Drilling Deep: John Vaillant on Climate Change and Wildfire

book Fire Weather. We were already planning to bring you that conversation this week, but now the entire state of Victoria is under an extreme fire danger warning. It's bringing back memories of the terrible fire season in Australia just a few years back. There are spotfires burning in New South Wales and South Australia as well. So I can't think of a better time to bring you this conversation.

The story it tells us about a Canadian oil town that experienced a catastrophic bushfire in twenty sixteen. And though it describes events a world away, for many of us here in Australia, it'll be deeply familiar and for many people in this region.

him for warmly welcome Mbayron Bay. And just before we get into it, I want to be just heads up. We will be taking questions in this session, so in about forty five minutes a volunteer will come around with a microphone. So if you have your questions, hold on to them to then we do ask that the questions are a question and you know you're going to keep them short so we can get as many in as possible to kind of get as much good information as

we can out. And if you want to have more of a conversation with John, you're more than welcome to do so. I wrote the book, signing tent with a copy of the book when after the show, So John, I wanted to kind of open this conversation with you by asking the question, I mean, there are many fires in many places, but what drew you to this one?

pace up in Canada. We're doing our part. And Fort McMurray, which caught on fire in May on May through twenty sixteen and drove the largest most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times, caught my attention before any of us knew that really, because it disappeared from the face of the earth for a while, and I was I'm not a climate journalist. I'd write about every book is

about a different subject. I've written about aman eating tiger in Russia and a botanically unique tree in British Columbia and other things. But so fire was not really on my radar. And I was working on a novel and in Italy at a very swank writer's retreat and made the mistake of looking at Twitter and this petroleum hub

of Canada. Canada's the fourth or fifth largest petroleum producer in the world, and the hub of that industry had completely disappeared beneath a forty thousand foot tall pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud. And that was on May third, twenty sixteen, and nobody knew there were a ninety thousand people in there. You can see the cars streaming out. There's only one road out. They were streaming out like ants to the horizon, and nobody knew who was left in there, and nobody knew

for days. It was really frightening. Kind of at a national level, it's a nationally important city. It is home to the highest wages in the whole city. I think you have some of that here. There's you have a great name for it, the pilberl, the uh okay and the name for the people who make spectacular wages working there.

earth in an afternoon was deeply threatening and terrifying. And I dropped the novel and started paying attention so on that.

out of the ground. And this industry has altered, basically destroyed a thousand square miles of the northern boreal forest. And as they use gigantic shovels, much like coal mining to dig this stuff out, and then in order to process it, you have to melt it with billions of cubic feet of natural gas just to render it into a liquid form that can then be piped a thousand miles south to an American refinery for processing, where it

needs more natural gas to refine it. So it is probably the least efficient, most environmentally destructive, most costly petroleum product anywhere on Earth, and the math that makes it work is fuzzy to say the least.

way information is controlled there. It's sort of small f fascist and you know, I'm really sorry to say that. You know, I'm a Canadian, generally proud Canadian, but you know, Alberta is a problematic place in complete denial about climate change, like Texas, like Washington, d C. Now, and it's basically in servitude to this so far very lucrative but extraordinarily destructive petroleum industry. And it creates a very weird tension where incredible wages can be garnered, but also the same

mostly men. It's about twenty five to one up there. Men to women also live in enormous procarty because they can be laid off at any time. They get on the hook for one hundred thousand dollars f one fifty or a house and then they can lose it all. And it's a very kind of hyper and unstable situation that has a lot of casualties come out of it.

in the country of CO two. And the idea of a climate enhanced wildfire that was behaving in ways no one had ever seen before, the idea that this fire would not only threaten but actually overrun the entire city was kind of on the nose, really, and yet it happened. And I think what was surprising is how hard it was, even when the fire was in front of people's faces, how hard it was for them to believe that this was actually happening and happening to them.

