The world is getting smaller cuz Greenland is melting
H/T Eric
| | Greenland has a 'vital strategic asset'
A sheet of ice two miles thick (and also some remarkable people)
Bill McKibben
Jan 06, 2026
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana atop the Greenland ice sheet.
When President Trump first started fantasizing about seizing Greenland for the U.S., it sounded farcical—a little Gilbert and Sullivan, or maybe The Mouse that Roared. In the wake of America’s attack on Caracas, however, it now seems as likely as not that we’ll soon be landing troops in Nuuk, a truly hideous prospect that we should all try to head off. Here’s my small effort:
First off, I think it’s a very real possibility.
Here’s Stephen Miller on Monday, talking with Jake Tapper:TAPPER: Can you rule out the US is going to take Greenland by force?
MILLER: Greenland should be part of the US. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The US is the power of NATO
TAPPER: So force is on the table?
MILLER: Nobody is gonna fight the US militarily over future of GreenlandAnd here’s our leader himself, speaking to a press gaggle on Air Force One while a beaming Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-Obsequious) grinned by his side:Trump: We need Greenland. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships.
Reporter: What would the justification be for a claim to Greenland?
Trump: The EU needs us to have it.None of this makes any actual sense—Greenland is not covered with Chinese and Russian ships, the EU does not want us to have it (European leaders united today to say “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” which seems pretty clear), and Denmark asserts control over Greenland in pretty much the same way Washington asserts control over, say, Alaska or Vermont.
In fact, though, Denmark has been slowly loosening that control over the decades—not because it wants to sell it to America, but because it recognizes that the people who live there, most of whom are Inuit, should have the greatest say in how it’s managed. Greenlanders have exercised that say in ways that would be uncongenial to the White House: for instance, civil partnerships for gay people have been standard since 1996, and gay marriage legal since 2016 when the island’s parliament approved it by a 28-0 vote. Under the Kinguaassiorsinnaajunnaarsagaaneq pillugu inatsit law, sex changes have been allowed since 1976. In other words, Trump’s claim that Greenlanders “want to be with us” is palpable nonsense—a poll last January found that 85 percent of the population opposed the idea.
Discerning Trump’s “real” reason for wanting Greenland is a pointless exercise; he’s a sad, ancient baby, and babies just want. He seems to think that the point of a ruler is to acquire more territory, and that he more or less owns by divine right the land masses adjacent to our country. (MAGA bloggers this week were busily talking about “vassal states” across the hemisphere). There are minerals there, but hard to get at. Oh, and there’s petroleum in and around Greenland as well, and that usually sings a siren song to this child of the oil-driven 20th century.
Really, however, there’s only one truly vital strategic asset in Greenland, one thing that could change the world. And that’s the ice that covers almost all its landmass.
I’ve been up on this ice sheet—I’ve hiked up glaciers from the tideline, climbing and climbing till the sea disappears behind you and all you can see in every direction is white. It is uncannily beautiful.
I helped organize a trip there in 2018 so that two very fine poets could record a piece from atop this ice sheet. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner came from her home in the Marshall Islands, which is already slipping under a rising sea (and which has long known about U.S. imperialism; part of the atoll is still radioactive and off limits, thanks to U.S. bomb testing in the 1950s); Aka Niviana is a native Greenlander whose home has begun to melt, a melt that if it continues will guarantee the submersion of Polynesia, and much else.
They stood there on that ice, in a chill summer wind, and recited their long and majestic poem for a camera; my job was to stand just outside its range with a pair of sleeping bags that they could wrap themselves in between takes. “Rise: From One Island to Another,” as their work was called, has won both prizes and large audiences on YouTube; it will, I think, be one of the documents of this global warming era that someday people will look at in a kind of outraged awe, one more proof that we knew exactly what was coming and did nothing about it.
We were camped above the Eagle Glacier—Jason Box, the American-born climatologist now living in Denmark who helped lead the trip had named it that because of its shape when he first visited five years earlier, “but now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.” And that’s true of so much of the island; we watched as one iceberg after another came crashing off the head of glaciers, each one raising the level of the ocean by some infinitesimal amount.
Greenland holds 23 feet of sea level rise, should we eventually melt it all. That will take a while, but we’re doing our best. It’s been losing mass steadily for the last quarter-century—it lost 105 billion tons of ice (billion with a b) in 2025, and the ice was melting well into September, unusual in a place where winter usually descends in late August. The people of Greenland, by the way, recognize all this: they passed a law in 2021 banning all new oil exploration and drilling—the government described it as “a natural step” because Greenland “takes the climate crisis seriously.” (More than two-thirds of their power comes from renewables, mostly hydro).
