Time is now to invest in arctic shipping

This editorial originally appeared in the Wednesday edition of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Change is coming to the arctic, and we owe it to ourselves to be ready.

We’re not talking about climate change specifically, although the residents of Kivalina and other coastal villages are already having to adapt to eroding shores and melting permafrost. Developments in Alaska and across the circumpolar arctic — some related to climate change and some not — could profoundly alter the way our state works.

One change that will be particularly significant is the potential for shipping on Alaska’s north coast as sea ice recedes toward the North Pole. During the past 60 years, temperatures in the Arctic have risen twice as fast as in the rest of the world, leading to reduced ice pack off the North Slope as well as around Greenland and Canada’s northern islands.

In summer months, this ice reduction has the potential to open up shipping lanes that would be shorter and more cost-effective than the bottleneck of the Panama Canal.

But for Alaska to benefit from shipping gains, the state will need a deepwater port or ports in the northern half of the state. An Army Corps of Engineers study on such a port is due in a few months, but even given optimistic timetables, the quickest estimate for completion is in the neighborhood of 2020, with 2025 or 2030 more realistic possibilities. Efforts by Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski to drum up interest in Washington, D.C., have met with little success, as legislators from the Lower 48 have yet to be convinced of the value of investing in arctic infrastructure. The delegation’s efforts to bring more icebreaking capacity online has similarly failed to move, with a proposed bipartisan budget amendment by Sen. Begich and Sen. Murkowski failing to get a vote late last year.

Unfortunately for America, other arctic nations, like Canada and Russia, aren’t sitting on their hands in the same manner. In addition to its more well-publicized pushes into Ukraine, Russia has for the past several years been aggressive in asserting its territorial rights in arctic waters.

In addition to expanded military patrols and the symbolic act of planting a Russian flag on the sea floor at the North Pole, the Kremlin has recently surveyed the country’s continental shelf to aid in defense of its claims. Last year, 71 ships moved 1.3 million pounds of cargo in the waters off Russia’s north coast, amply demonstrating the country’s commitment to northern shipping.

Coast Guard capacity tells a similar story — Russia operates more than 30 icebreakers, while Canada has six. Depending on their states of repair, the United States has either two or one in service, with no plans to build more.

Even if new icebreakers were funded tomorrow, the timetable for their construction is about eight years, roughly the same as construction of a deepwater port would take if permitting, design and construction proceeded efficiently.

America is well behind in a race that so far it has given little indication it knows it’s even running. With the U.S. slated to take a leadership role as chair of the Arctic Council next year, Alaska — and the rest of the country — can’t afford to waste any more time.