Fire weather: climate chaos is already here | The Chris Hedges Yarn

In May 2016, a monster wildfire engulfed thecity of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcingthe evacuation of 88,000 people. The freakishly destructive conflagration which tore into the townwith such speed that residents barely escaped in their cars as their houses flared and vaporized,is a harbinger of the new normal; The climate catastrophe that will become commonplace as theclimate heats up and monster storms, heat waves, and wildfires proliferate. Fort McMurray is inthe heart of the Alberta tar sands, one of the largest concentrations of crude oil in the world.The tar sands produce 98% of Canada's oil and are the US's largest source of imported oil. Thisoil, among the dirtiest fossil fuels on earth, is a leading cause of atmospheric pollution,releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide..

The production and consumption of onebarrel of tar sands crude oil releases 17% more carbon dioxide than production andconsumption of a standard barrel of oil. Tar sands oil is a thick, mucky, clay-likesubstance that is infused with a hydrocarbon called bitumen. The oil is extracted by a processknown as steam-assisted gravity drainage which occurs under the earth and is similar to fracking.In the northern part of the province, extraction is done by strip-mining the remote boreal forestof Alberta, 2 million acres of which have already been destroyed. The destruction of vast forestssold to timber companies and the scraping away of the topsoil have left behind poisoned wastelands.This industrial operation, perhaps the largest such project in the world, is rapidly acceleratingthe release of the carbon emissions that will,.

If left unchecked, soon render the planetuninhabitable for humans and most other species. The oil is transported thousands of miles,to refineries as far away as Houston, through pipelines and in tractor trailer trucksor railroad cars. More than 100 climate scientists have called for a moratorium on the extractionof tar sands oil. Former NASA scientist, James Hansen, has warned that if the tar sandsoil is fully exploited, it will be “game over for the planet.” He's also called for the CEOsof fossil fuel companies to be tried for high crimes against humanity. Joining me to discussthe suicidal folly of our continued extraction of fossil fuels and the consequences for theplanet is John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World which isa finalist for the National Book Award..

So let's begin. I'm going to read this passagefrom the beginning of your book. It describes the fire itself. “Within hours, FortMcMurray was overtaken by a regional apocalypse that drove a serial firestorms throughthe city from end to end — for days. Entire neighborhoods burned to their foundations beneatha towering pyrocumulus cloud typically found over erupting volcanoes. So huge and energetic wasthis fire-driven weather system that it generated hurricane-force winds and lightning that ignitedstill more fires many miles away. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains thelargest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.” This incident thatyou build your book around, at one point you compare it to the firebombing of Hamburg. Lay outfirst, the preconditions that are there including.

You write about it, the nature of the forestitself. You wrote the trees don't grow because it's designed or it's expected to burn. Before weget into what happened, lay out the antecedents. Yeah, sure. It's good to be with you, Chris. Theboreal forest system is the largest such forest system on earth. It circumnavigates the NorthernHemisphere. It goes all the way across Canada, all the way across Alaska, through Russia where it'sknown as the “taiga,” into Scandinavia, touches down on Iceland, picks up again in Newfoundland,and heads off westward again across Canada, completing the circle. Alberta is about halfboreal forest, and one way to understand Alberta is it's basically the Texas of Canada. So a lotof the same values, interests, economy, religious emphasis, alienation from federal government, andall of that can be found in Alberta too, along.

With this very naturally flammable forest system.In May of 2016 when this fire broke out, you could say erupted, we were seeing alandmark in a steady trend of heating and drying. So the boreal forest system has moresources of freshwater than any other biome, including the tropical jungle. It's been slowlywarming and slowly drying out, and on May 3, 2016, there were five separate wildfires burning aroundFort McMurray. The conditions were extraordinary, in the low 90s. And again, we're in the subarctichere. We're 600 miles north of the US border, so 90 degrees is a very unusual temperature.Not only that, we have a relative humidity of about 11%, and to find a similar environment, youhave to go to Death Valley in Southern California to find a steady relative humidity like that.So now you have this naturally explosive fire.

