Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming Read Online Free Page B

China and the United States but nonetheless remains the world’s first and only binding international agreement on greenhouse gases. Yet Canada would be overshooting its Kyoto targets by 30 percent by the time it abandoned the treaty in 2012—just before another northern economy, Russia, also made its exit. One could blame Canada’s climate about-face on its reliance on carbon-intensive tar sands. But it is also unclear that climate change is all that bad for Canada.
    The $49 million grossed by Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth might have been global warming’s first true financial success story, but as the Montreal entered the Northwest Passage, the new mentality was taking hold. Reports by Citigroup, UBS, and Lehman Brothers advised investors on how to wring a buck out of global tailspin. Citigroup’s report Climatic Consequences: Investment Implications of a Changing Climate, released in January 2007, was particularly helpful. It highlighted investment opportunities at seventy-four companies in twenty-one industries in eighteen countries, including Aguas de Barcelona (drought-afflicted Spain’s “leader in water supply”), Monsanto (drought-resistant crops), and John Deere (more tractors needed in America as drought wiped out Australia’s wheat exports). It showed a graph of the six top natural-gas-producing countries in the world. Four of them—Russia, the United States, Canada, and Norway—were Arctic nations.
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    MY BUNK MATE on the Montreal was a man I’ll call Sergeant Strong, a tall Canadian in his forties who had a thick brown mustache and a runner’s build and wore a dark beret with a gold crest. He had killed people in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and places he would not specify, and every time I pulled out my camera, he stepped out of view. He did not want me to use his real name. He was a patriot and a lifelong soldier, and recently he’d become a reporter for Canada’s Army News . He roamed the ship with a pair of Nikons slung from his shoulders. We first met on the back deck, near the helicopter hangar, and he immediately asked who I thought owned the Northwest Passage. I said I wasn’t sure. “It’s ours,” he told me. “It’s fucking ours.” Then he shared his solution for the territorial dispute over Hans Island. “We should just nuke Denmark,” he said. He was kidding, of course. Canada has no nuclear weapons. His real solution was more typically Canadian, and it revealed him as a believer in the basic boots-on-the-ice premise of Operation Lancaster: If Canada backed up its Arctic claims with a physical presence, the world would recognize them. “Just put a trailer on the island,” he said. “Two guys, two months at a time. Give them TVs and VCRs. And guess what: Problem solved.”
    The sergeant had a partner, Master Corporal Bradley, a giant videographer with whatever the opposite of a Napoleon complex is. Bradley’s mustache was gray and waxed into dueling barbs, and he wore noise-canceling headphones even when he wasn’t filming. He walked like a hunchback through the bowels of the Montreal, constantly hitting his head on doorways. The three of us, it turned out, would be part of the landing team forming Observation Post 1 on Devon Island. We would be joining eight Vandoos and four Canadian Rangers—Inuit reservists outfitted with red cotton hoodies—to go ashore at Dundas Harbor, a shallow fjord where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had manned an outpost in the 1920s. Back then, two constables had been lost to self-inflicted gunshots to the head: the first, a suicide; the second, an apparent walrus-hunting mishap.
    Two days before our “insertion,” which is what everyone insisted on calling our mission to Devon, we were allowed to take a tour of the Montreal ’s operations room—a cave of damp air lit only by radar and sonar screens and low red lights. Inside we met the ship’s underwater-warfare officer. “Could you detect a passing submarine?” I