Calm! It is not ICE (United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Trump will be acknowledging another bogeyman: global warming, suggests The New York Times.
New year, new life. As in 2025 — and 2024 — Donald Trump entered 2026 with the same idea of the United States taking over Greenland. But something really seems to have changed: will the billionaire recognize global warming?
Among the declared geopolitical and commercial interests, another motivation may explain the US president’s fixation on the gigantic Arctic island: the defrost.
According to the reading, the accelerated loss of ice in Greenland could be a “time bomb” in terms of access to the territory currently controlled by Denmark.
According to researchers from the Danish Meteorological Institute, between September 2024 and September 2025 Greenland will have lost 105 billion metric tons of ice; Between 1985 and 2022, the ice sheet has shrunk by approximately 5,180 square kilometers. The availability of areas currently covered by ice and permafrost is expected to increase in the coming decades as the climate warms. And when the temperature heats up, Trump comes into play.
Underneath the ice there is a “treasure” of minerals such as graphite, zinc and rare earthsraw materials with increasing importance for the technological industry and the energy transition. US logic dictates that if melting ice makes these resources more accessible, Greenland will have an even greater strategic value, not only due to its geographic location, but its extraction capacity.
“Its settlement in Greenland is an admission that climate change is real”says John Conger, consultant at the Center for Climate and Security, to the New York newspaper.
The motivation becomes relevant when the others no longer make sense: the US already has practically unlimited military access in Greenland under a Cold War treaty with Denmark, which gives North Americans the possibility of operating however they want in the territory, he says. historian and economic analyst Adam Tooze.
“If Greenland is currently not adequately defended, it may have to do with the fact that the United States has completely deactivated several military bases it maintained in Greenland during the Cold War,” Tooze said on his podcast.
The hypothesis of interest in oilconstantly associated with North American intervention abroad, also makes no sense: Greenland stopped granting oil exploration licenses in 2021, for climatic, environmental and economic reasons.
Tomás Guimarães, ZAP //