System, the boreal forest, heated to SouthernCalifornia temperatures and dried to desert dryness. You put a fire in there and you put awind blowing in the wrong direction and you don't have a normal wildfire — you have a firestorm.A quick science lesson here; Radiant heat is the heat coming off the fire. It's the heat thattells you not to touch the candle or put your hand in the fire. The heat that day coming towardFort McMurray out of this wildfire was about 950 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's hotter than Venus.Let's talk about the natural cycle within the ecological system. You write one of the reasonsthe trees never get very big or very old is because in spite of all that water, they burndown on a regular basis. They're designed to. Yeah. The boreal forest system, we don't thinkabout it too much because it's so far north..

It's very sparsely inhabited up there, soenormous fires are natural. You could have a thousand-square-mile-fire that would beheadline news if it was in California and it will pass without a ripple in the Canadiannews cycle because they're relatively common. But this is where Fort McMurray is an anomaly:It's a city of 90,000 permanent and temporary workers. 600 miles north of the US border, in themiddle of this forest system that is typically uninhabited and generally left to burn on itsown. So to put a large, permanent city that has enormous economic value to the country in theway of a fire-prone environment is asking for trouble. And they had managed to deflect it inthe past and their number came up in May 2016. Let's talk about the extraction. As I toldyou before we went on the air, I visited Fort.

McMurray and driven up through the tar sands andit's very hard to grasp the size of the operation and these monster trucks, and it is somethingout of a moonscape. But talk a little bit about the extraction, both in terms of this specialequipment in the book but also of how vast it is. Yeah. When Canada talks about its petroleumindustry, we think of oil wells, drilling rigs, and things like that, and we really haveto forget all that. What it's closer to is a massive coal-mining project. Bitumen issand; It's sand soaked in bitumen which is basically tar. And no ordinary person wouldever imagine extracting oil from that but — You write in the book that it's only 10% bitumen.– Yeah, yeah. So it's about 90% or 85% quartzite sand which is a hard mineral, 5% water, bits ofclay, and then this tiny percentage of bitumen.

Which has to be dug up with giant machines. WhenI say giant machines, I'm talking about cranes and shovels that have scoops about the size of agarage, and the trucks that they then fill with this material weigh 400 tons empty so that thetrucks themselves are the size of three-story houses. The wheels are 13 feet tall. Everything issteroidally large and it's because the landscape itself is so vast. It's very hard to even finda scale for it until you stand a person next to it and people just disappear in that environment.So you have these massive shovels digging up this bituminous sand which grows under the borealforest. So before you can even dig anything, you have these even larger bulldozersthat plow the forest up into heaps. Then the shovels come in, the trucks aredriving across this blackened landscape,.

And they come to these upgrading facilitieswhere they heat up this bituminous sand and melt the tar out of it. The goal here is to makea petroleum product but they literally squander, in my view, billions of cubic feet of natural gasevery day to melt the bitumen out of the sand. All you have after you've burnt all that natural gasare vats full of tar which is essentially driveway sealant. Then to render it into something likepetroleum, you have to heat it again in these pressurized tanks, and that takes more natural gasand produces extraordinary amounts of pollution. In the petroleum industry, you're fractionatingusable elements of whatever petroleum product you're trying to render, and here theyget this oil-like substance that then has to be piped or trucked south to Americanrefineries that can handle heavy, dirty oil,.

And then it needs to be heated again. So whenyou think of the amount of fossil fuel that is used simply to get this to the factory whereit can be turned into something resembling oil. It's called synthetic crude — it is cheapand abundant but extraordinarily wasteful. I spent some time in the book trying toexplain the business case but no ordinary business person would take it on because it'sso extraordinarily inefficient and wasteful. Here's your description of what it looks like, anda pretty good one having been there myself. “Mile upon mile of black and ransacked earth pocked withstadium-swallowing pits and dead, discolored lakes guarded by scarecrows in cast-off rain gear andoverseen by flaming stacks and fuming refineries, the whole laced together by circuit boardmazes of dirt roads and piping, patrolled.

By building-sized machines that, enormous as theyare, appear dwarfed by the wastelands they have made. The tailings ponds alone cover well overa hundred square miles and contain more than a quarter of a trillion gallons of contaminatedwater and effluent from the bitumen upgrading process. There is no place for this toxicsludge to go except into the soil, or the air, or, if one of the massive earthen dams shouldfail, into the Athabasca River. For decades, cancer rates have been abnormally high in thedownstream community.” What you're leaving behind, especially because this is such a large sourceof fresh water, is this gigantic poisoned landscape that's probably irrecoverable.Yeah, I think so. The petroleum companies working up there will be long gone by the time anyserious reclamation has to happen. So in a sense,.

