Confronting Local and Global Tipping Narratives: Green Energy Development in the Arctic and Why Greenland Is Not for Sale

Abstract

AbstractThis research addresses a confrontation of narratives usually overlooked in global-local discourses about green energy futures by focusing on the case of Greenland. On the one hand, the call for keeping the vast amounts of Greenland’s fossil fuel deposits in the ground, as one of the most efficient and fastest strategies to limit global GHG emissions and avoid a climate catastrophe -hence preventing a negative global climate tipping point. And on the other, the need to exploit and provide alternative mineral resources for the global green energy transformation – hence enabling a global positive tipping point towards a sustainable development trajectory. For that, we trace the historical local conditions and events that eventually led towards green development trajectory pathways. These include indigenous groups’ opposition to oil drilling in the Arctic waters and more recently, the consideration of alternative resource governance mechanisms in support of a low-carbon transformation. We argue that overcoming such confrontation requires reconciling both Natural Resource Justice with Earth System Justice principles that consider the rights, needs, worldviews, and institutional traditions of local communities. Among them, the impossibility of privately owning land across generations in Greenland stems as a possible example of disruptive tipping intervention on how Western societies could learn to relate to biophysical systems in more sustainable ways to cope with accelerated global environmental change.