‘Krill, baby, krill’ – what president-elect Donald Trump means for imperilled Antarctica

Fishing in the Southern Ocean. (Photo: Flickr)

25 Nov 2024

Analysts, including a former official who served in Trump’s first administration, think US influence under the president-elect may be a slow-burning disaster. Could it also hold counterintuitive promise?

William Muntean, who led the US delegation to Antarctic Treaty meetings in 2022 and 2023, says he’s had a “childish affinity” with emperor penguins since he was “very little”. When China vetoed the treaty’s widely supported conservation plan for Antarctica’s most photographed penguin at the June 2022 annual talks, Muntean pushed for its protection back home.

In October 2022, the US listed it under the Endangered Species Act after receiving a substantial amount of new data. This reversed a 2008 decision not to list it.

“It would break my heart to see them disappear,” he says.

Now a non-resident senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the former 20-year career diplomat served in both the Trump and Biden administrations between 2018 and 2023. He says he wants to help ensure the Antarctic — Earth’s remotest continent and ocean — remains a zone of peace and wildness.

“American voters have now voted twice in the past three presidential elections that they prioritise pursuing short-term economic gain over addressing long-term environmental risks. Recognising this perspective, once back in office, President Trump will likely remove the US from the Paris Agreement,” Muntean predicts. “This will have important long-term negative implications for Antarctica’s environment and ecosystems.”

When the world’s second-biggest polluter packs its bags and leaves Paris, keeping global warming below 1.5°C becomes a pipe dream. Melting ice sheets accelerate, destabilising sea ice.

Muntean takes vanishing sea ice personally, because emperor penguins need frozen winter seas for breeding and fledging.

“Sea ice melt increases the risk that the emperor penguin will go extinct by the end of the century,” Muntean observes.

Major new US Antarctic policy prioritises protection

In May, the White House announced the US’s seminal new national strategy for Antarctica — a major update on a policy that was last written in 1994, shortly after the treaty’s environmental laws and mining ban were signed in 1991.

By clinging on to 1.5°C and promoting “an ecosystem-based approach”, which is informed by the “best-available” science, the new text speaks the necessary language of the day.

This is also the first US policy to emphasise Washington’s leadership role as both initiator and ongoing depositary of the 1959 treaty.

Eyes on China

Muntean led the most recent US unannounced inspection of stations in Antarctica in 2020, including China’s new research outpost as it was being raised on the Ross Sea. That inspection found nothing weird, but in February 2023 the CSIS issued a much-publicised report that says the Chinese station has satellite technology that could be used as a fig leaf for military advantage.

Muntean was not involved in that report, but points out that so-called dual-use technology is widely available at Antarctic stations, Chinese or not.

“The only question should be: What is that information being used for? That’s a much more complicated question.”

Muntean adds: “I hope and expect that the second Trump administration will use unannounced inspections and related monitoring tools to answer questions and concerns about Chinese actions and capabilities in Antarctica.”

A new era of uncertainty

And yet international affairs have now been thrust into a new level of uncertainty, emphasises Timo Koivurova, an Arctic and Antarctic law expert at Finland’s Arctic Centre, University of Lapland.

“Everything is more or less speculation,” cautions Professor Koivurova.

Presidencies one and two are not necessarily comparable, says Koivurova, because “Trump is by now a full politician with an agenda, inserting loyalists into all possible federal departments and agencies” — a culture that is “reinforced by a very conservative Supreme Court”.

Trump’s re-election is not only a “disaster for Arctic nature”, Koivurova writes in a new comment. His policies will “come to impact the ATS [Antarctic Treaty System] as well”, even if the US’s standard mid-level engagement with Antarctica was largely shielded from Trump’s more dramatic first-term shifts.

His envoys will try to ensure “his main agenda points are implemented in all international affairs” with a new level of “magnitude”.

“It may likely happen that the US will cut down on climate science done in Antarctica, and this will be a major loss for climate science, even globally,” says Koivurova.

Africa in the firing line

The political psychedelia of Trump’s first White House stint was also fuelled by budget cuts to federal science and environment agencies such as Nasa and Noaa, the University of Cape Town’s Dr Annette Hübschle reminds.

And when the White House makes decisions that can disrupt Antarctica’s global climate regulation, this puts Africa’s coastal people in the firing line of rising sea levels and changing ocean currents.

The voices of these varied, complex peoples are represented by a single country, South Africa, at the treaty’s decision-making table.

