Photo: wili_hybrid (flickr)

Contrary to opinions such as Senator Frank Murkowski's, the Arctic is not just “snow and ice.”

From Inuit tribes to the migratory caribou, the Arctic is full of life, especially during the summer. For energy-hungry nations, however, the Arctic is full of another element of interest: oil.

Beneath its melting icecaps lie the “world’s largest remaining untapped gas reserves and some of its largest undeveloped oil reserves,” says the WWF. In face of the current “oil shock,” the five nations that border the Arctic Ocean — Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and the U.S. — all want a slice of this lucrative “ice” spot.

Late last May, these five rival nations met in Greenland to resolve these competing claims. The convention reaffirmed rules laid out by the UN Law of the Sea Convention, which draws national boundaries based on geological features. The UN is expected to oversee decisions on Arctic control by 2020.

Climate change has a big role in increasing the appeal of the Arctic. Rising temperatures rapidly melt the Arctic ice, which increase drilling and shipping access during summer months. Eventually, this will even open up “a route through the Arctic Ocean linking the Atlantic and Pacific that would reduce the sea journey from New York to Singapore by thousands of miles,” says The Telegraph.

Absent from the meeting were environmental groups, who “said the closed-door meeting paved the way for a land grab by countries who have claims to the continental shelf at the pole,” according to The Guardian.

Environmentalists also object to the environmental dangers of drilling.

John Calder, the director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Arctic Research Division, warns not only of the landscape destruction and negative impacts on the indigenous Arctic villages due to infrastructure development, but also the calamitous effects of oil accidents:

Oil spills are especially dangerous in the Arctic, because its cold and heavily season-dependent ecosystems take a long time to recover. Besides, it is very difficult to remove the damage from oil spills in remote and cold regions, especially in parts of the ocean where there is ice.

Photo: Costa Rica from Above. BlindAmbitionBlog (flickr)

This week, Norway declared that it will become the world’s first carbon-neutral country, by 2030. It turns out that the idea of “going carbon-neutral” is becoming quite the fashion around the globe, though – and Norway might find more competition than it bargained for: In 2007, Costa Rica announced it's intention to become carbon neutral by 2021, the 200th birthday of the Central American country. If Costa Rica meets its goal, it will beat Norway to claim the title of first carbon neutral country.

Update: In the weeks since this was posted, the United Nations has launched the Climate Change Network, which aims to unite global responses to climate change. Since Norway announced its intention to go carbon-neutral, three more countries have made the same declaration: Iceland, New Zealand, and Monaco. A National Geographic News article posted in March figured that Costa Rica was most likely to win the race to carbon-neutrality, considering for example that 80 percent of that country’s energy comes from renewable resources already.