It's a sacrifice zone in the making. There arehigh rates of asthma in town. There are elevated rates of cancer, not just downstream, but inFort McMurray itself. The smell of bitumen is in the air and people there joke, well, yousmell that tarry smell when the wind's blowing the right direction, and you say that smellslike money but it also smells like cancer. Well, there is money to be made. The marketsdeclined a bit with the drop-in crude but what I think you had in the book that the average salaryin Fort McMurray or household was $200,000 a year. It's like a hot house up there. All kindsof people from across Canada — There are some depressed parts of Canada, especially in theMaritimes on the east coast — Ever since the cod fishery collapse, people have struggled to makea living there. A third of the population of Fort.

McMurray is from the east coast of Canada,from Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova Scotia, and places like that. This is the only placethey can simulate a middle class lifestyle, and they do it hundreds, and in that casethousands, of miles from their families. But they've created these simulacra of suburbia inthese subarctic forestscapes. It works for them but it's a very artificial construct because it'scompletely dependent on the bitumen industry which is completely dependent on the global oil price.And bitumen, because everybody in the industry understands that it's a third-rate material, it'sa stepchild of the industry so it has to accept lower prices and deal with a lot of abuse frompeople who are drilling oil out of the ground. A lot of these people may have their family inFort McMurray but they're put on buses. I saw.

The buses because it's so vast, the area, goup to these man camps where I don't know how many days they work before they get to comeback. So they're not living in Fort McMurray. There are different tiers of inhabitants. Thesecamp workers and these camps are like gulags; It's really cold up there in the winter, asyou can imagine, 40-50 below zero. These are insulated trailers that are stacked up, they looka little bit like polar research stations except they're surrounded by heavy fencing and patrolledby guards. Everybody has to wear an RFID device so that they can be tracked wherever they go. Theywork 12-hour shifts. These facilities run 24/7, 365. They never stop. These men have a look tothem; After a few weeks in that environment, there's a pallor and a weariness that sets in,and as good as the money is that they're making,.

The toll on the soul is heavy.There's another population that lives in town in nicer houses and they're ableto have their families with them. They've thrown in their whole lot and moved everything up toFort McMurray. They're permanent residents. So there are these two tiers of laborers upthere but ultimately they're all serving this giant machine whose sole purpose is toexcavate, melt, process, and transport bitumen. Why is the security so heavy around the camps?There is anxiety around protestors. The bitumen industry has been a pariah in thepetroleum industry for decades now, and it's been a target of environmental groupsand environmental activists. They honestly don't have that much to worry about because it's soremote, it's so hard to get there, there's only.

One road in one road out, and again, there arepolice everywhere. I've never been — Certainly in North America — In a place that felt likeit had such a heavy police/security presence. There're many different private companies workingup there along with the RCMP and the city police. The workers, because it's so… And you hearabout this in Williston, North Dakota and other boom towns in Texas. When you get thatmany men together far from their families, working extraordinarily hard, paid extraordinarilywell, the incidents of drug use and other kinds of violence — Internal and external — Areelevated; The normal governors aren't there, there's a lack of civility, and the normalstabilizing characteristics of a multi-gender, multi-generational society aresubstituted by police order, fencing,.

And rigorous systems of control. You check in,you check out. It's like a low-security prison, I would say. Comparable to that.Let's talk about wildfires. You write that they're not single entities andyou divide them into three distinct parts. What are those parts and how do they work?Yeah. The behavior of wildfire is varied and depends on its stage of growth and what thenature of the fuel is. So we've all seen a cigarette fire on the side of the road which isa slow spreading blackness that might glow at night but in the daytime you might not see itexcept for the smoke on the leading edge. Then as it gets into larger fuels, leaves, underbrush,you might see actual flame. Depending on heat and wind — And heat and wind really are thedeciding factors for whether a fire will.

Succeed or not — If you've got hot conditions andwindy conditions and you get into some good fuel underbrush and susceptible trees — Especiallyconifer trees which are in abundance in the boreal forest — You'll get those flames climbing up intothe architecture of the trees and then the forest. As it climbs — Fire wants to climb, we all knowheat rises — It's rising up into the treetops and it's sucking in wind from underneath becauseit needs oxygen all the time. So the fire, it's helpful to think of it as a breathing entity; It'spulling oxygen in from all around and rising up into the architecture of the trees and so there'sthis rushing chimney-like effect. Where the fire is in a way happiest, most energetic, mostcharismatic, and dynamic is up in the treetops, and then it's pulling in wind from down below. Asthat heat builds, as the whole tree is engaged,.

