Benefits of a Melting Arctic

This article pegs China, but that's not the only country that's looking at the benefits of an ice-free arctic. The five arctic nations (US, Canada, Russia, Denmark, Norway) have already been talking about how to divvy up the rights to the newly accessible resources. The thing that grabs me about the article follows from the oil reserves there. First, there's the ridiculousness of going there to drill for oil, when burning oil is what's melted the ice to begin with. But completely aside from that, it's the amount of oil there that strikes me. This article cites it as 90 billion barrels. Which sounds like a lot, but let's do the math.

According to the caption on this graph, world oil consumption was 85 million barrels per day in 2006. Assuming no further increases beyond that in demand/consumption, that works out to just over 31 billion barrels of oil per year. Which means that the entirety of the oil to be pulled out of the arctic will feed our global hunger for less than three years. That strikes me as more of a problem than a solution.