The 21st century will be shaped by fire

the province of Alberta. The fire stood out for its size and its speed, but it interested writer John Valiant for another reason. Its location. Fort McMurray is a company town. At its heart is the oil industry. You might not have heard of tarsan's oil or bitumen before, but it's a sticky, viscous substance that requires extremely energy intensive steps to turn into usable crude oil. Canada sells millions of

barrels of this stuff every day. The story of how fossil fuel extraction made Fort McMurray, and how a fire, supercharged by the effects of global warming nearly destroyed it, is the subject of John's latest book, Fire Weather is a best seller and Pulitzer finalist. It's a deeply reported work of nonfiction that taps into some of the contradictions of the way we live today. I got to talk to John about it a few weeks ago at the

Charleston Festival, near Lewis in the English countryside. As we'll hear on this episode, the fire at the heart of the story is a thing of awe and terror, but it's also a distinctly man made disaster. When I read Fire Weather, I was struck by the sheer force it takes to extract bitchumen. Massive machinery, huge shovels, an enormous amount of energy, and human willpower, all of which in this story set the stage for a great deal of destruction.

When I spoke with John, I asked him to begin our conversation by reading a passage from his book that describes just how bitchumen is extracted from the Canadian earth.

job on your truck and your kitchen floor. The process of excavating, separating, and then upgrading this pavement like substance involves elements of strip mining, rock crushing, and steam cleaning, the petrochemical equivalent to squeezing blood from stones. Because of this, there's really no comparison between the petroleum industry in northern Alberta and the petroleum industries in Texas, Saudi Arabia, or any other place on or offshore where oil is drawn

from the earth by conventional means. A bitchumin mine is not a place you would let your child play, but it's excavated using equipment familiar to any four year old conversant in Tonka technology and with a similar grandiosity of ambition. In order to access the bitumen, the forest above it must first be removed. In industry parlance, this living material is referred to as overburdened, and the machine used to

scrape it off is a Caterpillar D eleven bulldozer. The D eleven weighs more than one hundred tons and its blade is twenty two feet wise, it can plow down a forest like mowing a lawn, but this is entirely in keeping with the scale of things up here. Working alongside the D elevens are Komatsu D five seventy fives, which are even bigger. Once the forest has been removed, enormous electric shovels excavate the by two minutes, sand in boulder sized chunks that can weigh one hundred tons and

occasionally contain complete dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous period. These garage sized payloads are dumped into a hauler, and the Caterpillar T seven ninety seven is one of the biggest dump trucks in the world. It's three stories tall and weighs four hundred tons unloaded. There are hundreds of machines like this operating in the mines north of Fort McMurray. Far too large for ordinary highways, they must be transported

north in pieces. It takes twelve oversized semi loads traveling with escorts to move the component parts of a single hauler. The tires alone are thirteen feet tall and cost eighty five thousand dollars a piece. When one of them catches on fire, something that happens more often than one might expect due to the terrific friction their loads generate, it must be deflated from a safe distance with a rifle bullet. Should one of these six ton tires explode on its own,

it will impact its surroundings like a powerful bomb. I have read that one aloud. It's really that's thanks for the for the opportunity, But.

it under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. And I really think the tar trade, you could call it, grew quite organically, if you want to call it organic, out of the fur trade, and where basically the European hat industry ran out of furs in the UK and Europe headed to Canada in the late seventeenth century, a really difficult place to work, freezing cold, and set about basically persuading compelling the indigenous inhabitants of Canada to denude the boreal forest

of beavers. And it's a really hard thing to do. But the Hudgson's Bay Company is, you know, along with the East India Company, are really one of the first global corporations. And even though it took three years to do a full round of furs from the forest to Montreal to the UK, returning with trade goods into the

Athabasca Wilderness for more beaver firs. That was a three year cycle, it still was incredibly effective, incredibly lucrative, and basically managed to harness the entire environment, human, animal and inanimate into this profit making machine. And I think that mindset and that skill set has informed the beitchuman industry in some really powerful ways.

ready to generate energy. And that's why we're mostly interested in petroleum is because it burns so In Canada, in the borel Up in Alberta, they take this excellent fuel, natural gas, and they burn it by the billions of cubic feet to melt bitchumen out of quartzite sand. I'm really sitting here like I don't even I can't even believe I'm saying it, you know, really, it's so it's so hard, you know, to do, and the temperature swings up there, it goes to minus fifty, it goes to

plus ninety five. Machines don't like that. Heavy machinery doesn't like that. Human beings don't like that, and they do it anyway, and so it's so what.

