Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming Read Online Free PDF

he said. “To some degree the constraints of international law will fade into the background. But luckily, water conservation is much cheaper than enormous engineering projects. They’ll find it hard to justify the expense.”
    The discussion turned to the Northwest Passage, where the United States has twice enraged Canadian nationalists by sending ships through without asking permission. The 1969 voyage of the SS Manhattan, an ice-strengthened supertanker that tested the frozen route’s viability for transporting North Slope oil (the verdict: not yet), led to 1970 legislation in the Canadian Parliament that asserted Ottawa’s right to control Arctic traffic, which in turn led to failed eleventh-hour maneuvering to forestall the new law by Henry Kissinger and the U.S. State Department, then to a retaliatory cut in U.S. imports of Canadian oil. The 1985 crossing of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea led to more uproar and the negotiation of an informal “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy: Before making any transits of the passage, the coast guard now notifies Canada (without exactly asking); Canada agrees never to tell its neighbor no. American submarines already use the passage to travel between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and I had heard unprovable tales of Inuit hunters mistaking those subs for whales and shooting at them, only to have their bullets bounce off.
    “We are talking about moving from a country that, in practical terms, had two coastlines, to one that now has three coastlines,” Byers said. “And we’re being told that our new third coastline isn’t subject to full Canadian jurisdiction—that it’s the Wild, Wild West.” He said that drug smuggling, gun smuggling, illegal immigration, and environmental damage could go unchecked if Canada didn’t take control. McKeown suggested there was a deeper threat as well. As divisive as the Northwest Passage may be, he said, Canada and the United States are drawn together in times of crisis—not pulled apart. He rattled off examples of cross-border cooperation: the Permanent Joint Board on Defense in 1940, NATO in 1949, NORAD in 1958, the Smart Border Declaration in 2001. In the mid-1950s, when it mattered that the shortest flight path from the Soviet Union to the United States was over the Arctic, the fifty-eight radar posts constituting the Distant Early Warning Line were built with mostly American money on mostly Canadian land. If climate change is truly as disruptive as both world wars, might Canada be drawn into an inescapable embrace with America?
    McKeown was running out of time, so he raced through his last slides, laying out a climate-change scenario designed to “stretch our way of thinking”: First, rising seas flood Bangladesh, Mumbai, and Shanghai. Refugee applications then flood Canada. A terrorist group based in Canada soon attacks America. The United States closes its borders. In retaliation, Canada ceases water exports. But then, as immigrants sneak in from the Arctic and Russian and Chinese subs cruise the Northwest Passage, Canada asks for America’s help. It offers unfettered access to its resources in return for security. “Canada,” McKeown concluded, “remains an independent country in name only.”
    Byers let that sink in. “If we’re in a Mad Max world, when things are increasingly dangerous and it’s survival of the fittest,” he said, “it’s not implausible to argue that our future is bound to the United States.” He was playing devil’s advocate. It worked. The class erupted. “Integration is a slippery slope,” said McKeown. A student on the far side of the room agreed. “We could lose our central-banking independence, our monetary independence, our social democratic Canadianism,” he said. “Our sovereignty is us, right? Without it we lose independent policy all over the board.”
    “Has anyone here been to Puerto Rico?” Byers asked. “Is it part of the United States?” The students answered