Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

While bitumen, crude, and all their derivatives are known collectively as petroleum, they fall under the broader umbrella of hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are not just oil and gas, they are truly the stuff of life: without hydrogen and carbon, Earth would be a lithic sphere and nothing more—uninhabitable, unrecognizable. Simpler, perhaps, than describing what hydrocarbons are, is describing what they aren’t: water, air, rocks, and metals—in other words, things that are not, and never were, alive in the biological sense. But even with 99 percent of Earth’s constituents off the table, an awful lot of things remain unaccounted for. “Hydrocarbons” is an awkward concept to wrap one’s head around because they take such wildly different forms. As dissimilar as they may seem on the surface, Kentucky coal and Kentucky bourbon are both full of hydrocarbons; so are Irish peat and Irish whiskey. Hay bales, cow farts, library books, and extra-virgin olive oil are all hydrocarbons, too. Likewise, Big Wheels, Barbie dolls, LEGOs, Lululemon, Trojans, Vaseline, WD-40, and every tree on Earth are also hydrocarbon based. So is human fat. Fats—lipids—are the organic precursors to all the petroleum we burn. They occur in plants, too, including algae and phytoplankton. Long after other components of these creatures have decomposed or been reduced to inert sediment, the lipids endure, thus confirming a suspicion held by many people attempting weight loss: fat lasts forever.