I found those Greenlanders I met to be hardy, thrifty people very much in tune with their place. I spent a memorable afternoon with Box planting trees outside the former American air base in Narsarsuaq in an effort to, among other things, soak up some carbon dioxide. And I spent an equally pleasant afternoon drinking beer with him and the rest of our party at a microbrewery in Saqqannguaq (one of several in the country) which brews “with the purest drinking water on earth, coming from the Greenlandic ice cap” and hence “free of toxins, chemicals and micro plastics.” Highly recommend the IPA, reminder of yet another imperial adventure.
Obviously seizing Greenland would be a terrible idea because it would break up NATO and put America at loggerheads with the liberal democracies of Europe (though that may be the single biggest incentive for the administration). Obviously it would be a gross example of modern colonization, obliterating the rights of the people who live there. Obviously it would raise tensions around the world even higher, and send the strongest possible signal that Beijing should just go grab Taiwan. Lots of people are talking about those things, though there’s not the slightest sign that anyone in power is listening. (Stephen Miller’s wife has tweeted out a map of Greenland decked out in red and white stripes).
But in a rational world what we’d mostly be talking about is all that ice. That’s what, for the other 8 billion people on the planet, actually matters about this island. It could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out, all by itself (the Antarctic, much bigger but slower to melt, will eventually add much more). A foot is a lot—on a typical beach on, say, the Jersey shore, which slopes up at about one degree, that brings the ocean about 90 feet inland.
And the fresh water pouring off Greenland seems already to be disrupting the great conveyor belt currents that bring warm water north from the equator, maintaining the climates of the surrounding continents. That too could raise—by significant amounts—the level of the sea, especially along the coast of the southeast U.S. (and also plunge Europe into the deep freeze even as the rest of the planet warms).
The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile. Here’s how Jetnil-Kijiner and Niviana put it in their poem:
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
And yet there’s a generosity to their witness – a recognition that whoever started the trouble, we’re now in it together.
Let me bring my home to yours
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater …
None of us is immune.
Life in all forms demands
The same respect we all give to money …
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
Share
In other energy and climate news:
+A new study shows that climate change is likely to trap many humans on the farm who would otherwise in the normal course of things move on to other jobs.Climate change is reshaping agriculture worldwide, but its consequences for development are most severe where productivity is low, trade is costly, and many workers remain tied to farming. The emerging evidence suggests that warming can slow – or even reverse – the movement of labour out of agriculture, exacerbating the ‘food problem’ just as economies would benefit most by diversifying away from agriculture.
Empirical evidence from India provides a clear illustration. Liu et al. (2023) exploit long-run variation in temperature trends across districts and show that each 1°C increase in mean decadal temperature reduces the non-agricultural employment share by 8.2%. The effects are strongest in remote areas with weak road networks – settings where households are more reliant on local food production and the food-problem mechanism is likely to bind most tightly+My old friend Winona LaDuke offers everyone a reminder of the time that Venezuela came to the aid of lots of AmericansIt was right after Hurricane Katrina and U.S. refinery capacity was down. Oil prices skyrocketed, it was a hard winter, and the oil companies were making huge profits while many Americans experienced real hardships. Congress asked if they would give the American people a break on pricing.
That didn’t happen. However, Venezuela’s CITGO Petroleum donated about $400 million in fuel support for American families. No American corporations did the same. This fuel donation over a couple of critical years was provided in 25 states and to 240 native American communities.
Most of the tribal nations in Minnesota and the Dakotas received support, as did many low-income people in the region. We were grateful. That was a donation in a time of need+Check out Hurd, a new app designed to help workers make their companies more climate-conscious
And if you’re a little more ambitious, check out Lead Locally’s Run for Climate which helps climate champions seek state and local offices across the country. They’re very much the real deal; I enjoy digging in to help their candidates every fall, and a lot of them win, and go on to do great things. And they’re about to launch a free six-part training series
+Nice little piece from some guy named McKibben in the Christian magazine Sojourners touting e-bikesTHERE ARE A few things that seem like magic to me. One is ice—when water freezes, suddenly you can glide across the surface of the earth. The fastest I’ve ever gone on my own unmodified power was on a pair of speed skates across a newly frozen lake. I didn’t even realize how fast I was flying till I fell and slid for what seemed like half a mile.
Almost as good: a bicycle. Yes, there’s some machinery intervening, with chains and gears and such, but basically you’re working just hard enough to overcome friction. With a rigid frame doing the work of holding you upright, you cover distance far more efficiently than you do when walking—more efficiently than most fish in the water or birds in the air. As a physiologist once explained to Scientific American, bicycles “turn humans into this hyperefficient terrestrial locomotor because they make being on land more like swimming.”
