Climate Change, Glaciology, and Politics of Oil Trade

Climate Change, Glaciology, and Politics of Oil Trade

Barriers & borders

By Raphael Kim, Jamie Weir, Maria Hällfors, and Michelle Bastian

Interdisciplinary Workshop Outcome

Image credit: Manuel Ernst / UFA-Filmteam
 

Thinking beyond implications of climate change and glaciology on ecology and wildlife, this concept connects the phenomena in terms of the politics of trade. We imagined using ice caps and its morphological changes with temperature as a political clock, timing our activities via the changes in ice, rather than the standard clock. This could involve hastening, as well as delaying, international relations. More specifically, one avenue of politics that could be affected included the transportation of oil and how the health of ice caps would positively affect the goods transport. These were dependent on the timing of the glaciers and the impact of minute changes (e.g., a fractional shift in global temperature).

 

 

Ice crystal driven economy?

 

We entertained the friction between different stakeholders of climate change, not only in terms of wildlife and the ecosystem, but those of law makers, politicians and the government. It might be good for business? And what about the political ramifications this might have? Increased cargo transport would create new jobs, new legislations for better transport, and also affect how trade relations affect different nations concerned (e.g., Russia and its importing nations).

 

 

Cascading impact of glaciology as a political clock

 

 

 

In terms of design outcomes, there are two main avenues: one avenue would be to design an artefact, a type of ice cap packaged as a political clock that would indicate the sense of oil market and the fallouts that result from it. Satellite (or drone driven visualisation, couple with digital annotations for example). A second type of design would involve system design, how could the interactions between phenomenological changes drive by ice melt allow transparent understanding of political temporalities, of renewed or sour relations to rise to the fore?

 
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