…the arrival of this signal in 2023 is staggering.”
The story you tell customers, employees, vendors, and strategic partners about the future (and your organization’s place in it) is a sturdy, structural response to the severity of this current age of uncertainty. We, humans, hold on to stories for dear life. Foresight narratives give your business ecosystem something to hold on to, build on, and make real. We are comfortable with the oft-quoted axiom that “the future”, per science fiction writer William Gibson, “is already here. It is just not unevenly distributed”. Signals that validate a future trend or fledgling new system should be central to your organization’s foresight strategy efforts.
We like to think that OODA Loop is helpful in these efforts. When we track signals from the future as a function of our research and editorial voice, we base our efforts on the conclusion (based on years of collective experience) that not all the signals will be positive or intrinsically techno-utopian, embedded with the blind faith that technology is exclusively a source of only good, promising things. We have experienced too many unintended consequences to keep beating that Silicon Vally branding drum one beat longer.
Even with this stoic stance, the signal from the future featured in this post, at least for this writer, is a definitive data point about the accelerated onslaught of the climate crisis. More so than any of the information contained in the most recent report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the arrival of this signal in 2023 is staggering.
Antarctic Ice Sequestration Figured Prominently in the MOtF
“It’s stupid this notion.”
We recently featured two geopolitical maneuvers that read like lost chapters from Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future science fiction masterpiece, The Ministry of the Future (TMoF): the ongoing Water Wars in France and Saudi Arabia’s movement away from the U.S. dollar. These two developments were very surprising, as they were so similar in their narratives to the cautionary tale Robinson provides to us in TMoF. Real-world events that hue so closely to the TMoF narrative are, by their very nature, bad news. Or, at the very least, clear signals in 2023 that we are heading toward a worst-case scenario with the climate crisis – and all the societal upheaval intertwined with it in the story told by Robinson – which, when you read it, is just intuitively, deeply plausible. That stories like these have become the type of post we are sharing on a regular basis as real-time facts is humbling.
In Chapter 44 of TMoF, Robinson introduces us to the hail mary project known as Antarctic Ice Sequestration, which is the process of pumping sea level rise waters from the ocean to Antarctica and freezing the water to replace the melting arctic permafrost. The narrator of the chapter is on the record as cynical about the project: “…if you were thinking of pumping seawater up onto this part of the ice cap to keep seal levels from rising, it was going to take a lot of fo energy. It’s like sucking up the ocean in a drinking straw…and spitting your mouthfuls onto the shore. It’s stupid this notion.”
The pumping for the project would require the power of about ten thousand nuclear subs and “would take far more pipe than ever made in all history.” By the time the project is a reality in Chapter 57, it comes with the stark realization that if this project were to actually become a reality, we clearly have gone from hail mary to fool’s errand in our last-ditch efforts to turn the tide – and catastrophe is imminent. The implausibility and scale of Antarctic Ice Sequestration were intended to read as an absurdist track right smack dab in the middle of a near-future dystopian novel.
Imagine our chagrin, then, when we chanced upon ConocoPhillips’ Project Willow.
Big Oil Plans to Artificially Freeze the Melting Arctic to Drill More Oil
The Biden Administration approved ConocoPhillips’ Willow Project this week, which will use “thermosyphons” to freeze melting permafrost.
As reported by Hannah Docter-Loeb at Vice:
Earlier this [month], the Biden administration approved ConocoPhillips’ Project Willow, to the dismay of many environmental groups. The project is an oil drilling venture in the National Petroleum Reserve slated to drill oil on federal land in Alaska’s North Slope. One part of the plan? Installing “thermosyphons” in the Arctic to artificially freeze it.
The Arctic’s permafrost is melting due to climate change spurred by the human consumption of fossil fuels, and the proposed oil drilling venture has the potential to further impact the area’s ecosystem. But the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management has accounted for this.
As the project’s environmental impact statement notes, there are measures to minimize heat transfer and impacts to permafrost by “designing flare stack height to reduce radiant heating; filling the gap between well conductors and inner pipes with polyurethane foam; using thermosyphons adjacent to well rows and at-grade structures; and installing insulation below the foundation floors of heated, at-grade structures.”
Thermosyphons are long metal pipes installed in the ground that utilize passive heat transfer so that the ground stays cold.
“It’s absurd that as our tundra is melting because of climate change, ConocoPhillips plans to use ‘chillers’ to re-freeze tundra…”
“Pressurized two-phase gas (typically natural refrigerants such as CO2 or NH3) moves through the sealed closed-loop system, driven by the difference in temperature between the cold winter air and the warmer ground temperature,” the ConocoPhillips website explains. “As the vapor/condensate moves, heat is transferred out of the permafrost. They require no external power supply.”
This isn’t an environmentally benevolent plan. In the context of the Willow Project, keeping the ground solid is also a priority to ensure it’s stable enough to hold the drill equipment. And according to a High County News article on a separate thermosyphons initiative, the technology is not new to the area.
“Thermosyphons have been used for decades to protect critical infrastructure in Alaska, including communications towers, buildings, and the state’s famed Trans-Alaska pipeline system—anything that could collapse should the permafrost beneath it melt,” reads the article. “The state’s Department of Transportation and Public Facilities has installed thermosyphons on roadways north of the Alaska range.”
But many scientists and environmental advocacy groups condemn the Willow Project’s use of such devices, finding it ironic.
“It’s absurd that as our tundra is melting because of climate change, ConocoPhillips plans to use ‘chillers’ to re-freeze tundra so it can drill for oil that will, in turn, make climate change even worse,” Alaska Environment Research and Policy Center State Director Dyani Chapman said in a statement.
The Water Wars in France Eerily Resemble Scenes from The Ministry for the Future