boreal forest to burn. And this city is an isolated city, five hours driving from the nearest other major source of assistance, which is Edmonton, terribly isolated, and so fires surround it every summer and every spring, and so there is this strange comfort with smoke plumes on the horizon, but also this magical compact that they seem to have that well the fire, Yeah, the fires burn out there, but they'll never come into our city. And that had worked for

fifty years. And nature, you know, is not here to make agreements with human beings or their ambitions. Nature is here responding to the forces that influence it. And what we had on May third, twenty sixteen was a temperature record for that day broken by six degrees celsius, and we had relative humidity of eleven and that, you know,

might make your eyes roll back. And it's not an interesting subject to me until I started looking at where eleven percent humidity is normal, and eleven percent humidity is normal in North America in Death Valley in the month of July, the driest hottest place on the continent. And now those conditions have been transposed to one of the most flammable ecosystems on Earth, and we've had two years of drought, and so those trees didn't just catch on fire,

they exploded into flame. And at about one in the afternoon, a ten kilometer wide wave of fire one hundred meters tall swept into the city and it came fast and burnt through the city day and night for a week. And it's I think the only other fire that's lasted that urban fire that's lasted that long as the Great Fire of London in sixteen sixty six. And those were some different conditions, and so how did the people respond?

First off, Well, one person I interviewed. There's this very heavy duty, angry looking black plume on the other side of the river from where she lives, and there had been four other big fires around the city. People were already being evacuated temporarily. This woman, who lived right in the middle of town was hosting one of these evacuated couples, and they were taking pictures of the plume across the river, but it was a novelty to them. It was like

a rainbow. And then she went off to work in her Porsche and it was a bluebird day, unseasonably hot, and so she dressed for the weather. She wore a skirt, which she hardly ever did, because it's a city of men, and being a woman working there is a very weird, overdetermined experience, and it's a little bit like maybe being a female prison guard in a prison, like there's this unwholesome energy is directed at you. And in spite of this, she dressed it in a festive way and went off

in her Porsche. And when she came back down into town for lunch, the city had disappeared behind this black and red curtain, and she didn't even understand what she was looking at It had happened so fast, it was so huge that what a lot of people experienced was disorientation. They simply didn't have the space in their head to

understand what was happening. So and that was really interesting because you know, I have my feelings about the petroleum industry and people who work in it, and there's a policy of climate denial in Alberta. And this wasn't denial. This wasn't people being obtuse. This was something so enormous side their experience that they simply didn't have the cognitive capacity to process it in a rational way. It was just not computing. It just yeah, it basically kind of

created more of a short circuit. And so and then you know, ash was falling. Sky was completely orange. By two or three in the afternoon. You could only function in the city with headlights because it had turned black. It was so dark from the except for things that were burning. And everybody realized, you know, not from the authorities, but from their neighbors saying, you know, my house is

on fire, you should probably leave. Then this very hirky jerky, disorganized evacuation began, and with a miraculous outcome which we can get into But.

the expectation of the wall as it should be. And I think one of the scenes that and I want to ask you about the authorities reaction a second, but one of the scenes in particular I'm thinking about involves the authorities, and that was when I think it was. Was it the fire chief when the radio station.

grip on this. All is good. And then right after that, around noon, a journalist brought the wildfire guy into the radio station and it had a plate glass window that happened to look in the direction where the fire was, and you know, it was a distant you could barely see it, you know, at ten in the morning. But by twelve thirty it had achieved crossover, which is basically where the humidity and the temperature divide in a particular

way that really energizes fire. You have that here in Australia too, for sure, And so that was happening and it changed the quality of the smoke coming up behind these neighborhoods. And so we see the interviewer who described this to me in detail. You hear this guy, the wildfire manager, just repeating by wrote these almost kind of platitude, like anodyne directives about what people should do, which was don't do anything, rash, go to work, do your thing.

And we've got this in hand. But he's watching with his eyes as the smoke changes, and he knows, he understands, because he's a wildfire prison he understands what's happening. And then he kind of cuts the inner and hustles out of there. And that's when the first evacuation notices is issued.

And so we see people, even the experts, even the people in charge, who understand the gravity of the fire conditions, how dry it is, how hot it is, two years of drought, all of that things that people in Australia and are very familiar with. And imagine the fire authority who understood that intellectually but still couldn't make the leap. My god, this is energy that could take over the city. And that's what you see kind of in real time as they start to put it together. And it's very

hard to look at in retrospect. How could you not understand this when all the fire codes, the drought, moisture code, the temperature, the wind, everything was pointing to firestorm conditions. How could you not get it? And I think intellectually

they got it, but they didn' get it existentially. And so that's what we see in this kind of tortured way as this city, you know, one of the wealthiest in North America, where people have enormous agency and enormous confidence in their ability to meet challenges, are overwhelmed by an energy they've never encountered and have no equipment to respond to.

beautiful despite the awful circumstances you are describing. Could you talk about what happened as people evacuated from these neighborhoods, as they evacuated from the city.