You have this increasing heat and increasing windwhich then builds on itself so it becomes almost a self-perpetuation machine. If you have hotenough, dry enough, and windy enough conditions, those flames will then begin toleap from treetop to treetop. Why it's hot, what the heat does is it releasesvapor, it releases hydrocarbons from the fuels around it. That's the purpose of the heat. So whatthe fire is sensing that we can't see is vapor and that's why you see these explosive fireballsand massive surges of flame coming out of big boreal fires because that's the superheatedvapor rising up and being ignited. Imagine an empty gas can — Even though there might notbe a lot of liquid in it, it will still explode in a spectacular fashion. That's what the fire isenabling in the forest, for all those hydrocarbons.

To release in this gaseous cloud that thenignites. That's when you see, especially a boreal fire, in full run; It's called a Rank6. It's comparable to a Category 5 hurricane. These flames can be 300 feet tall. They can sendfireballs rolling up into the smoke column for another 1,000 feet. The fire front can be manymiles wide. They're less like fires and more like tidal waves of flame rolling across the landscape.They are charismatic, terrifying, and impossible to stop once they get running like that.You have this amazing story from, is it the Chisholm fire in 1950? I'll letyou tell it. NASA or NORAD or somebody is monitoring global weather from a satellitefeed, but you can pick it up from there. Yeah, yeah. This was in 2001 and about a100 miles or so south of Fort McMurray,.

In the boreal forest. This fire ignited undersimilarly hot, dry conditions. I think it was a Navy satellite observer in DC, he saw this aerosolinjection, this giant smoke plume erupting out of the forest of Alberta. He knew there are novolcanoes there, so what else could send up a jet of smoke like that with that much ferocity andenergy into the stratosphere? The only other thing he could think of that could do that is a nuke.So they inquired to the authorities in Alberta, have you just detonated a nucleardevice? And they said no, we haven't. When the fellow in DC identified thezone on the map where this was happening, that was the Chisholm fire which has gone down inthe record books as the most energetic, intense, and ferocious wildfire ever measured on earth.It's got a lot of competition, not just from.

Alberta, but from California, Australia, andeven Siberia. So it was an extraordinary event, but it was in a way, a bellwether for what wasto come. And Alberta has produced some of the most intense fires ever measured since then.In the book, you ask us to look at fires from a different perspective, and at thetop of chapter 12, you quote Ray Rasker, the co-founder of Community Planning Assistancefor Wildfire. He says, “We don't have a forest fire problem. We have a home ignition problem.As soon as you come to that realization, it changes your view on wildfire.”Yeah. People talk about human beings being people of the corn And I think more apt,and certainly in the 21st century, we are people of the hydrocarbon. Not only is our entire economy– Or 80% of it, anyway — Driven by fossil fuels.

At this point, but an extraordinary percentageof the things that we interact with and even wear are derived from petroleum products.Our clothes, our shoes, our mattresses, our playground furniture. We have tar shingles,we have vinyl siding, we have vinyl windows, we have all plastic laminates in our flooring.Most of us go to bed at night on petroleum products in terms of what our bedsheets might bemade out of, what our mattresses are made out of. So the home, which is this sanctuary for us, it'sthought of as this inviolable space where you can safely raise your family. When you heat it up totemperature, it begins to off-gas hydrocarbons like the forest does, like a gas can does. Themodern home is more flammable than a log cabin or a 19th century home that's made mostly outof wood, mostly furnished with cotton-stuffed.

Furniture or horse hair stuffed furniture, thingsthat we think of as antiques now. But the modern home is a giant gas can and we don't think of thatwhen it's 75 degrees. But when it's 300 degrees because of the radiant heat coming off a fire, or1,000 degrees because of the radiant heat coming off a boreal wildfire, it turns into somethingcompletely different. Firefighters discovered that in some painful ways in May 2016.Well, that's what you call flashover. Yes. Again, the point of the heat and fire isto release the hydrocarbons in a potential fuel, and the fuels that fire interacts with are invapor form. Fire can't burn solids. It needs to heat the solids up until they begin to vaporize.So when you have 1,000-degree heat coming out of a wildfire, like the one that came into FortMcMurray on May 3, entire houses were heating up.