“African nations, though often underrepresented in polar governance discussions, have a stake in ensuring that Antarctic policies prioritise conservation and climate adaptation,” says Hübschle, of the university’s Global Risk Governance Programme, “as these directly impact our continent’s environmental and socio-economic future”.

Fishing in the Southern Ocean. (Photo: Flickr)

‘The last place on Earth where business has not been done as usual’

Krill fishing and marine protected areas (MPAs) are now a bellwether for the Southern Ocean’s pitching and rolling geopolitics.

After vetoing all conservation plans at the October talks of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), China can now compete with vulnerable krill predators like whales by fishing in a single area. Russia also used its vetoes. Rosgeo, Moscow’s mineral explorer, is once again deploying its oil and gas survey vessel to the Southern Ocean for the 2024/25 research season, according to the treaty’s database for non-military ships.

The “drill, baby, drill” culture that defines Maga realpolitik is also not likely to result in the promotion of new MPAs, says Oslo University’s Professor Alejandra Mancilla.

“Quite the opposite,” quips the political philosopher. “‘Krill, baby, krill’ might become the new CCAMLR motto.”

Indeed, the US entered krill fishing in July when American Industrial Partners acquired Aker BioMarine, a major Norwegian harvester. These cascading effects ask a deeper question: What should Antarctica symbolise in an era of environmental and political crisis?

Even though the philosopher describes the treaty as “not ideal”, she chooses to “see Antarctica as the last place on Earth where business has not been done as usual, and where even the most powerful actors have shown restraint”.

“Recall that the very possibility of an Antarctic Treaty sounded ‘blue sky’ to many until just before its signature,” says Mancilla, arguing that Trump’s re-election highlights the urgency of reaffirming the values that have kept Antarctica in peace for more than 60 years.

Mancilla recently co-wrote a paper arguing why the rights of the non-human natural world should be more directly considered in Antarctic governance.

“My hope is that Trump will pass,” she says, “but that the Antarctic Treaty will stay.”

‘Ignored by US administrations under the past four presidents’

There may not be any significant changes in the already minimalist US stance at ATS meetings, suggests Professor Alan D. Hemmings of Gateway Antarctica at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury.

Binding measures on liability for potential environmental disasters and Antarctic tourism have stalled in Congress for 20 or so years.

“They have been ignored by US administrations under the past four presidents — from both parties … nothing will change here,” says the Antarctic governance expert, whose latest paper unpacks the challenges of advancing progressive “rights of nature” policies within the “Greater Southern Ocean’s” fiendishly complex legal regime.

“The State Department officials who lead US delegations will, as before, aim not to have any issue arise at the meetings that requires, or attracts, the attention of the White House,” he observes. “The US stance is likely to be less supportive of climate change issues, but these are anyway barely touched upon at a policy level within the ATS.”

Hemmings believes that “the general enthusiasm for ‘containing’ China, already evident but likely to strengthen under the Trump administration, will also strengthen in relation to dealings with China around the Antarctic”.

“This would mean even less likelihood of the US seeking a rapprochement with China over disputed Antarctic issues — MPA designation, approaches to consensus around other matters — and thus these issues will continue to stymie the functioning of the ATS through his term.”

Relations with Russia may thaw at Antarctic meetings if the US under Trump pivots from supporting Ukraine to Russia. Unlike China and the US, Russia has “already approved the outstanding tourism and liability measures and seems committed to the ATS, so this may be largely a matter of atmospherics if the US-China difficulties remain unremediated”.

For Hemmings, the bipartisan commitment to the US’s waning polar icebreaker capacity — particularly compared with China’s and Russia’s — “will likely be given new emphasis under the new administration, which should increase US polar capacity in a few years’ time. But coupled with Aukus Pillar 1, in particular, may accelerate conventional security competition between the US and China in the region by the end of the decade.”

‘Influence in the Antarctic starts with presence’

For Muntean, the former US diplomat who fought to save emperor penguins, polar icebreakers are law enforcement tools and not offensive military assets. They may, in fact, represent an opportunity for Trump 2.0 to succeed where other administrations have failed.

“Influence in the Antarctic starts with presence, much of which is granted by icebreakers and the talented US Coast Guard crew that operates them,” Muntean notes.

Just as previous administrations prioritised different aspects of the 1994 policy, Muntean says, the incoming one will be selective about what it pursues in the revised policy, and that may well involve icebreakers.

“Addressing the long-acknowledged need for polar icebreakers could be an easy and important geopolitical win for the second Trump administration.” DM

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