You probably have this in Australia too. There's only one road in people haven't really thought about, well, we should probably have an alternate exit road in case that one is blocked by fire. This is a really serious issue across a lot of the Western world and places in general, especially where there's new rapid development going in and so, and they are realizing that their community is on fire in a very uneven way. And again a lot of it is word of mouth. And what's extraordinary is somehow

everybody did the right thing, and that statistically impossible. This is a city of eighty or ninety thousand people where you know, there are drug problems there, there are people who have worked, you know, pulled two or three twelve hour shifts. People are sleeping at odd hours. This industry runs around the clock, so you have people sleeping in the daytime, and you also have many different languages and

ethnicities there, and it's kind of a melting pot. And so what to cut to make a long story short, there was a one hundred percent success rate with the evacuation. No one knew this for days. They kept as they you know, eventually started sifting through these burnt basements, of which there were thousands. They were expecting to find bones or something. They never found any. And they've they've you know, they've realized we had a one hundred percent successful evacuation.

And of course, you know, that's because it was Canadians who and.

international nature. And so you have the languages, the ethnicities, the religions, the different concepts of what risk is, the different concepts of what community is. And yet somehow, between police, firefighters and citizens going door to door, every single person got out. And it's amazing. And this does not have This is not happening in Turkey right now, where we have a lot of fatalities. Didn't happen in la where thirty people were killed, didn't happen in Paradise where nearly

one hundred were killed. Didn't happen in Valparaiso last spring where two hundred people were killed. People generally die in conflagrations, and there's been a lot of them over the past decade, and so Fort McMurray had this strange mercy visited upon it. And a lot of people work in the petroleum industry, so there have fire consciousness. But that doesn't explain a

one hundred percent success rate. And I'm kind of hoping a sociologist will go up there and analyze the escape, because it's never been repeated and probably never will be. And so Canada got a pass. And their response to that, though, was to rebuild the city exactly as it was and to increased petroleum production and to be in complete denial about what happened on the evacuation.

to the last to make sure word got out. And the other thing I wanted to ask before I wanted to kind of pull the camera back and ask some bigger picture questions in the second. But the final thing is the response the firefighters, the people on the front line who were responding to this thing. You had an incredibly respectful, incredibly incredible stories that you spoke to these people about. Can you talk about some of how they responded, how they had to learn on the fly in response to what was.

the community. So it's desiccating everything. And if you have vinyl siding on your house, of course that's melting off. And because the modern house here in Australia too is composed heavily of petrochemicals, at that temperature, all those petrochemicals start to vaporize, and so what you have is a gigantic gas can full of flammable vapor. Except that's your house,

that's your neighborhood, that's your city. And so the other thing that's happening with that kind of heat is it's generating ferocious wind, and so you have ember showers, you know, sort of fifty thousand embers per acre, landing on these unburned houses, and instead of the house catching on fire because of all the vapor, the house explodes into flame.

And so I got through to some firefighters finally. You know, that's a sort of a closed environment and it's kind of hard to break in there, and I managed to do it with the help of another forest fire fighter and talking with these guys and I said, yeah, the

houses were burning down in five minutes. And I was sure that this guy was exaggerating or you know, like five minutes, and I pressed him and I said five minutes, Like what do you mean from no fire on the house to fire in the basement with nothing standing in five minutes. And these are you know, half million dollar houses that weigh fifty tons, you know, these are proper homes,

and they began to modify their firefighting technique. By there's no way they could get to a house quickly enough when it's burning five minutes, so they would basically figure out which way the fire was going and then count down the houses. And it takes twenty minutes to set up at a hydrant, and so they would count down four houses and start on that house, and the previous

four would burn. And in many cases the heat was so intense that they simply had to issue a may day and just evacuate the fire trucks in everything, and to the point that they were leaving hoses in the hydrants, and which is something you never do. You know, It's like a soldier leaving their gun behind. You know, there's certain things that are just ingrained into your behavior and you do not leave any equipment behind or obviously any

of your firefighting crew. And all they could manage to do was to get out with their trucks and they managed to, you know, bring the civilians. And this is something I think that you know, we hadn't hit yet, but Australians have where the firefighting operation turns into a life saving operation where all you can do is try to get as many people out as you can, and you can't. The structures are so involved with fire that there's nothing water can meaningfully do.

