Polar Bears and Today's Oil Boom

11/12/2013 2:17:13 PM

Polar Bears and Today's Oil Boom

By Kassie Siegel

Out here on the shores of Western Hudson Bay, polar bears roam the tundra, waiting for the ice to freeze. They nap in the willows, sometimes becoming covered with snow during a long nap in a squall. They awake and stretch, sniffing the air. They are magnificent and magnetic and beloved worldwide.

Polar bears need our help and they need it yesterday. Without deep and rapid greenhouse pollution cuts, we will lose the sea ice polar bears need to survive and polar bears will join the sad list of species from the passenger pigeon to the Yangtze river dolphin that have been lost forever through human rapaciousness. It is a process already well underway.

The changes we need to save the Arctic and the polar bear are big changes, but they are the same solutions needed to save the rest of the world as well. Arctic warming and sea ice melt has long been stark and easy to understand, because the Arctic is the Earth's early warning system, warming at about twice the rate of the rest of the globe. But the damages worldwide from climate disruption are mounting rapidly, from scorching heat waves, to longer droughts, to stronger storms like Superstorm Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan riding on seas that have already risen half a foot from planetary warming.

Solving the climate crisis means transitioning rapidly to a clean energy future. It means an all out push for innovation and advancements that allow us to continue to raise living standards around the world while we decarbonize all aspects of society. It means getting off fossil fuels - and getting off them quickly.

But an oil and gas boom going on right now—spurred by fracking, a new way of extracting fossil fuels from shale formations underground—is taking us in exactly the wrong direction. Today's fracking techniques allow the exploitation of vast new stores of fossil fuels—far more than we can burn and still maintain a safe climate or polar bears in the Arctic. Fracking is also dirty, dangerous, and terribly disrupting to communities. That's why, in part to protect polar bears, I now spend a large portion of my time working to keep shale oil in the ground.

Recently a new way that fracking could affect polar bears even more directly has come to light: so much shale oil is being extracted in North Dakota that pressure is mounting to find new export routes to markets around the world. One proposed scheme is to ship the crude oil by train up through Canada to the Port of Churchill for export by tanker to Europe. An oil spill along the rail line through polar bear habitat would be ecologically devastating, and a spill in Hudson Bay could be a fatal blow to polar bear populations that are already suffering from climate change.

There are many problems with the Churchill oil shipping idea, and it may never come to fruition. One thing we can all do to help avoid this dangerous proposal and others like it is to reduce our own oil consumption, and support efforts to transition to a truly clean energy future. We need to get started today with small changes that lead to big changes to end our addiction to oil and other fossil fuels to give polar bears a chance and make a brighter future for all of us.