Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

The Petrocene Age has enabled ordinary people to command energy in ways kings and sultans could only dream of, and with an ease hitherto unimaginable. Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than six hundred horsepower as she draws a six-ton trailer at sixty miles an hour while talking on the phone and drinking coffee, in gym clothes on a frigid winter day. Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or a pharaoh could have summoned such power, and its equivalent would have required hundreds of enslaved people and draft animals. Today, with cheap and plentiful oil at our disposal, everyone’s an emperor. Every time we get in a car, on an airplane, or on a ship, we are traveling with a vast invisible retinue that multiplies our potency even as it multiplies our emissions. During this first century and a half of the Petrocene Age, as we have harnessed, democratized, and amplified fire on demand, we have also unleashed some unintended consequences: a by-product of becoming a petroleum-based society—in other words, a fire-based society—has been the superheating of the atmosphere.