They're on their own in there. In many cases they're superiors,

don't even know where they are. They're kind of caught behind enemy lines trying to save a school or you know, some piece of a neighborhood, or maybe the airport and At one point, the fire was moving so quickly through this one housing development that they just realize the only way they're going to stop it, so basically, plow a fire break through the neighborhood, in other words, tear all the standing houses down to keep it from going into the next neighborhood. So this is day three or four.

It's you know, four in the morning, pitch dark except for the fire, and these bulldozer and backo operators are brought in and told to plow every car they see in the street through the wall and into the basement of the nearest house and then plow the house down on top of it. And these are again six hundred thousand dollars houses that are literally brand new, finished that year.

And so these guys are just kind of doing what they're told, and they don't have protective gear on the fire as they're raging, and their solidarity for each other, their concern for each other, and their bravery and their incredible expertise under pressure was kind of unmistakable and fascinating. And these are you know, these guys had never been interviewed by anybody before, and they're humble, working guys paid

extraordinarily well but pretty low key people. And it's just a fascinating section of the book hearing these guys who are experts with heavy equipment talk about the subtleties of heavy equipment under the most kind of terrifying and dangerous circumstances that they've ever operated in. And so that just gave me a sense of who these people really were.

And again, I live in Vancouver. It's kind of a lefty liberal viro scene that I come out of, and so I have a lot of baggage, you know, around the petroleum industry, and I quickly learned that that's not going to help me in my reporting, and so I really tried to leave as much of that behind as I could and just kind of approach these folks as

human beings with a very specific kind of expertise. And that paid off handsomely because we get to meet people who normally nobody ever bothers to interview, and they helped save that city and it was heroic what they did, and so I feel really proud of them and lucky to have had the opportunity to interview them.

So there's really few things more toxic than the cumulative smoke from a burning house. You know, there's a bazillion

chemicals in there and one thing that's quite poignant. These firefighters who spent a week NonStop trying to fight this fire are all pretty clear that their lives have been shortened the same way the people who did who were clearing away the Twin Towers after nine to eleven, people who are clearing up after Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, just the soup of poisons that are ambient and released from normally able and inert objects is overwhelming, and these

guys who saved the city are going to pay the ultimate price for them.

kind of pressing. And these guys are not poets, and they're not scientists. They're firefighters. But they had this relationship with this entity that clearly had agency and a kind of ambition. And so I asked a very unscientific question, just rhetorically, which was is fire alive? And the second question was do humans and fire have a common ancestor, and these are questions no scientists would ask, and you know, firefighters don't ask that question either, and that's why we

have journalists to ask kind of unprofessional, improbable questions. But it led me to a much more nuanced understanding of fire, which has almost all the characteristics of a living thing except for sentience. So in terms of its power to reproduce, its versatility of diet, its ability to weight and to smolder, to be dormant and then to reawaken, I made a whole list of those qualities. And then that led me into you know, what's driving it and which is oxygen,

And that's kind of our common ancestor. You know, we are burning events. Also, we just take eighty years to burn up and fires burn much more quickly, but we're all oxidizing. Fire is a rapid oxidation event and you are a slow oxidation event. But we're both we're all oxidizing. So that made me think about petroleum in a different way, and our kinship with fire, which accompanies us everywhere we go to the point that we don't even realize it.

And so you know, when I turn on the hot water I'm activating fire, but to me, all I'm feeling is a nice, warm shower. When I get in the car, I get to go where I want to go, but hundreds of thousands of combustions are taking me there. And so I counted the number of fires that human beings make daily, and including internal combustions, it's on the order

of tens of trillions. So if you could see all the fires that we make just going about our daily lives, it would be like galaxies, galaxies of fire, none of which would burn, and circumstances like this, My god, this is a very very impressive rain you've got here.

to transporting fire energy. And that's what drives us, that's what empowers our economy, that's what it has enabled us to be together right now, That's what enabled me to join you from Vancouver. That's what has enabled most of us to achieve the wealth we have. You know, however humble that might be. Most of that is due to

thanks to petroleum. So we owe an enormous debt to petroleum, even as its externalities, which have not been factored in, which CO two and methane are now actively taking those gains away from us town by town, city by city, forest by forest. And so we're in this very early stage of understanding both are the debt we owe petroleum and at the same time, I'm the collection process that

a superheated climate is costing us. So where it's you know, we've never been here before, folks, and it's new, and.

the Fort McMurray fire. In twenty sixteen, he wrote an article for Slate magazine and he coined the term the pyro scene and he basically said, that is the era we're in. So last twelve thousand years was the Holy Scene epic. It's what enabled it was the kind of relatively stable climate conditions that allowed us to build the civilization that we've come to know and enjoy. The piraccene

what I call twenty first century fire. We're also seeing it in flooding in terms of drought and temperature peaks. Is a new world. It's a post hole a scene, and that's what we're entering now and having to come to grips with.

move on to the cars. It can it can manipulate any situation to its benefit. And this is what large corporations are also able to do. And again, the goal is growth and growth at any cost. And fire has no conscience and it has, you know, one job, which is to combust as broadly and charismatically as it possibly can.

