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

revolutionary-socialist Red Party. We mostly talked about shopping. “I love eBay!” she said. She told me she used it to order American clothes from four thousand miles away. The gas from Snøhvit would go to Bilbao, Spain, and, eventually, to Japan and China via the Northeast Passage, the newly passable shipping lane above Russia that is also known as the Northern Sea Route. Much of the money would stay here. Statoil paid ninety-four-hundred-person Hammerfest $22 million a year in property taxes, and that, the socialist admitted, bought loyalty. Even her mom was in favor of Snøhvit.
    In his bay-front office, Hammerfest’s deputy mayor touted his town’s new projects: renovated primary schools, a bigger airport, a flashy sports arena, a “full-digital,” glass-walled cultural center. Home prices had doubled in five years; strollers were everywhere in the snow-covered streets. It was easy to forget that until recently Hammerfest was a dying town, shrinking in population, the most violent place in Norway. “It was clean fighting, not so much with knives and such,” he assured me. I asked about the soot from the flares. “People didn’t like it,” he said, “but they accepted it.”
    It was 2:00 p.m., the high north in winter, and it was becoming dark. I stepped out just in time to see Snøhvit come to life—the Arctic on fire. A flame spouted four hundred feet, five hundred feet from the tallest chimney, dwarfing the mountains, hanging high over the town, bathing it in orange light. From two miles away, I could hear it burn, and I could feel its heat on my face.
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    “I COULDN’T START without saying thank you,” Randall Luthi told the crowd at Chukchi Lease Sale 193, and a sea of oil traders and lobbyists stared silently back at him, or perhaps past him, at the map of petroleum blocks projected on a floor-to-ceiling screen. “The thank-you goes to industry for making their interests known,” he said. “But thank you also to those who have voiced concerns—because this is a time that is very indicative of the way the world is today, of the way our economy is today, of the way our energy future is today. These are tough times with tough decisions and tough questions. One question I’ve been asked: Why have this sale?”
    Outside the hall at Anchorage’s main public library, a group of activists, two Inupiat Eskimo men and three white women—one wearing a polar bear costume and a pair of Sorels—waved handwritten signs: “Oil and Polar Bears Don’t Mix!” “Keep Big Oil OUT of Our Garden!” “Chill the Drills!” “Don’t SpOIL My Dinner!” Their breath condensed in the frigid air. Inside, in front of the screen, three schoolmarmish staffers armed with tape, boxes of paper clips, and bottled water guarded a table covered with blue file folders: the bids. Luthi, a rancher from Freedom, Wyoming, whom George W. Bush had appointed director of the Minerals Management Service (MMS), wore an ill-fitting gray suit and stood at a podium emblazoned with the MMS seal. “Mineral Revenues–Offshore Minerals–Stewardship,” it read, the words encircling a golden eagle. The MMS had yet to be rocked by its “oil for sex” scandal, yet to be blamed for lax oversight in the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, yet to be re-formed, or at least renamed, as BOEMRE, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, then as plain BOEM. Lease Sale 193, under which 45,900 square miles of Arctic seabed would be offered up in 9-square-mile chunks, was going forward despite serial delays by the MMS’s parent agency, the Department of the Interior, on a closely watched decision: whether the polar bear, a resident of the Chukchi’s retreating sea ice, should be listed as global warming’s first official threatened species. It would be the most lucrative lease sale in the history of the Arctic Ocean, and Shell would scramble ahead of its rivals with high bids totaling