literally under the ground. The natural gas is cheap, the subsidies are generous, and by selling it at a discount into the US market, which is voracious for petroleum in all its forms, there's a way to turn a profit, a marginal profit. And Putin has been, you know, the best friend the bitchumin industry ever had, because it was really in a hail spin before Russia invaded Ukraine and spiked petroleum prices around the world.

on this industry. So let's flip the script here, because one thing that we do need to do is to try and build an industry that does not produce greenhouse gas emissions but still produces energy because we all need it, right. So if the Canadian government could do that for tar sans, as you describe, such a difficult industry to make profitable, could it not do it for clean energy solutions?

draw on. We've got everybody beat on that score. And then we also have endless geothermal, a lot and enviable hydropower. So were it to be a priority, were it to be subsidized and pursued with the zeal with which the bitumen industry has been pursued, Canada could power the continent of North America no problem. By itself. We could power the United States, and that is a matter of priority, and we've already demonstrated we can do the impossible by turning bitchumen into money. It is a dog of the

petroleum world. It's the only petroleum that sinks. You know, oil is supposed to float, and bitchamin doesn't. Bitumen sinks. So exactly, it's really it's political will, and you know right now the petroleum industry is the tail wagging the dog of the nation.

make the green transition happen. I'm sort of interested in what is possible and profitable and practically possible within the politics that we have today. But some of the stories in your book are about something else. They're about sacrifice, heroism that in many cases defies rational thought. Firefighters who left their own homes to burn in order to try and focus on trying to stop the spread of fire.

But when we talk about climate and we hear the words sacrifice, few people want to give up their car, their burgers, their flights. So how can we bring sacrifice to our understanding of what we need to be in the twenty first century? Yah?

the work is. A beautiful counterbouance to that is Texas, which is pretty hostile to the federal government, super conservative, always been a kind of rancorous, independent minded place, and they have installed and it's also the center, you know, the ground zero of the American oil industry in the early twentieth century. They have installed more wind and solar in the past year than the nation of Canada has

in its entire existence. So you can have climate denial, you can have hideous politics that punish women, that punish immigrants, and you can still somehow move forward into twenty first century energy. And some of that is because of President Biden and subsidies to build this energy. But also it makes sense for Texas. It's a huge place, it's got a lot of wind, it's got a lot of solar, it's got a lot of empty space, and so they are laying on the gigawatts by the month now, so

it's totally possible. Whereas in Alberta, the twin sibling to Texas, they have put a moratorium on wind and solar to examine the environmental impacts as they expand bitchmin production. So Canada had its worst fire season ever in twenty twenty three. At the same time, the petroleum industry was make can get abundantly clear that it wasn't going anywhere. Sun Core and one of the biggest players up in for McMurray, sold off its renewable energy arm, laid off fifteen hundred people,

and expanded its production. And every petroleum company that I've seen quoted, you know, I've read Financial Times, Wall Street Journal has made it really clear we're here for the profits and we're not going anywhere. And they've almost given up greenwashing. You know, they've been called out on that, and I think they will not be allies in this transition. We have to go around them, and that is happening.

We are in an energy transition right now. If you kind of need some hope on this score, young people are not going into the petroleum industry. That's not where the energy is, so to speak. That's not where the future is. And so what I see is a very powerful, very entrenched industry, like the tobacco industry, trying to wring every last dollar out of its model before it collapses. And it's you know, it's obviously it's a huge part

of our world. It's a complicated question. We could talk about it for an hour in terms of the way forward.

written about an exodus, for example in the Old Testament. Well, this actually happened, and atmospheric science hasts had not really ever seen it happening over a forest fire until nineteen ninety eight. The most closely studied one happened in Alberta, quite close to for McMurray in two thousand and one.

And these fire systems puncture the stratosphere. They're forty five thousand feet tall, they generate their own winds, They turned the way a hurricane does and because they generate their own lightning, This pyrocumulonimbus fire system essentially turns into a self perpetuation machine where it can start its new fires twenty or thirty miles away from the central fire. So this was an extraordinary rarity, really written about in the late nineties and early two thousands as a kind of novelty.

It didn't really enter the literature of fire science until around twenty ten. But this pyrocumulonimbus fire system I was a companion of the Fort McMurray fire for many, many days. This fire burnt in the city, not for days, I think. Actually the Great Fire of London in sixteen sixty six lasted for about five days, but obviously that was an extraordinary historic phenomenon driven by wooden houses and other things.

