Climate Change could throw a wrench in Trump’s Greenland pipe dream

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world’s largest island is known for its vast ice sheet, sprawling fjords and abundance of wildlife—from polar bears to narwhals. 

It’s also one of the latest targets in President Donald Trump’s bid for US energy and military expansion. Since his first term, Trump has talked of securing Greenland for its critical minerals, untapped oil reserves, opportunities for military positioning and central location in the international shipping network, particularly as melting sea ice opens up new trade routes. Now, he is pushing for a Greenland land grab with renewed vigor, offering to purchase the island from Denmark or even potentially take it by force. 

But the same warming temperatures that may transform the island into a trading hotspot are making it more inhospitable to development, research shows. Thawing permafrost and ice triggers landslides along jagged fjords and destabilizes the landscapes that infrastructure would need to lie on top of, while loose sea ice makes passing through Greenland’s waters a perilous journey. 

Oil and gas companies around the world are facing similar issues as the very climate impacts they helped cause are threatening operations. 

Greenland is 6,000 times the size of Philadelphia with just 3 percent of the city’s population. The Arctic island’s rugged terrain and frigid climate is not for the faint of heart, with temperatures in the winter plunging to as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit. 

But overall, the Arctic is warming four times as quickly as the rest of the world. Since 1992, Greenland has lost trillions of metric tons of ice. Theoretically, this ice melt should open up new shipping lanes that could connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in a fraction of the time it would take otherwise. There is evidence that this trend is already happening: The number of unique ships entering the Arctic increased by nearly 40 percent between 2013 and 2023, according to the intergovernmental Arctic Council.

However, in practice, conditions are still rough in many of the waters around Greenland. 

“You can say there’s going to be less ice, but there’s going to be a lot more ice drifting around to puncture ships,” Melody Brown Burkins, director of the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College, told Scientific American. 

The people of Greenland have spent millennia adapting their lifestyles and infrastructure to the presence of snow and ice. But rapid melting has disrupted road systems, decreased fish stocks and triggered landslides. These events show that Greenland may not be as ideal for mineral extraction, military operations and oil and gas development as Trump thinks, according to Paul Bierman, a geologist at the University of Vermont. 

“Now amplified by climate change, natural hazards make resource extraction and military endeavors in Greenland uncertain, expensive and potentially deadly,” Bierman wrote in a recent article for The Conversation. Last year, Bierman published a book, “When the Ice Is Gone,” about the history of Greenland’s melting ice sheet. 

He pointed out that nations, including Norse Vikings, have tried to occupy and develop Greenland in the past—to no avail. Since the mid-20th century, the U.S. has had rights to operate military outposts in Greenland, but many of them have crumbled under the harsh conditions. Permafrost thaw is currently jeopardizing the U.S.-operated Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base), which has seen cracked roads and slanting of its banquet halls in recent years as the land destabilized. Journalist Natasha Maki Jessen-Petersen reported on this issue for ICN in 2023. 

There’s another barrier standing in the way of the U.S. pursuit of Greenland: Many residents don’t want to be Americans. Despite Trump’s assurances that “the people want to be with us,” a recent poll showed that 85 percent of Greenland’s population doesn’t want to be part of the U.S.

As burning fossil fuels increases global temperatures, the oil and gas projects that supply them are buckling under climate extremes. 

In one of the starkest examples, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 destroyed or damaged more than 60 platforms and 10 drilling rigs, shutting down 95 percent of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. Tropical storms have continued to wreak havoc on oil and gas operations since then. During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, flooding caused more than 100 industrial spills in and around Houston that released hundreds of millions of gallons of oil, wastewater and chemicals—some cancer-causing—into the surrounding area. 

Along with acute weather, rising seas pose long-term threats to fossil fuel operations. A recent study by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative found that 13 of the oil ports with the highest supertanker traffic will be seriously damaged by just 1 meter of sea level rise, which could come as early as 2070. Liquified natural gas facilities are facing similar threats in Texas and Louisiana, which produce more than 90 percent of the country’s LNG exports but also lead the way in rising seas, the Washington Post reports. 

Big insurers’ willingness to keep issuing policies for fossil fuel facilities is sparking backlash from environmental activists as homeowner’s insurance markets crumble under the weight of increasingly severe weather. My colleague Keerti Gopal has covered this global movement, which is calling for insurance companies to stop underwriting or investing in fossil fuel projects due to the serious financial risks they pose by contributing to climate change. The movement has picked up steam in recent years, with some companies such as Zurich Insurance Group halting coverage of new fossil fuel exposure. 

Gopal went to London in October to report on a series of insurance-related protests in that city’s financial district—and activists told her that action needs to happen faster to prevent further climate catastrophe. 

“The weak spot of the fossil fuel industry is insurance,” said Extinction Rebellion activist Marijn van de Geer on the first day of protests in London. “If we can persuade as many insurers as possible to pull out of these projects, we have a real chance of actually stopping those projects, and that’s ultimately what the goal is.”