Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

Since roughly 2000, an inversion has begun: the world’s great terrestrial carbon sinks—the Amazon rain forest and the circumboreal forest, along with many other less famous forest systems around the world—have become net carbon emitters. In other words, what used to be a reliable source of carbon storage is now generating more CO2 than it is sequestering. This grave reversal is one of the most pernicious developments of the Petrocene Age. As forests heat up and die—from disease, beetle infestation, fire, logging, land clearing, and drought, they skew the CO2 balance even further. It is not that living, growing trees don’t continue to absorb carbon, it is that they are no longer keeping pace with the emissions of their sick, dead, and burning neighbors.

In June 2021, the riverside hamlet of Lytton, British Columbia, broke the heat record for Canada three days in a row, topping out at 121°F. On the fourth day, a wind-driven wildfire burned the town to the ground in half an hour. Two people died. “I’m sixty,” said Lytton’s mayor, Jan Polderman, “and I thought climate change was a problem for the next generation. Now I’m mayor of a town that no longer exists.”

Under normal conditions, the province of Alberta uses a 1–10 scale to rate air quality, 10 being the worst. That day, the air quality around Fort McMurray was 38. Without a clock, it was hard to tell what time of day or night it was. By then, smoke from this and other fires had cast a pall across the entire continent—south to the Gulf Coast of Texas, east as far as the Bahamas, and northward all the way to Labrador.

“Ashification” is another one of those words, like “spalling,” that doesn’t enter the conversation below 1,000°F or so, but that, in a word, is what happened. Many residents were perplexed by how a large, sturdy structure that had once housed them, their families, their cars, and all their possessions could be reduced to a pile of ash and scrap metal that would fit in the back of a pickup. Even forensic fire investigators were puzzled by the absence of normally fireproof objects like toilets and sinks. They weren’t there, because they had vaporized.

By 1980 (when van Beurden was twenty-two), the science was effectively confirmed, and there was no excuse not to act. And “act” they did: for the next forty years, the API, and its affiliates, actively engaged in what the futurist Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay.” Predatory delay, as Steffen defines it, is “the deliberate slowing of change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will be paid by others.”