This fire, this was a modern city, and the fire was burning in and out of the city, driven by winds for a week or so, And part of this was due to this giant fire system swirling above that was starting new fires again twenty to thirty miles away from the center, but also generating its own winds and sucking up all available moisture not just from the forest but from fire hoses from any attempt to put this fire out, and the houses and the trees of Fort

McMurray basically came back to earth as black hail, and it really was a kind of biblical scenario, and that was one of the things that made me want to explore this more closely. And then I realized that this the fire, the heat being generated again. Everything is extraordinary dry, extraordinarily hot, and it created this kind of new set of parameters for the fire to grow and expand in So the heat coming out of the forest into Fort

McMurray was five hundred celsius. That's the radiant heat, and radiant heat that's the heat that tells you not to touch the candle. It moves at the speed of light, and so the fire can be way over there, but the heat is desiccating everything in front of it and heating it above combustive temperatures. So as soon as an ember lands on it and embers were flying in the

tens of thousands that day, it bursts into flame. And that's why homes half million, three quarter million dollar houses built to the state of the art, and they were burning to the baseman in five minutes and when firefighters told me this, I thought, well, you're exaggerating talking to a journalist. You're a lot of adrenaline that day. I can see why things would be accelerated for you. No's three minutes over here, five minutes over there, eight minutes

over there. And finally I talked to a physicist who specializes in domestic combustion in the burning of houses, and he said, well, yes, that is possible, and why don't you go and study the Hamburg firestorm of nineteen forty three if you want to understand the mechanics better. So that's basically what was recreated in for McMurray from an organic wildfire.

fire a character? This way, what does the beast want?

But the beauty of not being a scientist and being locked up in a room for seven years as I was working on this book is you can kind of really let your mind wander. And I wondered, humans and fire are so closely entangled, and we always have been. And I think you think about humans and dogs. You know, we've been together for forty or fifty thousand years, and you know, what is it about dogs and humans that

make such good companions? And so I pose the same question of fire, even though fire is not animate and alive in the same sense, And I thought, do we have a common ancestor? And again this is not scientific, but we do have a common molecule, and that is oxygen, And oxygen is the engine of life, and anything that depends on oxygen, whether it's a human or a dog, or an octopus or a wildfire, is a hostage to that molecule and has to keep moving in order to

feed itself. And so fire will die. If we just lit this table on fire and the table burned up, the fire would go out, but there's all all this plastic whatever it is here, and that heat would try to release the hydrocarbons from that, and it would try to keep moving. That's what it wants to do. Its default is not to die. Its default is to try to perpetuate itself, to try to expand, to try to grow. And I made a list of all our common attributes,

and there's about a dozen of them. And so fire is not alive, it's certainly not sentients, but it's lively and it's ambitious. And after this fire refused to leave the city for three or four days, the fire chief called it the Beast, and that's what it became known as. And it's really the first time I think in post contact North American history that a natural phenomenon has been given that kind of sort of animate power and identity, and yet to see it behave to talk to firefighters

about it. It felt like an address area that was behaving in a willful and intentional manner.

the petroleum industry is a fire industry. And I made the mistake of counting the number of fires that humans make every day, and it's actually in the trillions when you count the combustions in our engine. And so I imagine being an extraterrestrial looking down on planet Earth as it is now, with eight billion humans lighting fires wherever we go, and I thought, wow, this is a planet that follows a fire cod everywhere we go there is fire of some kind or another. And then I started

thinking about the petroleum industry a fire industry. And then I took it a step further and came to understand that the petroleum industry is a wholly owned subsidiary of fire. Fire is the ultimate expression of that domestication of desire. We are it's servants, and I think we are operating under the kind of illusion that fire is our servant.

But when you look at the fact that now fire burns more intensely, more broadly across the world than at any time in human history, and when you look at the geologic record in terms of the impacts of this obsession with liquid fueled fire, I think the geologic record will show that it's humans who served fire rather than the other way around. The twenty first century is going to be a really different experience for all of us.

All of us are going to see this. And there's a small town in British Columbia that burnt to the ground in forty five minutes in twenty twenty one during the heat dome and the mayor, sixty year old man, was being interviewed about it and he said, yeah, I thought climate change was a problem for future generation, and now I'm the mayor of a town that no longer exists.

So we are kind of reckoning with these changes at the same time that we see this really powerful awakening, especially among young people, but among all kinds of people that seeing the necessity of renegotiating and revivifying our relationship to the planet. Fort McMurray was just evacuated again last week due to fire, and people don't want to work

in that environment. So they're these kind of systemic cultural changes and this way of understanding nature and our role in it that is new and challenging and happening, and that I'm really excited to be part of that. It's going to be really quite pain. We are going to lose things. We're losing things right now. But we can handle this. And the question is how, how quickly and how and then how enlightened a way can we address it?

is composed by Wonderly Special. Thanks to the organizers of Charleston Festival, Takira bindrim Anamazarakis and Alisia Clinton I am Akshadharrati Back soon.