his laptop in a plastic bag. He and I kept low out of the biting wind, but the premier, wearing jeans, thin gloves, and a baseball cap, stood in the back of the boat, watching the coastline zip by.

The water was smooth, and there were beaches the whole way; above them, slopes rose steeply to six-thousand-foot summits already covered in snow. We passed seals and house-size icebergs and finally looped into Niaqornat’s natural harbor. The village was stunning, on a spit of low-lying land between an ocean-side turret of rock and the white peaks of the peninsula. There were bright wooden houses but no cars. There were racks where villagers were drying junk fish for the sled dogs and strips of halibut and seal for themselves. Open boats and icebergs shared the harbor. The sun was shining. It was, for once, the Greenland of my imagination—and perhaps that of the premier’s as well.

The meeting was held in the schoolhouse, and a quarter of Niaqornat showed up, if you count the baby. To make a projector screen, they flipped around a big map of Greenland and hung it over the blackboard. Above the map were diagrams so the children could learn the Danish names of everyday items: balloon, anorak, king, cigarette. As the premier talked, I checked out a poster showing eight local whale species and their key specs: weight, top speed, length, amount of time they could hold their breath. A man in a T-shirt that read “Deep Sea Shark Fishing” asked about money, and Minik flipped through some slides I hadn’t seen before: projections of mineral revenues skyrocketing into the future. One showed the oil blocks that Greenland had already sold off to foreign firms. They were just on the other side of the peninsula.

We had lunch in the home of one of the premier’s supporters, a great hunter whose walls were decorated with narwhal tusks and walrus skulls and pictures of dead polar bears. He laid out dried, jerky-like whale meat, then served us cold narwhal skin, which his daughters and the premier sliced into chewable chunks. His CD collection and computer were in the corner, along with his daughter’s pet gerbil. His teenage son walked in with a premade sandwich and stuck it in the microwave. The premier gorged on narwhal. “If we did not eat what the sea gives us,” he said, “we would not be here.” When we reached the dock to meet our boat, the village had gathered to see us off, and someone had distributed little Greenlandic flags, which the citizens waved back and forth until we were out of view.