Cooling Down a Warming Place to Make it Warmer

I once heard a comedian tell a joke about the butter box in a refrigerator, a warm box in the otherwise cold refrigerator, and the refrigerator was a cold box in a warm house, with the house being a warm box in the cold outdoors. That was the gist of it.

This is even worse: According to The Guardian, in the Arctic, ConocoPhillips is looking into "cooling devices that will chill the ground beneath its structures, insulating them from the effects of the climate crisis."

CleanTechnica says this means making the permafrost stable enough for trucks to drive over it and oil rigs to drill into it. Here's the Environmental Impact Statement if you want to dig into it. Notice the caribou on the cover page -- their babies too! -- happily coexisting amidst all the oil infrastructure, one big happy family. 

Of course, the more drilling they do, the warmer the planet gets, so the more permafrost will melt, and the more cooling they'll have to do. I wonder how long it can go on. Probably longer that I can imagine.