@johnzajac @futurebird Well, to a degree, but note that when they made that decision back in the 80s fossil carbon use started going up and is still going up; society is as much as possible organized to force you to buy gas.

The only reason we're in as hopeful a position as we are comes down to some Chinese engineers presenting a smog mitigation plan to the Central Committee back around 2000. (Thus a major economy decided to put money into Solar PV.)

@futurebird So, alas, it really does come down to a policy constructed by people who think greed is a virtue and who need loot to keep the illusion of prosperity going for the elites whose opinions they notice.

The actual fix in prosperity terms is to decarbonize, quickly and thoroughly. But this lot have been resisting that since the 70s because that would reduce their relative wealth and status and they're quite willing to immolate the world instead.

@futurebird It is important to note that this interior-sea vision of the ice free arctic is abject nonsense; it may well get there, but it doesn't get there on a timescale of human lifetimes, and there's nothing to eat in the meantime.

It's also important to note that the freebooting "we want it, we should take it" basis of policy is predicated on different material conditions than those which actually pertain.

@futurebird Putin's legacy grand strategy is a safe Russia, which means no other nuclear powers and control of the ice-free Arctic. That means breaking up alliances and taking over the government of any other nuclear power and ideally crashing their economy so hard they cannot maintain a credible deterrent. (In the Time of Angry Weather, that is a simple ambition.) So Putin's an input, but not the only input; "why shouldn't we steal it?" is home grown.

@futurebird There's a belief that NATO is a scam; the other NATO members are exploiting US defense funding so they don't have to spend, which is an economic advantage, and a huge fraction of (at least) Republicans feel like they're being ripped off and resent it bitterly. (Having to spend money instead of just stealing things is the worst thing that can happen to a mammonite.) They want to destroy NATO because they, personally, aren't getting money from it.

@futurebird Fram is next to Greenland. So there's this economic fantasy about control of Atlantic access to the Arctic Ocean which means needing a strong territorial claim to something along the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap.

There's a belief that melting glaciers will just leave masses and masses of rock flour that can be scooped up and refined at low cost; there's another belief that the US should exert territorial control over the entire Western Hemisphere.

@futurebird The petrofaction ("keep extracting fossil carbon no matter what") sees the Arctic Ocean as the Next Big Thing, it's practically an interior sea like the Med if it wasn't frozen over and there's decades of Russian "and soon it will not be frozen over and it is ours" positioning.

Thing is, the Bering Strait is epicratonic (=shallow, over continental crust), it's not really suitable for major trade. The only really deep water access is Fram Strait.