The November issue of The American Prospect has a wonderful article by Joshua Kurlantzick:

Some oil companies boast about their commitment to fighting global warming. But as the arctic heats up, these same companies are racing to drill in newly melted waters. The rush to exploit the melting ice cap is on.

Kurlantzick lays out a contradiction between what the oil companies are saying on the one hand, and placing themselves in line for on the other.

In recent years, the oil industry has been trying to get on the right side of global warming… ConocoPhillips, BP, and other oil giants have joined the effort. (The holdout is ExxonMobil, which still spends corporate cash promoting anti-global warming advocates.) In recent years, BP has promoted a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar advertising campaign entitled “Beyond Petroleum” in which it boasted that it would start “a journey that will take a world’s expectations of energy beyond what anyone can see today.” The company even changed its name from British Petroleum to BP and adopted a new logo — a cuddly green, yellow, and white sunburst. “We take the problem of climate change very seriously,” BP chief executive officer Lord John Browne told German reporters this year. BP, the first oil company to acknowledge the seriousness of global warming, also has drastically ramped up its alternative energy programs…

Yet even as the oil giants show off their green stripes, they have quietly pursued a strategy that works against the environmental tide: buying up rights to explore arctic and sub-Arctic lands soon-to-be exposed as global warming melts the polar ice. Such territories likely hold vast new stocks of oil, gas, and minerals, and the oil companies and other energy and mining interests are investing heavily in the warmer globe.

The entire article is very worth reading.

-- MattShanley