Free Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by McKenzie Funk

climate change becomes bogged down in an ideological ‘dialogue of the deaf’ between the conflicting positions of rich, industrialised countries versus poorer, developing nations—a paralysis that allows emissions of atmospheric CO 2 to grow relentlessly.” Toward the end of the scenario, when the supply crunch and climate change are impossible to ignore, emissions begin to level off. But CO 2 concentration is heading above 550 parts per million—200 more than the red line of 350 parts per million identified by campaigners and many diplomats and scientists. “An increasing fraction of economic activity and innovation,” the scenario planners write, “is ultimately directed towards preparing for the impact of climate change.” That is, the world must adapt to what it has become.
    When I asked Bentham in 2012 if the future was looking more like Scramble than Blueprints, he was uncharacteristically concise. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the view.”
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    BEFORE I FOLLOWED Shell to Alaska for the lease sale, I traveled up the Norwegian coast from the conference in Tromsø for a glimpse of the future Arctic. The formerly dingy fishing town of Hammerfest was home to Snøhvit, or Snow White, the world’s northernmost liquid natural gas operation, watched closely by Shell and its rivals. It was the day before the planned start of production when I arrived, and the $10 billion installation had long ago taken over a once grassy island abutting town. Viewed from Hammerfest’s newly glitzy shopping mall, it was a tangle of smokestacks, lights, and tubes, backed by a fjord and a row of snowy peaks. The gas field was farther offshore, in the Barents Sea, eight hundred feet underwater and connected to the island by eighty-nine miles of pipes. Production was behind schedule. A few months earlier, the winds had shifted as engineers were putting the plant through the paces, and its flares—chimneys burning off excess gas—coated cars and homes in a layer of black soot. The plant operator, Statoil, Norway’s national petroleum company and Shell’s soon-to-be rival in the Alaska lease sale, brought in doctors to test for carcinogens and community liaisons to hand out reparations checks.
    Here at the top of Scandinavia, where the North Atlantic Current left the coastline mostly ice-free, the Norwegian national schizophrenia was amplified. The second-richest country in the world with the second-largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, a $500 billion reserve known colloquially as the Oljefondet, or Oil Fund, Norway was flush enough from offshore petroleum that it could afford to be concerned about the environment: In 2000, it became the world’s first and so far only country to sack its government over lack of progress on carbon emissions. It was serious about the Kyoto Protocol, so much so that Snøhvit would eventually become a CCS test facility, thus a test of whether a scenario like Blueprints could ever come to pass. It would reinject CO 2 into the seabed after sucking out all the natural gas. In the meantime, Snøhvit’s production problems might single-handedly cause Norway to miss its Kyoto targets. And the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which on ethical grounds excluded investments in tobacco companies and arms dealers, counted Shell—perhaps Norway’s equal in schizophrenia—as its single biggest stock holding.
    As Hammerfest waited for the plant to fire up again, I had a tour of the island with a Statoil spokesman, clearing security, driving through a tunnel beneath the fjord, and passing barracks of imported workers: Turks, Greeks, Slovenians, Poles, Finns, and Russians. The wind was blowing again, and the Arctic Princess, one of the world’s largest natural gas tankers, was anchored in the bay. But what interested me most was the Faustian bargain back in town. In a pizza restaurant in the center, I met the only local politician opposed to the plant: a nineteen-year-old from the