How Trump’s Greenland game plan hinges on climate change: Commentary
Now that President Donald Trump has, er, solved the Panama Canal crisis he created with BlackRock buying out the Chinese ports on either side of it, his attention is likely to turn to Greenland next week as parliamentary elections are held. Ironically, climate change is a key part of his game plan.
For our money, Trump will likely use the strategy he used in Panama, and time after time again during his business career: Letting someone else pay for it. In this case, a combination of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Tech billionaires such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have long cited Greenland’s rich mineral deposits as attractive for energy and tech applications, even backing a mining project there together a few years ago. Imagine a consortium of tech giants with a hundred-billion-dollar package to invest in Greenland mining, manufacturing and job creation.
Such a deal would send a massive infusion of wealth to Greenland and could change the constant discussion there of independence from Denmark, which will become more even active next week after the vote on March 11. Despite insistence from Greenland Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede that the country is not for sale, an investment deal would always be on the table.
A deal like this would only work, however, if Greenland continues its pattern of warming faster than the rest of the world, even Antarctica. Melting ice creates not only mining opportunities but opens shipping channels and trading opportunities with nearby Europe. It creates an investment thesis, but also the international security scenario that Trump continues to harp on. That climate change, which Trump dismisses, is a key driver of both these scenarios is not lost on those who watch what Trump does rather than what he says.
It is unlikely that Trump would ever invade Greenland (or Canada for that matter), or agree to subsidize it like Denmark does. But an investment package, paid for by someone else, would allow him to claim victory in his strategy, just as he has in Panama. Which may be all that matters to him.
How the parliamentary vote goes next week will kick this independence talk into high gear in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. How investors respond will depend on Trump’s next move, but much more so on the incredible environmental changes happening in a region that is no longer overlooked by the rest of the world.
David Callaway is founder and editor-in-chief of Callaway Climate Insights. He is the former president of the World Editors Forum, editor-in-chief of USA Today and MarketWatch, and CEO of TheStreet Inc.
