Drill, Baby, Drill

 Many governments and companies favour Arctic drilling. Global warming is making the Arctic - shared by Nordic nations, Russia, Canada, and the United States - more accessible to shipping and mineral exploration. Last month, Trump's administration began environmental reviews for oil and gas drilling in a section of the Arctic national Wildlife Refuge. In Norway, Statoil and other companies plan to keep up exploration in the Arctic Barents Sea, which is ice-free further north than other parts of the Arctic thanks to the warm Gulf Stream. Statoil spokesman Bård Glad Pedersen said the Johan Castberg field, due to start pumping in the early 2020s off north Norway, would have a break-even of $31 a barrel.

An architect of the Paris climate agreement urged governments on Tuesday to halt oil exploration in the Arctic, saying drilling was not economical and warming threatened the environmentally fragile region.

Christiana Figueres, formerly head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat when the Paris accord was reached by almost 200 nations in 2015, told Reuters by telephone "the Arctic has been rendered undrillable."

The past three years have been the hottest since records began in the 19th century, and Figueres said the heat was a threat to everything from Australia's Great Barrier Reef to ice in Antarctica. "The stakes are visibly higher than they were just a few years ago," Figueres said