Quote:
Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna
And therein lies a big part of the problem. Our Congress has refused to ratify the UN resolution forming the committee that governs such things. The committee has been formed (see my post above) and is operating without the U.S. As best I can determine, the failure to pass our Congress was determined by votes totally along party lines. And the votes flip-flopped when the GOP took over control of the House from the Democrats. So it looks like we may have uncovered yet another important national issue wherein our elected representatives are practicing partisan politics at the expense of the country.
Geez, if there was ever a reason to throw every single one of them out of office and get a new president to boot, this is just another one. It's not that it's less important, but getting the public all excited about the Russians drilling for oil on their continental shelf and not even being involved in the UN decision-making on the issue probably just isn't sexy enough to get any good soundbites.
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VK, Here are some additional notes on the situation and problems with our aging coast guard cutter fleet and the UN Law of the Sea Convention.
Our cutter fleet is not just aging, it is overage and lacks either the numbers or capability to effectively protect US interests whether they be in the Bering Sea, the fishing grounds around the United States, counter-terrorism, etc. Here is a link to an article in the US Naval Institute Proceedings that describes some of the problems:
http://www.usni.org/magazines/procee...s-cutter-fleet
While the U.N. Law of the Sea Convention has some problems especially involving seabed mining, it is critical that we sign on in order to protect such crucial rights as innocent passage, transit passage and archelagic sea-lane transit. Without these rights, international commerce could come to a standstill and our Navy’s effectiveness would be greatly reduced. If just the right of transit were challenged, it could allow Iran to close access to the Persian Gulf. Some of the other straits affected could include Dover, Malacca, Gibraltar, Bosporus, and Bering.
However, the same laws that keep these crucial strait open to us forbid our regulation of innocent traffic from the arctic to the Pacific Ocean. Our best hope is probably a bilateral treaty with Russia. Oil from the Arctic will probably remain in the Pacific. The shortest passage to the Atlantic is the Panama Canal and neither Very Large Crude Carriers nor Ultra Large Crude Carriers can transit the Canal nor will they be after the Canal widening is completed in 2014. Drilling on land with pipelines going south to usable ports appears to offer the best approach for the time being.