To 600, 700, 800 degrees. All the vinyl siding,all the glues and laminates in the plywood, everything was vaporizing. Firefighterscouldn't see it, homeowners couldn't see it, but the fire could sense these giant billowsof flammable gas in and around these homes. When I was speaking to firefighters afterward,they said, yeah, houses were burning to the basement in five minutes. I was sure that theywere exaggerating, and not because they were untruthful but there was a lot of adrenaline,there was a lot of fatigue; A lot of these guys didn't sleep for days on end because thefire never let up so I assumed it was the fog of war type of a situation. And then I spoke to aphysicist who specialized in home destruction and home flammability, a guy named Vyto Babrauskasin Seattle, and he said, yeah, no, that is.

Possible to get those incredible burn times.I said, but can you explain it? And he said, well, you should probably look at the Hamburgfirestorm from World War II and that will give you an idea of the energy and circumstances thatwere to be found in Fort McMurray in May of 2016. I didn't know this until I read it in yourbook, that that firestorm was completely engineered where they, in preparation, erectedbuildings that replicated German construction styles right down to sofa stuffingand the placement of babies' cribs. Yeah. It was diabolical, yeah.Yeah. But you really liken that engineering of the firestorm in Hamburg toour own, the engineering that we live in. This is what is strange and sinister about this.Standard Oil, now Exxon, has and had a sideline in.

Incendiary weapons. And they partnered with theUS Army to develop a bombing program to ignite the city of Hamburg. Before doing that, theyhired architects, set designers, and carpenters to simulate German homes and then they testedthese incendiary devices on these homes in Utah, some other bombing ranges around the country, andin the UK to see what combination of thermite and other products would work best for setting thesehouses on fire and engineering a firestorm. So it was one of the most extraordinary andpremeditated acts of state-sanctioned arson ever perpetrated on a civilian population, andit was repeated numerous times in Germany but also in Japan. Scores of cities were bombedthis way in Japan as well during World War II. There's this quite bizarre irony that now themodern home is its own incendiary device in the.

Sense that it is filled with petrochemicalsand sheathed in many cases with petroleum products like vinyl siding and tar shingles.It just kind of makes sense when you look at the petroleum industry. Its business is fire.We think of it as oil. We might think of it as natural gas or bitumen, but its sole purposeis to burn, and that's the business that these companies are in. And so everything they touchin a way, whether it's a plastic garbage can or a rubber tire or a beautiful modern home,at the root of it is this extraordinarily flammable substance which is petroleum products.And so that, it took me a while of researching and thinking about it to realize and look aroundmy own home that I'm basically sitting inside a kind of incendiary device, and that is a strangefeeling, and then it kind of makes you wonder.

Whose side is the petroleum company on really.It really changed my view of how we live and how we power our lives, and the strange ease wehave with extraordinarily explosive substances, not to mention a gas can full of, sorry,a gas tank full of gas basically set right behind our child's car seat, gas grills, wehave flames burning in our basement with a water heater and furnaces. We have an eeriecomfort with this really destructive energy. You ask what role does the petroleum industry playin promoting and approving building materials that are supposed to shelter families from harm.Yeah, there are fire retardancy ratings for all kinds of products, including mattresses andthings like that. Many of those fire-retardant substances are actually quite carcinogenic,and they only work up to a certain point. So no.

Amount of fire retardancy will stop a house that'sfully engulfed in fire and certainly won't stop a house from burning if it is confronted with thekind of energy coming out of a forest fire that we saw in Fort McMurray and that we've also seenthough… Boulder, Colorado has had similar fires, California, Montana. Lahaina was a really tragicexample of that. Canada has been burning literally all summer long, almost from coast to coast, andcommunities have been evacuated throughout the country, and several of them have burnt to theground. It's an energy that is really enhanced and enabled by the high petroleum contentin our lives, in every aspect of our lives. Well, you call the age we live in the petro scene.Yeah. Yeah, the petroleum age, and I would date that really from around 1859 whenthe gusher at Titusville was released,.

