President Donald Trump has long craved Greenland, a large island in the North Atlantic controlled by Denmark. He has played a game of chicken by threatening to conquer the island and even vowed at a July NATO summit in Ankara to take Greenland for the United States. He has repeatedly posted a meme of his face acquisitively looming over a Greenlandic village with the slogan “Hello Greenland!”
Now Greenland Energy, a company created by Trump supporter Larry Swets of Texas last year in the midst of Trump’s imperialist rhetoric toward the island, has started moving drilling equipment to East Greenland’s Arctic basin. They claim they will mine $1 trillion in crude oil beneath the Jameson Land region. Both Denmark and Greenland are protesting. And, as one prominent TV news anchor pointed out, America may have in effect begun to invade Greenland.
“The minister in charge of mineral resources in the Greenland government did a local interview in Greenland in which he said he was absolutely sure this American oil company would never break the law and try to start this drilling project without permission,” MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow explained. “Should that happen, he said, Greenland has the means to stop their actions. He said, ‘This is a society governed by the rule of law, so I have some broad-shouldered men in black uniforms in the first instance who can help me deal with some illegal activities if I ask for them’ — by which he means, I think, the Greenlandic police. Then he said, ‘Ultimately, I’m sure that the Arctic Command will also contribute’ — by which he means the Danish military would also, he believes, intervene to stop this American oil company from trying to drill for oil in Greenland without any permission to do so.”
Maddow added, “So you put all this together: this Trump-aligned oil company based in Texas saying, ‘We’re going to drill for oil in Greenland.’ Greenland saying, ‘Oh, no, you’re not.’ The company going ahead and dropping off their drilling equipment anyway. Local residents saying, ‘We’ll fight tooth and nail.’ The local government saying, ‘We’ll use the police, we’ll use the Danish military.’ You put it all together, and it kind of seems like we’re invading Greenland. I mean, this company has somehow hornswoggled itself into a partnership with Dr. Phil to make what sure looks like propaganda TV shows about this ‘heroic and exciting’ oil-drilling project — which the government of Greenland says is illegal, and which they don’t have permission to carry out.”
Ultimately she asked, “Honestly — is this how we invade Greenland? With Dr. Phil doing a ride-along, like he did with ICE [which Greenland Energy says they are going to do]? All because a Trump donor billionaire says he needs to drill this oil, and who cares what this little country says?”
If America invades Greenland, the European Union could activate its Anti-Coercion Instrument, a series of boycotts and trade restrictions that would effectively devastate America’s economy in retaliation for violating the sovereignty of European nations.
“The EU’s single market counts roughly 450 million consumers,” wrote the German Marshall Fund’s Antonia Wunnerlich and Georgina Wright in February. “As a result, these tools can have significant extraterritorial impact, even targeting foreign businesses without European subsidiaries. US and Chinese services firms are particularly exposed because their home countries run sizeable services surpluses with the EU.”
Additionally, Greenland’s ice sheet is melting as a result of man-made climate change, which is destabilizing the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. If the situation worsens, it could lead to rising sea levels, widespread floods, severe storms and other extreme weather events.
“That rate of Greenland melt is approaching or exceeding rates of melt during natural warming periods over the past 12,000 years is not surprising,” Michael Mann, at the time a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told this journalist for Salon in 2020. “It’s what I would expect given the evidence we have already.” He also said that one of his studies found “evidence of the freshening of the sub-polar North Atlantic that we would expect as Greenland continues to melt. That freshening is reducing the stratification of the ocean and likely slowing down the ‘conveyor belt’ ocean circulation (the real-world equivalent of the ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ scenario) showing how these potentially threshold-like climate responses are potentially linked.”
Mann added, “As I am fond of saying, uncertainty is not our friend. It’s cutting against us, not in our favor, as we see and learn more.”
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