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The frozen island sits atop giant oil and gas reserves that climate activists say should never see the light of day...
An attempt by incoming United States President Donald Trump to wrest control of Greenland could be big business for fossil fuel firms – and could send the planet into a climate change spiral from which there would be no hope of recovery.
Trump, who will be inaugurated for his second term on January 20, has issued a warning about annexing the icy island territory, which has been part of the Kingdom of Denmark for three centuries. He threatened to impose heavy tariffs to force Copenhagen's hand.
There is another reason the island could be an enticing prospect for Washington, beyond Trump's claim that it needs "economic security."
According to an estimate by the U.S. Geological Survey, Greenland "contains approximately 31,400 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMBOE) of oil" and other petroleum products, including about 148 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
"This is the amount of reserves that if discovered in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, businesses would jump for joy," said Ajay Parmar, a senior crude oil markets analyst with commodity intelligence firm ICIS.
"Of course, since it's in Greenland, there would be technical challenges in laying pipelines to extract it and distribute it around the world," he said.
"But there's still a huge commercial opportunity there, even if it would take a lot of time and effort to make it work."
However, in 2021, Greenland introduced a moratorium on oil and gas exploitation after the pro-independence Inuit Ataqatigiit Socialist Party took power, vowing to "take the climate crisis seriously."
In contrast, Trump has vowed to “exploit American energy” once he takes office. He has also promised to overturn a Biden administration freeze on new natural gas projects and has repeatedly rejected U.S. commitments on climate change.
Environmental activists worry that the prospect of Greenland falling into Trump's hands could mean lifting the ban on oil and gas drilling, leading to more emissions that they say constitute a "carbon bomb."
"We can easily say that there is no path to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees that does not include moratoriums or bans or not opening new oil fields anywhere," said Kirtana Chandrasekaran, an activist with Friends of the Earth.
According to her, expanding extraction in Greenland would be a very poor example to set for global climate leadership and would be used as an excuse by climate change skeptics in Europe and beyond "as to why other countries should now just forget about it and collapse."
In an interview with Fox News, Congressman Mike Waltz – Trump's incoming national security adviser – said the plan "isn't just about Greenland."
"This is about the Arctic," he said, adding, "you have Russia trying to become king of the Arctic with over 60 icebreakers, some of them nuclear-powered...".
The impact of mining itself could have a catastrophic effect on local fauna and flora in the melting region, according to Anne Tolvanen, a professor and research program director at the Natural Resources Institute of Finland, who is co-author of a review on mining in the Arctic environment. /Adapted from Politico/
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