The first industrial oil well. Standard Oil, nowExxon, and many other petroleum companies was founded in 1870. That's when the kerosene industryreally took off. That was kind of the precursor of the petroleum industry as we know it, and thenobviously the automobile really set it in motion, so to speak. There's evidence to suggestthat the petroleum age is peaking right now, that we're hitting peak oil. There is a transitionunderway, if uneven. There's a lot of pushback from a deeply, deeply entrenched petroleumindustry and all the systems that are enabled by it and financed by it, including our politics.Here's a point that I guess I knew, but once you articulated it I thought it was kind ofinteresting. You said exhaust fumes, like the atmosphere that they flow into, are mostlyinvisible and easy to keep out of mind, but if.

That Silverado's tailpipe were directed back intothe vehicle, the driver and all her passengers would be dead in minutes. If the Silverado'sexhaust were piped to the driver's living room, she and her family would be dead in an hour.But somehow, when we run our cars “outside,” in quotes, in our shared atmosphere, all of a suddentoxic gas is magically disappeared is really… Yeah. Yeah, no, all of us alive today have grownup in the petroleum age, and it feels normal to us the way I think people smoking on airplanes andin doctors' waiting rooms felt normal to people in the 1950s. We're completely habituated to it,to the point that it's invisible to us. But if you really stop and think about how petroleum isrendered and what it in fact is, it's literally toxic at every stage of its life, from the momentit's drawn from the ground through the incredibly.

Polluting refining process into our cars and whereit's burned, and so if you look at… Petroleum will kill you in every form, whether as a liquid,as a toxic spill, as a gas, as an emission, and it's strange to think that we have surroundedourselves and persuaded ourselves that this profoundly toxic substance is an ally to us and anenabler of this wonderful lifestyle that we live that is now being compromised in measurableand visible ways by that very energy source. Well, let's talk a little bit about that. Youwrite about it. I think Ronald Wright called us the future eaters, but you also deal withthis issue of convenience and luxury and power, the kind of power that fossil fuels give us.You talk about a woman driving a car, but talk about… So the science is there, and not just thescience but the breakdown of the climate itself is.

Visible and yet we don't react in any meaningfulway, and that is an issue you deal with in the book. Explain why or why you think we don't react.The ease, the sense of there's a kind of disassociation that we're engaged in in ourdaily lives, and we might see the headlines. Now pretty much everybody in Canada knowssomebody personally who's been evacuated due to wildfire. That's how ubiquitous it isup here now after this terrible summer we've had. Certainly many people in the States areno strangers to this either. At the same time, we continue to drive. We may continue even toinvest in the petroleum industry. We accept it. First of all, I think humans have a kind ofadaptive genius for compartmentalizing and dissociating and managing risk, but I think alsothere is this allegiance to the status quo that.

Compromises our good judgment and compromiseseven our capacity for self-preservation. And so a really good illustration of this can be seenin Alberta which has suffered terrible fires, but where the industry is heavily dependenton petroleum extraction, and so folks up there… I think there was this thought thatwhen people went through climate disasters, they would become climate activists. They wouldkind of wake up. In Alberta, people have gone through some of the worst fires you can imagine,really terrifying events. Many of them have PTSD, many of them have health issues as a resultof this, but they will still vote for a climate-denying government who is pro-petroleum. Ithink their lifestyle is so dependent on remaining allegiant to the industry and to all of itsbenefits in terms of just the cash rewards.

Of being associated with that industry thatit seems too expensive and frankly impossible to envision not being associated with it.It made me look at petroleum executives in a different way. It's easy to see them in all kindsof negative lights, but if you think of that, the petroleum industry is their status quo.Their entire professional life, their status, their friends, their whole social structureis built around a close affiliation with an acceptance of the petroleum industry as it is withthat status quo. To disconnect yourself from it, to depart from it, to criticize it could almostbe seen as a kind of social suicide and certainly a professional suicide. And so I think that'swhere our clannishness, and I mean this in the best sense, we're family oriented, communityoriented species. We evolved in small groups,.

Intimately depended on each other's approvaland acceptance, and that lasts to this day. Our affiliation with the group, allegiance tothe group trumps everything else. And so if that stability is dependent on petroleum or onthe industry, it would be counterintuitive and almost insane to turn against it or reject it.I think all of us, even those of us who think of ourselves as quite green, we're still underpinned,the foundation of our society is still petroleum driven, petroleum enabled. It gives us thisincredible mobility through travel. It's enabled extraordinary wealth because everything we do ismultiplied. I think that it's easy to forget that, but when you have an internal combustion engine ora jet engine or fossil fuel powered electricity, everything you do is enhanced and multiplied soit's really like having a retinue of servants at.

