This Map Shows Us the 21st Century’s Biggest Energy Challenges – CleanTechnica

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A common online joke is that Trump only wants Greenland because it looks big on the map. But, the joke goes, he’s been fooled by the Mercator Projection, which makes things look bigger the closer they are to the north or south poles. Why? Because stretching the features of a spheroid shape onto a flat square can be challenging. Something has to be distorted somewhere for it all to work out. Greenland isn’t that big, nor is northern Canada, Alaska, or Russia.

While I’d love to be able to say that Trump really is that stupid, even a broken clock is right twice daily. In this article, I want to explain why Trump is partially correct about Greenland, and why we all need to rethink the way we view the world in the 21st Century.

The partial map in the featured image above this article comes from the Peirce Quincuncial Projection, which attempts to produce a map with less distortion of the land masses. Instead of wrapping the equator across the center of the map and then stretching everything else to fit a square, this projection found a way to push the distortion away from all of the land but Antarctica, leaving basically everything but New Zealand in roughly the right place. Here’s the full image:

Before I explain why this map is important, I want to first apologize to New Zealand readers. Yes, we know you’re close to Australia, but to make things work out reasonably well for all of the other places, you guys kind of end up getting cast away. The same is true for a number of island chains globally. Again, we know, and my use of this map doesn’t mean the people living there or working in Antarctica don’t matter.

By putting most of the land in the world in perspective, the importance of not only the Arctic Ocean, but every other sea route, begins to come into focus. Instead of looking like an unfathomably big ocean at the top of the world, we instead can see that the Arctic Ocean is more of a global version of the Mediterranean Sea. And, as climate change melts more and more of the ice, moving goods and services through it bypasses challenging waters near Antarctica and artificial passages like the Suez and Panama canals.

Any aspiring empire or any empire trying to remain relevant during the 21st and likely the 22nd century will need to look at the world this way. Moving goods and services is important. Moving fuel and military equipment can be even more challenging as powers assert control of places like the South China Sea and possibly Panama. Choke points like Greenland and northern Canada make a lot more sense.

But, aside from the deep moral problems with taking land away for geopolitical gain, Trump is also wrong because he’s missing out on the biggest cheat code: renewables!

The biggest problem with today’s map is that most global energy and transportation relies on moving fuel around on this map. This is not only expensive, but it leaves countries open to attacks on supply lines, even for their own home energy use. China is particularly vulnerable to this, as much oil and coal comes in from foreign sources by ship from great distances away.

So, if Trump was smart, he’d be doing what the Chinese government is doing and going all in on renewables, battery storage, and alternative fuels. Places like Greenland and Panama would continue to be very important, but trying to play without cheat codes against opponents who aren’t limited to fossil fuel thinking is just plain stupid.

Images: the Peirce Quincuncial Projection, generated by Strebe (CC-BY-SA 3.0).