A hot race for cold oil

The only thing standing between the U.S. and access to huge oil deposits far off the coast of Alaska is an unratified treaty.

Russian scientists are hard at work trying to prove that a big chunk of the Arctic Ocean — and the billions of tons of oil underneath it — belong to them. The U.S. could counter this claim, but it doesn’t have standing to do so because this nation hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.