But the relatively new invention—the e-bike—goes one better. It’s an ordinary bicycle, until you need a bit more power and flick a switch. And then its small electric motor efficiently adds power to your pedal stroke, as much as you need. Essentially, it’s a bicycle without hills, which means that almost anyone—older, injured, overweight, out of shape—can ride one. If you work the kind of job where arriving with a ruddy glow might be a problem, it’s a bicycle without sweat. And if you need to haul something—kids, gallons of milk—it’s got the power.+And here’s an account of Third Act’s supervolunteer Lani Ritter Hall—truly one of the finest organizers I’ve ever met—in the Guardian. She talks eloquently about the ways that activism can help overcome lonelinessWhen Lani Ritter Hall’s beloved husband of more than 40 years, Gus, died in 2022, she felt a bit unmoored. Taking care of him had been the thing that got her out of bed in the morning, and with him gone, the 76-year-old felt she’d lost her purpose.
That is, until she found organizing.
Shortly after Gus’s death, she came across an op-ed about a new group called Third Act, focused on mobilizing older adults to protect democracy and confront the climate crisis, and figured she might as well reach out. Though the former public school educator had never been involved in any political organizing or activism before, she soon found herself serving as a volunteer coordinator at Third Act, setting up more than 120 Zoom calls over the course of 10 months to welcome people who were new to the organization and help them figure out how to plug in.
At a stage of life when many people find themselves increasingly lonely, isolated and aimless, Ritter Hall began to feel more connected than ever, both to her sense of purpose and to other people. “It’s been the biggest joy of my life,” she said.+ Heatmap News is pretty invaluable, with day to day updates on energy policy. Alexander Kauffman has a typically fine piece today, that I doubt would have been reported much of anywhere else, but which will affect, sadly, millions of AmericansLow-income households in the United States pay roughly 30% more for energy per square foot than households who haven’t faced trouble paying for electricity and heat in the past, federal data shows. Part of the problem is that the national efficiency standards for one of the most affordable types of housing in the nation, manufactured homes, haven’t been updated since 1994. Congress finally passed a law in 2007 directing the Department of Energy to raise standards for insulation, and in 2022, the Biden administration proposed new rules to increase insulation and reduce air leaks.
But the regulations had yet to take effect when President Donald Trump returned to office last year. Now the House of Representatives is prepared to vote on legislation to nullify the rules outright, preserving the standards set more than three decades ago. The House Committee on Rules is set to vote on advancing the bill as early as Tuesday night, with a full floor vote likely later in the week. “You’re just locking in higher bills for years to come if you give manufacturers this green light to build the homes with minimal insulation,” Mark Kresowik, senior policy director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, told me.+I had a great talk with the wonderful people at Solar United Neighbors this morning, finding out what they were planning for the year ahead. (Think plug-in solar!). And they sent over this truly fine video about their work—it will cheer you up, I think, as will this short video from California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is introducing bills to make heat pump and balcony solar installation easier in the Golden State. (Wiener, who has done more than any legislator in the country to make it easier to build affordable housing, is running for Nancy Pelosi’s House seat as she retires; America should be so lucky).
In fact, let’s finish off with two reminders of just how much joyful room there is for clean energy to keep expanding.
From China, the first offshore open-sea floating solar plant has come online. . And it has a fish farm underneath.HG14 is expected to generate about 1.78 TWh annually, meeting roughly 60% of electricity demand in Kenli district, avoiding 1.34 million tons of CO2 emissions and saving more than 500,000 tonnes of coal. The project also integrates aquaculture under a “PV-above, farming-below” model, enabling dual use of marine space and additional revenue streams.And in Waukegan, Illinois, which seems a long ways from China, but where rational solar policy developed under Governor Pritzker is playing out, there’s this: a Superfund site, badly polluted with industrial waste in the 1950s and 1960s, is the new site of a solar farm. As Kari Lydersen reports,The 9.1-megawatt Yeoman Solar Project, which went online last month, can provide energy for about 1,000 households, as well as the Waukegan school district, which owns the land.
The school district bought the site in the 1950s hoping to build a new high school. But the land proved too swampy, and from 1958 to 1969 it was used as a dump for industrial and municipal waste. The highly contaminated Yeoman Creek Landfill was finally cleaned up 20 years ago, and now the district receives lease payments from CleanCapital, the national solar-investment company that owns and operates the solar farm.
Such brownfields are attractive locations for solar installations because of ?“existing electrical infrastructure, lower-cost land, and community acceptance,” noted Paul Curran, CleanCapital’s chief development officer. Incentives from the state initiative Illinois Solar for All helped make the project financially viable, even given extra costs incurred from building on a Superfund site.We can do this, people! It doesn’t have to look flashy and dramatic; it can just look…normal
Ribbon-cutting in Waukegan
billmckibben.substack.com |
|
