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July was the world’s hottest month on record. Wildfires this summer destroyed a Hawaiian city and prompted evacuations in Canada, Greece, and Thailand. Floods devastated towns in Vermont in July and killed thousands of Libyans in September.
If this is climate change, governments and voters do not seem too alarmed. Rishi Sunak has just watered down the UK’s net zero policies. Last year, the Biden administration — the same one that enacted vast clean energy subsidies — implored drillers to pump more oil to make petrol cheaper. And with elections looming, politicians seem suddenly reluctant to talk about the sacrifices that may be needed to halt global warming.
John Vaillant’s new book Fire Weather aims to shake us out of this stupor with a tale of terror from a climate change frontline: the city of Fort McMurray, in northern Canada’s vast boreal forest, where an uncontrollable wildfire during an exceptionally warm spring in 2016 engulfed entire communities within days.
Vaillant tells his story at disaster-movie pace, starting with the glimpse of smoke on the horizon and assurances from the authorities that all will be fine in suburbia. Mounting doom follows as the flames lick golf courses on the city’s edge. Then, catastrophe.
By the end, 90,00 people had been evacuated, 2,500 structures destroyed, another 500 damaged. The fire burnt with such intensity that houses were eaten whole within minutes. The energy generated by the blaze created its own weather system, with hurricane force winds and lightning strikes.
Fire Weather includes a lot about the science of fire and weather. But it is also a book about the cognitive dissonance in climate change discourse; and how, like the emergency services in Fort McMurray who reassured residents that the fire was under control even as its flames became visible from the edge of town, we are all too sanguine in the face of imminent threat.
The book’s central irony is that Fort McMurray is the industrial epicentre of northern Alberta’s tar sands, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel deposits. It is a city whose existence depends on the hydrocarbons whose combustion cause climate change; but whose existence almost ended in a climate-induced combustion.
Extracting oil from the tar sands is messy, involving either open mining of the bitumen-soaked soil around the Athabasca river, or the injection of steam — in the depths of northern Canada’s winter — into the ground to make the bitumen flow. Even then, it must upgraded into liquids that can be refined. The process makes the tar sands the world’s most carbon-intensive source of oil.
And yet the projects carry on growing — providing the US with a fifth of their oil — and the world’s fossil fuel industry thrives. It is an example of what Vaillant calls a “bifurcated reality”, where executives at companies such as ExxonMobil or JPMorgan “accept the science of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and the threat it poses, and still continue to — literally — pour gas on the flames”.
This bifurcation is visible in Canada, where Justin Trudeau’s Liberal federal government enacted ambitious climate laws but is also spending billions of dollars to pipe bitumen across the Rockies to the west coast for export. At least the conservative provincial government in Alberta, home to most of the tar sands, has been open in its attitude to climate, suing to stop a federal carbon tax and recently imposing a moratorium on clean energy development.
But consumers are no less dependent than Alberta on fossil fuels, which as Vaillant shows can both sustain and threaten us, provide shelter but also terror.
The petroleum industry didn’t just pay the wages that allowed people to buy suburban homes in Fort McMurray; it made the houses too. The vinyl cladding; the plastic goods; the ethylene and propylene in the electric goods, furniture and clothing: all are petrochemical products. And all provided rich fuel for the wildfires. As the blaze raged, people fled in diesel-engine pick-up trucks, were treated in gas-guzzling ambulances, and evacuated in kerosene-fuelled aircraft.
Fire Weather isn’t a typical disaster book. Vaillant’s references to Nassim Taleb, Lucretius, Seamus Heaney, The Lord of the Rings, Xerxes, and Moby-Dick can grate. The Suncor Community Leisure Centre is impressive but not comparable to the Tower of Babel; Fort McMurray is no Babylon.
But Vaillant’s theme is epic. Our industrial world is releasing carbon at a rate 10 times faster than scientists can find in the geological record for the past 250mn years, he writes. “Thanks to fire and our appetite for boundless energy, we have evolved into a geologic event that will be measurable a million years from now.”
Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World by John Vaillant Sceptre £25/Knopf $32.50, 432 pages
Derek Brower is the FT’s US political news editor
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