Your beck and call, but they're machines insteadof human beings or animals, but all of that goes back to energy. Most of that energy thus far isfossil fuel driven, and so it's hard for people to imagine an alternative, and most of us areunwilling to give that up, especially when our financial system and our economy are so dependenton our continuing to buy, continuing to mortgage, continuing to invest ourselves, and cantileverourselves forward into debt and into consumption. So we're really part of this larger machinethat also enables us to live really quite beautiful lives in many ways and to provide ourchildren and our families with things that most people would want their families to have, andso it's not a… I don't think it's all cynical or malicious or anything like that. I think it'sreally, this is this lifestyle that we've become.

Dependent on. That status quo, it generates itsown allegiance, and we need to put up certain blinders to maintain a comfort with it. It'sa really interesting psychological issue, and spending time with people in Fort McMurray reallyilluminated that because these are really good, hardworking, earnest people who want the bestfor their families and were terrifically honest with me and open with me and yet they are… It'skind of like golden handcuffs. Collectively as a civilization, we have golden handcuffs linkingus to the petroleum industry as it exists now, and transitioning out of that is goingto really take a conscious effort. Well, I saw the same thing in Southern WestVirginia in the coal fields. Joe Sacco and I wrote Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Well, they'regolden handcuffs. It's completely suicidal..

Yeah. No, I mean, you're chained, in a wayyou're kind of handcuffed to the bumper of this juggernaut, and so you have to keeprunning behind it. You have to keep up with it, but it's going to keep going, and it issuicidal. What a hallmark I feel of the 2020s is this increasingly extreme dissonance thatwe find ourselves in. Almost everybody alive now is experiencing climate disruption of one kindor another. The deluge-like floods that would've been a normal thunderstorm 20 years ago and nowcars are floating around, and then the analog or the corollary to that are these terrible fires,terrible droughts and heat waves, all of which are directly traceable to our appetite for fossilfuels, and yet separating ourselves from that, stopping that, getting off that wheel, if youwill, seems impossible for so many. Indeed,.

For many it is, especially if you're beholdento a bank or any other debt carriers. Well, as you point out in the book, the fossilfuel industry is very aggressive against people who say precisely what you've just been saying.Yeah, yeah. No, they're so entrenched, not just in our psyche, but in every aspectof our government, really our religion too, and our media. To call it out feels like it'sgoing against our best interests, and that is in the best interest of the petroleum industryto kind of maintain that illusion, I think, and maintain that anxiety in us that you don'tgo against us. In Alberta when people criticize the industry there, they'll say, “Well, without usyou'd all freeze in the dark.” There's that fear. It really took me years of thinking aboutthis to realize, well, the petroleum industry.

Is actually only about five generations oldand human civilization is many millennia old, and we have lived without petroleum, and we'velived beautiful productive lives that in fact were much healthier, much more intimately connectedto nature and its rhythms than we are now, than we do now. And so that's something I reallytried to do in Fire Weather is invite the reader to kind of step back and look at this reallyanomalous time that we live in. This is the aberration. This isn't actually normal. We're in astrange and very disruptive experiment right now, and that experiment is an economy fueledby flammable, highly toxic substances. Well, we took, as you write in the book,500 million years of energy and decided to set it alight in a century and a half.Yeah. I mean, nobody has ever burned through.

A trust fund that quickly.Right. In a way, that's really what petroleum is. Ithas enormous utility, I think it always will, but the profligacy with which we've burnt it isreally unconscionable. The egregiousness of the waste that continues to this day where it's almosta virtue to burn as much as you can is so twisted, and yet we've been persuaded through advertisingand just the momentum of the culture that this is normal and desirable. I think the SUV isa beautiful illustration of that. That was a fabricated need that arose out of the 1990sand they've been growing ever since. This idea that you need to have this giganticvehicle that requires vast quantities of natural resources and huge amounts of fuelto operate in order to feel safe and like.

You belong in the world, it's an illusion, butit's so ubiquitous that it's hard to see it. Great. That was John Vaillant, author ofFire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. I want to thank The Real News Networkand its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara.You can find me chrishedges.substack.com.

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