Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

These everyday feats become still more impressive when one considers what we’re actually burning: even the youngest viable fossil fuels are millions of years old. The French call gasoline “essence”—and that is truly what it is. According to the energy historian Vaclav Smil, every gallon of gasoline represents roughly one hundred tons of marine biomass, principally algae or phytoplankton, that has gone through an inconceivably long crushing, cooking, and curing process deep underground. One way to visualize a tank of gas is to imagine a mass of ancient plant matter weighing as much as fifteen blue whales crammed into a tank next to your spare tire, just behind your child’s car seat. A typical driver can burn that in a week, often for the most trivial of reasons. All those distilled plants were grown by the same sun that grows our food today, so what we’re burning is, in essence (that word again), ancient, super-concentrated solar energy.