Who Gets the Oil?: Arctic Energy Exploration in Uncertain Waters and the Need for Universal Ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I. INTRODUCTION TO THE ARCTIC II. OIL AND GAS IN THE ARCTIC AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE A. Arctic Geography B. Oil in the Arctic C. Scientific Projections on the Arctic III. EMERGING ARCTIC TERRITORIAL DISPUTES IV. THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF THE LAW OF THE SEA. A. Legal Background on the Law of the Sea B. The Content of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea C. Existing Legal Framework for Claims to Territory under UNCLOS V. ONE OPTION FOR RESOLVING ARCTIC TERRITORIAL DISPUTES UNDER UNCLOS A. Abandoning UNCLOS Is Not Necessary B. Specific Recommendations VI. CONCLUSION AND CALL TO ACTION International law in most important particulars never has been impartially just and never has been stable, but always has been and always will be a product of the interplay of national interests, prejudices and pressures, and therefore has been unstable, uncertain, and controversial. (1) I. INTRODUCTION TO THE ARCTIC Less than two weeks before President George W. Bush left the White House, the Bush Administration issued a Presidential Directive asserting [t]he United States is an Arctic [N]ation. (2) Though this declaration might have seemed surprising, it was the Administration's final attempt to position the United States to stake a claim in the Arctic--the last large piece of non-jurisdictional territory on Earth. (3) Isolated on top of the planet, the North Pole and the vast Arctic region surrounding it contain valuable oil and natural gas deposits. (4) Despite the region's valuable resources, until fairly recently, the international community has paid little attention to the Arctic. (5) As the Earth's atmosphere has warmed and the Polar Ice Cap has thawed, Arctic waters have become more navigable, causing fossil fuels in the Arctic to become more accessible. (6) The result has been a flurry of international competition. (7) The Arctic has been international territory since 1997 when 152 nation-states ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). (8) Today, UNCLOS governs territorial claims in the Arctic. (9) Under UNCLOS, each of the five nations bordering the Arctic--the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway--has limited jurisdiction extending up to 200 nautical miles from its respective coastal baseline. (10) Despite these limitations, UNCLOS also permits a country to extend its so-called offshore exclusive economic zone (EEZ) where it can demonstrate that the Arctic seafloor's underwater ridges are not a separate feature, but a geological extension of the country's own continental shelf. (11) This rather obscure clause in UNCLOS has sparked an international race to the Arctic, dubbed the Cold Rush. (12) Arctic nations now find themselves competing among one another for enormous wealth by submitting extended continental shelf claims to the United Nations. (13) These extended territorial claims have led to what some consider 'the last big shift in ownership of territory in the history of the Earth.' (14) The resolution of these disputes will determine which nations own a piece of the Arctic, and answer the ultimate question: Who gets the oil? This Comment will evaluate the effectiveness of UNCLOS at resolving Arctic territorial disputes. Part I will provide background information on Arctic geography and recent climate change in the region. Current Arctic territorial disputes under UNCLOS will be discussed in Part II, with a focus on Russia's current extended continental shelf claim. Background information on early maritime law and the law of the sea will be provided in Part III, as well as an outline of the relevant provisions of UNCLOS. Part IV will recommend one option for resolving extended continental shelf claims under UNCLOS. Specifically, Part V will argue for universal ratification of UNCLOS and posit UNCLOS signatories amend Article 298 to permit binding resolution of boundary disputes pursuant to Article 287. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".