The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [166]
399 When a Japanese invasion became unlikely, the U.S. soldiers and contractors were recalled from northwestern Canada and the newly built infrastructure soon turned over as promised. Other northern bases were retained for decades, including a large military presence at Keflavík, not turned over to Iceland until 2006. Sondre Stromfjord (now Kangerlussuaq) was turned over to Greenland in 1992. Thule Air Base is still operated by the United States.
400 A. Applebaum, GULAG: A History (London: Penguin Books 2003), 610 pp. Highly recommended.
401 The acronym GULAG or Gulag comes from Glavnoe upravlenie legerei, meaning Main Camp Administration. Work camps had long antecedents in tsarist Russia and were implemented by Lenin almost immediately after the Russian Revolution. But Stalin’s expansion of the camp system in 1929 took it to a new level of scale and economic significance. For more, see A. I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (New York: Harper Collins, 1974), 660 pp., and A. Applebaum, GULAG: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 610 pp. See also F. Hill and C. Gaddy, The Siberian Curse (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).
402 F. Hill and C. Gaddy, Ibid.
403 Ph.D. dissertation of T. Mikhailova, “Essays on Russian Economic Geography: Measuring Spatial Inefficiency,” Pennsylvania State University, Department of Economics, 2004. See also F. Hill and C. Gaddy, Ibid.
404 Geological evolution and other material for this section drawn from June 5, 2009, personal interview with John D. Grace of Earth Science Associates, Long Beach, California, and his superb book Russian Oil Supply: Performance and Prospects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 288 pp.
405 A primary reason for this is economic “discounting” of up-front capital, in which money is valued higher today than tomorrow. The anticipated future profits for a proposed project are weighed against the alternative profits that could be generated by placing the project’s up-front cost into some other interest-bearing investment today. If the second number is larger, it makes no financial sense to proceed. Massive projects with longtime horizons to profitability, like building a freeway system or developing West Siberia, are thus unattractive to private capital. The key parameter in these calculations is the “discount rate,” i.e., the interest rate. The steeper the discount rate (the higher the interest rate offered by alternative investments), the sooner a project must be completed to make sense. Economic discounting is extremely important in energy development: Whether a proposed oil or gas field will take five years or seven before production can make the difference between its making economic sense or not.
406 I led a three-year National Science Foundation project to study peatland carbon dynamics in the West Siberian Lowland from 1998 to 2000. Its purpose was to drill cores across the region and involved dozens of Russian and American scientists and graduate students, including Olga Borisova, Konstantine Kremenetski, and Andrei Velichko at the Russian Academy of Sciences and David Beilman, Karen Frey, Glen MacDonald, and Yongwei Sheng at UCLA. For publications and results, see http://lena.sscnet.ucla.edu.
407 The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) is the successor to the Soviet KGB and Russia’s main domestic security agency. Upon arrival, foreign visitors to West Siberian cities must register/interview with local FSB officers and surrender passports at hotels. Some towns are completely closed to foreigners.
408 Including a CAD$1.2 billion bid for the rights to explore an offshore