That's what oxygen compels it to do. But it's very interesting to watch a standard oil the under the leadership of John D. Rockefeller or Amazon under the leadership of Jeff Bezos, watch how they move across a landscape and it's really quite similar. And it really got me thinking as sort of a probably something for another book and maybe probably a finer mind, but looking at the connection between capitalism and oxygen, and I think the urgency of oxygen.

You know, we're all calm now breathing, but if we were not to breathe for sixty seconds and then couldn't get a breath, our behavior would change radically and we would have some sense of the urgency of fire. And that's you know, fire is trying to keep the party going, to keep the combustion happening. And we see that with our current economic system, which is keeping this party going. And we see that the petroleum industry is a powerful driver of that in even flying in the face of

really basic, well accepted climate science. It wants to keep the growth and keep the speed, and it's disastrous. And see what happened with the fire at The fire will eventually burn out, exhaust itself, leaving a wasteland behind it. And there are analogies to be seen there in terms of the impacts of capitalism on a landscape.

going to go to questions. So just while you think of some pressing questions to ask our guests, I want to ask you one final question before we kind of move to that, which is and this is something that I picked up on through the book and I have also found on my own work as a reporter and a journalist, is that you spent so much time talking to people who had, in some cases been close to death, who would experienced something terribly traumatic, who had been through

incredibly scary moments. But in the process of doing that, you then recorded those conversations, and then you have to process those conversations and then write those conversations and wondering how you dealt with the kind of vicarious trauma of piecing that together and laying it out next to each other.

it would be very spotty. And now I think you could ask any Canadian the entire country of forty four million people, and everybody knows somebody who's been evacuated, or else they've been evacuated themselves. So I would say that PTSD is now an epidemic in Canada. And if you're an empathic person, and you kind of have to be to be a journalist, that's part of how you get people to trust you and share the worst days of their lives with you. It's a perverse thing to want

to do professionally, but I'm compelled to do it. I know Royce is too, and we have a role to play. But you're also taking in that trauma too and going to these places and seeing the totality of the destruction. What a modern fire can do. There was one in Redd in California two years after for McMurray that generated an e F three tornado. And I walked that landscape right after the fire, and it looked like photos i'd

seen of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was. It was complete and total destruction on a vast scale, and nothing was left. And I did not have gray hair when I started this book and now I do, and it's and you take it in and people, you know, these you know, tough oil dudes are crying in front of me describing how scared they were and how scared they were for

their family, and it's impossible not to shed a tear. Also, you know, you're being you're you're living this experience through them, and you might be the first person they've told the whole thing to. And sometimes these stories would take three or four hours to unfold as they described their evacuation process, which was grindingly slow because tens of thousands of other cars were also trying to leave at the same time

and everything was on fire. I mean, it is an absolute bona fide miracle that nobody was killed because everyone's driving like at a Starbucks drive through lineup speed, trying to get out, and yet they kept it together. Did it change it absolutely? You know in that sense. I don't know if you're familiar with the rhyme of the

Ancient Mariner, but that famous poem. It begins with this crazy old guy sitting outside of a church and he accosts this young man on the way into a wedding and says, I gotta tell you, And that's kind of I've been doing this for two years around the world, and I feel compelled to tell people because it's really bad and it can happen to us, and it feels incredibly urgent to me, and I honestly don't want other people to suffer the way the people I met and interviewed suffered.

fossil fuels as a of national survival strategy. And so we have a very probably the smartest, one of the smartest Prime ministers Canada has ever had, this guy, Mark Carney, very sophisticated guy, fully understands the climate risk that we find ourselves in. But he's also beholden to the petroleum industry that helped him get elected and to what Canada

has that's fungible right now, which is petroleum product. And so we are really behind in the energy transition, which, by the way, folks, is happening and Australia is actually making great progress on renewable energy. Texas again, you could say, the Alberta of the United States, conservative climate denying oil state is producing more wind and solar and adding to that more rapidly than any other date in North America. And you'd think California would be the leader or New

