Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

I think those are thoughtful and legitimate suggestions on how we might regulate U.S.-based oil companies who drill in open ocean waters. But how do we regulate foreign drillers, like the Russians who have claimed ownership of the continental shelf where they're drilling. As I understand it, we couldn't drill there even if we wanted to, given the failure of our Congress to take the necessary actions to permit the U.S. to be involved in the UN committee which has apaprently granted Russia the rights to those waters and the resources below the ocean floor.

And what about the foreign-flagged oil tankers, Russian or otherwise, who will begin using the route along Alaska's west coast as the shortest and fastest route to refiners in Europe and Asia? What happens if a big tanker sinks on that route, or collides with another coming in the opposite direction, and fouls the ocean shorelines from Alaska to Canada and maybe even the western U.S.?


Currently for a ship to travel from Asia to Europe the ship need to travel a long distance by...

• Traveling westwards through the Suez Canal in the middle east near the region where piracy has become rampant off the coast of Somalia,

• Traveling westward round the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa,

• Traveling eastward and passing through the Panama Canal,

• Or traveling eastward round famously rough and stormy Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America

Once the ice in the Arctic Ocean has sufficiently melted, ships traveling to and from Asia and Northern Europe will be able to take a much shorter route--as much as 25-50% shorter--by squeezing through the gap between eastern edge of Siberia and the western edge of Alaska,and then going through the iceless Acrtic Ocean to reach northern Europe. Tankers transporting oil from the Russian rigs in the Arctic Ocean would take the opposite route, creating "two way traffic" in that extremely rough but narrow passage in the Bering Sea only a few miles off the Alaska coastline.