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.

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.

Currently, we are on pace to re-create—in a couple of centuries—climatic conditions that previously took millions of years to bring about.

“De-manning” is an ugly neologism you will not hear in political speeches, nor in a sit-down interview with a CEO. It’s a private, behind-the-scenes verb that comes up in boardrooms and shareholder meetings. De-manning is how you make money from a marginal product without needing actual workers.

The problem with despotic institutions is that they rarely adapt constructively to changing environments. Instead, the pattern is one of entrenchment against emerging threats at the enthusiastic behest of those who are most privileged by established arrangements. The result is an increasingly brittle institution destined for catastrophic failure, much like the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s.

Mark Carney, became the most prominent capitalist to name the elephant in the boardroom: “The challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come,” Carney told his audience at a Lloyd’s of London dinner. “Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.” Investors, he warned, face “potentially huge” losses from climate change action that could make vast reserves of oil, coal, and gas “literally unburnable.”

Who will insure it may be the more pressing question.

world’s biggest insurance companies, including AXA, Swiss RE, Munich RE, Zurich Insurance, and the Hartford, have announced intentions to stop insuring and/or investing in ultrahigh-emissions fossil fuel projects like coal and bitumen.

Time will tell if these pillars of capitalism-as-we-know-it follow through, but the implications are enormous. In most countries, you cannot operate a car without insurance. The same goes for mines, drilling rigs, refineries, and pipelines.

In January 2020, the same month as the Juliana decision, JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest financier to the fossil fuel industry, sounded yet another alarm to shareholders. In a report commissioned by the bank, the authors explained that a status quo approach to energy and investment “would likely push the earth to a place that we haven’t seen for many millions of years.” Climate change, they wrote, “reflects a global market failure in the sense that producers and consumers of CO2 emissions do not pay for the climate damage that results…Although precise predictions are not possible, it is clear that planet Earth is on an unsustainable trajectory. Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive” (italics mine).

It should be noted that, despite their keen awareness and apparent concern, JPMorgan continues to finance fossil fuel projects. In fact, the world’s sixty biggest banks have loaned $3.8 trillion to the industry between 2016 and 2021 alone.

Currently, we live in a dangerously bifurcated reality where senior executives at forward-thinking, publicly traded global companies like Exxon, Shell, JPMorgan, and the Bank of England accept the science of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and the threat it poses, and still continue to—literally—pour gas on the flames.

The Pacific coastal tribes’ brief encounter with boomtown wealth was artificially fueled by a transient global trade whose template was a colonial one (which is to say, a capitalist one) modeled on the Hudson’s Bay Company, and still dominant today: total exploitation in return for a conditional supply of trade goods, alcohol, and weapons. And yet its beneficiaries (on both sides) embraced these terms willingly—even eagerly.

In the developed world, it has become an unspoken expectation that one of government’s jobs is to provide cheap and abundant energy, especially fossil fuels. It’s hard for most people to imagine an alternative. (What if I have to change my behavior? What if it’s unpleasant? What if it’s somehow…less?)

Virtue, then, is anything that moves you in the direction of mastering delusions. — George Saunders

None of this will be the fault of Nature itself. It will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults, in what might fairly be described as the greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next. (Italics mine.)

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.”

In 1980, the oil and gas sector represented 28 percent of the S&P 500 index’s value; in 2019, it represented less than 5 percent, and it is likely to keep shrinking. ExxonMobil, which was the most valuable company in the world in 2013, was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average index in 2021. In 2016, such a proposition would have gotten you laughed off the squash court.

May 2021 was a watershed. By a nearly two-thirds vote, Chevron shareholders demanded cuts to the tailpipe emissions of the company’s products—a first. On the same day, Exxon shareholders replaced a quarter of the company’s conservative twelve-member board with new members determined to address climate change and the need to shift the company toward renewable energy and a net zero future. Another first.

if the future is to be livable, it will be powered by carbon-neutral energy.

Fire 009—the Horse River Fire, now the Fort McMurray Fire—would not be declared “extinguished” until August 2, 2017, fifteen months after

This miraculous process of renewal and continuity was of great interest to Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was a twelfth-century Benedictine nun who was also a polymath. In addition to being an abbess, a scholar, a composer, and a true visionary (vivid paintings of her visions survive to this day), she wrote extensively about medicine, theology, and the natural world.