Arctic oil & gas development would setback progress against global warming
Quicktabs: Arguments
Shell is considering drilling for oil in the Arctic but it may not be worth the risk of public outrage due to the inevitability of catastrophic oil spills and the increasing realization that extracting Arctic oil would pose a grave risk to the global climate.
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The United Nations’ top climate official took a subtle poke at the Obama administration on Wednesday over its decision to conditionally allow oil exploration off Alaska’s coast, suggesting that the Arctic’s oil and gas should stay underground.
[ More ]If there’s oil in them thar hills, it should stay there. That’s the message of a new study that argues the bulk of remaining fossil fuels should remain in the ground, rather than being mined, fracked, extracted, or tapped.
[ More ]Scientists have realized for some time now that the extraction of fossil fuels must dramatically slow down if the global temperature rise is to be kept under 2°C. A new study in the science journal Nature, however, is the first to specify and quantify which regions of the world need to cool it on the oil, gas, and coal and it estimates that for the Arctic, 100% of the resources must remain undeveloped.
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This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw "vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor," as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.
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