Why Trump really wants Greenland

And how this neo-imperialism unmasks the right's hypocrisy on climate

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Why does Donald Trump want Greenland?

“National security” may seem like a weird excuse for Trump’s demand that Denmark turn over that island to the United States, but turns out it’s not just a distraction.

Trump’s imperial fantasy is rooted in a very real struggle between nations for control of the submerged world under the Arctic ocean, and has everything to do with what’s happening to the region as the climate warms.

The real reason Trump may want Greenland turns out to be below the surface. Literally. We’re talking about a secret mountain range you’ve never heard of.

And this strategic impulse reveals that the right feels differently about climate change than it lets on.

To explain all of this, we talked to paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and veteran science communicator Neil Shubin. Dr. Shubin — who’s famous for his co-discovery of Tiktaalik, the “fish with feet” that lived 375 million years ago and is one of the likely common ancestors of all terrestrial vertebrates — has worked in the polar regions for more than 30 years, and has a new book out next week, titled Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and our Future, which is a history of exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic, a meditation on how humanity’s story is one of our relationship to what happens at the poles, and an unlikely guide to current events.

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Your new book about the history of polar exploration ends up in a discussion of the politics of today, of saber-rattling over Greenland and secret missions to stake out claims on the continental shelf at the North Pole. And now a lot of people in the United States and northern Europe are going to be thinking a lot more about the Arctic. Why is it so important now for people to understand their connection to the poles?

There's a synergy, a dynamic, between us and the poles. The choices we make down south affect the poles, which in turn — as those polar regions change, ice melts and so forth and ocean currents change — will affect us. Many people deny climate change, and they don’t see the importance of the changes at the poles in their daily lives.

But witness what Donald Trump is doing with Greenland right now. He's not making that push for Bermuda, right? It's Greenland. And there is a reason why he's making that push.

You talk about some important reasons in this book that I think get left out of the conversation when the Trump people talk about “national security,” and it seems so ridiculous. But they are actually referring to something specific, and it’s something that major news organizations don't seem to be picking up on.

I think a lot of people just have no idea. What's really lost here is that countries are now jockeying for the biggest undeveloped patch of the earth, and Greenland is a very big piece of that, but not the whole story.