York would be the leader. Well, Texas is the leader, and so we find progress in some strange and unlikely places, which means I think we don't need to agree with everybody on everything in order to move in the right direction. But Canada right now is woefully behind. And I follow Australia and energy and climate issues kind of off the

side of my desk. Australia gets a lot of attention in Part three of Fire Weather because you are so important to the fire story and the energy and climate change story, and we have a lot to learn from Australians. With that study, revealed to me is how similar Canada's and Australia's policies and lack of policy are. I think though honestly, I think Australia, believe it or not, is a little ahead of Canada, and I would have objectively assumed it might be the opposite, but it isn't.

far haven't seen provincial policy or national policy. And yet at the same time, we in Canada have a program called fire Wise, which is sorry fire smart, it's fire wise in the US fire smart where members of the fire departments will come into your cul de sac or backyard or community meeting and talk to you about how you can basically harden your community against wildfire impacts, and

so that part is definitely happening. I think also what we're seeing because there have been so much fire in Canada over the past few years, that there's a lot more preemptive of evacuation. Because Fort McMurray was an absolute gong show, and again, it is a miracle that nobody died there, and a death toll of hundreds would have been totally plausible under the circumstances, and that would have been a national catastrophe that we would still be reeling from.

And we got to pass that time. And a number of municipal leaders now and fire chiefs understand how lucky Fort McMurray was in terms of loss of life that there was none, and so now people are a bit more conservative in terms of getting people out sooner. That feels like progress to me. In terms of actually fighting fire, we don't really have the means. Water doesn't work against fires of this intensity, and you can lay down fire retardant, but the Dixie Fire in California a couple of years ago.

It cast viablemer is ten miles They started fires ten miles away. There's no way you can build a fire break against that. Likewise, with pyrocumulonimbus fire clouds which occur here, which occur in places where they've never occurred before. Now they generate lightning same way volcanoes do, and so they can start a fire thirty or forty miles away from the center of the fire action. And again there's no firebreak.

No amount of water is going to stop that. So we're entering this, you know, a truly different reality in terms of what fire is capable of doing, and we are catching up to that very very slowly. But there are individuals in different communities. I find them everywhere I go, where people have either taken the message of fire weather to heart or had their own experiences, you know, really hard one lessons learned, and you know, I think that's

another place. So where I think Australia is probably ahead of the game, ahead of the rest of us, and where we have a lot to learn. I think Australia, and in terms of larger entities, I feel like Australia and California. That would be the two most progressive places and southern sorry, Southern Australia and California. And but it's it's a big question, but it's very erratic, very sporadic.

in one direction and pretty steeply. And so when you look at what's happening in the south of France right now, pretty much the worst fire in their history literally right now, and you look at across the Eastern Mediterranean, lethal and catastrophic fire is burning in several different countries, and we got a ways to go this summer, so I think we can expect a lot more of it, And in terms of it being baked in, you know there there there's a lot of anxiety around, justified anxiety around on

the state of permafrost in the far north in the and the amount of methane that is trapped there and that is released as it melts, and methane is a really potent greenhouse gas. So on the good news, it's looking like China's CO two emissions are plateauing and are probably going to go into decline as they catch up with renewable energy, which they've been leaning into harder than anybody else combined. And so you know a lot of naysayers will say, yeah, but look at all the coal

plants they're building. They are building a lot of coal plants, but increasingly those are backups for the wind and solar, and the wind and solar is now finally catching up so that their emissions are are plateauing and are probably going to decrease, and whether that's you know, so that's that is historic planetary change given the size of their

economy and energy needs. But then you have you know, the US, you know, going into regression, but the rest of the world is dialing into this energy transition that is on that is own root that I would say is inevitable. It's not going to happen as fast as the smartphone happened, but it's absolutely happening. The solar is the cheapest energy ever conceived, and it's being laid on at a rate that we've never seen before. So but we're going to see more fire too, and we have to get ready for it.

They come back ferociously. You know, as long as there is a prey base, they will they will just expand and h and flourish. So and we've seen that when we've we've taken dams out of rivers in the United States, how quickly the fish come back and the birds come back. So there's a lot of very good and potent energy out there that we're part of and that we can participate in and enable.

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