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July 18 - August 8, 2024
Dene and Métis rivermen in harness, scow tracking up the Athabasca River, October 1913. Note the scow downstream with men aboard.
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.
The Gordian network of intertwined systems that make up a city is truly daunting. Initiating an evacuation, even from a portion of Fort McMurray, would disrupt many thousands of people—everyone in that area from newborn infants and senile grandparents to pets and belligerent drunks. Complicating matters was the fact that most people were at work or in school. How do you get the message to them? How do you handle their emotions? What if they insist on going home? What if they refuse to leave? What if there’s an accident at a crucial intersection? If you shut down gas and electricity, what are
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This is one of the supreme challenges facing humans in how we manage the physical reality of our planet: the deceptively simple tension between time, rate, and distance.
These forgotten practices were simple ones: Don’t build your house in the woods, surround it with open fields; not only does this make for convenient planting and pasturage, but those cleared lands also serve as excellent firebreaks. Roofs made of tin or slate go a long way toward foiling embers. None of these time-tested methods were used in Fort McMurray.
In such a lopsided situation, the firefighters’ ignorance may have been a kind of blessing. “I remember their faces,” Jamie Coutts told me, “and I mostly remember because that’s what my face must have looked like when it slammed into our town in 2011—because it was just disbelief, right? It was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to lose ten houses here, but we’ll get it.’ And I’m thinking, ‘No, you’re going to lose five hundred houses here. You guys don’t get it.’ ”
An unintended consequence of the evacuation was the collapse of the 911 system.
In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.
that is what is different about the twenty-first century. The highs are certainly higher, but it is the lows—in all seasons—that are, in their way, more disturbing. A typical spring night in Fort McMurray used to be in the 40s; in May 2016, nighttime temperatures barely dropped below 70°F. In Canada and northern Europe, nights during which the temperature stays above 68°F are referred to as “tropical.” Twenty years ago, Toronto might experience one or two tropical nights in the month of July; in 2020, it counted fourteen. During the same month, Phoenix, Arizona, sustained an average
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This meant knocking down intact, unburned houses, most of them brand-new—and not one or two at a time, but by the block, just as a bulldozer would knock down a stand of trees.
“This observation,” he wrote later in his seminal work, Observations on Different Kinds of Air, “led me to conclude, that plants, instead of affecting the air in the same manner with animal respiration, reverse the effects of breathing, and tend to keep the atmosphere sweet and wholesome, when it becomes noxious.”
Here, in this city’s fire and the events leading up to it, can be seen the sympathetic feedback between both the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs, in all their varied forms, and the heating of our atmosphere that the global quest for hydrocarbons has initiated, and that is changing fire as we know it.
“The atmosphere may act like the glass of a green-house,” wrote the meteorologist Nils Ekholm, a friend and colleague of Arrhenius, in 1901, “letting through the light rays of the sun relatively easily, and absorbing a great part of the dark rays emitted from the ground, and it thereby may raise the mean temperature of the earth’s surface.”
That we have entered the Anthropocene Epoch (the geologic era of humankind’s global influence on weather and ecosystems) is now generally accepted among scientists. Precisely when this period began is a matter of debate. Was it 50,000 years ago, with the first evidence of our ability to extirpate populations of Pleistocene megafauna? Was it 12,000 years ago, with the onset of the Holocene Epoch, generally considered to be the age of modern humans? Was it 10,000 years ago, with the appearance of agriculture and city-states? Was it 2,000 years ago, with the accumulation of global pollution
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Exxon’s James Black allowed that he could not be absolutely certain that the current rise in carbon dioxide was due to fossil fuel burning (at least not in the same way you are absolutely certain you have just stubbed your toe), but in 1978 he was certain enough to say this: “Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”
Exxon chart indicating when CO2 would have a detectable effect on global temperature (1982)
If they got one thing wrong, it is the shocking speed with which these changes are unfolding.[*13]
This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.
“This isn’t a ‘drought,’ ” wrote the climate journalist Bob Berwyn in 2020, “because that implies recovery. This is aridification.” Aridification precedes desertification.
With every degree of warming, there is a 12 percent increase in lightning[*6] activity, a common cause of wildfires
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.
One of the cruelest aftershocks for homeowners was the realization that just because their house was gone didn’t mean the mortgage was. Likewise, many business owners who rented from remote landlords received no forgiveness on their rent for the time the city was closed down.
Fort McMurray is not an isolated case, but just one expression of a confluence of forces emerging from a changing climate, a changing energy market, and a growing awareness of the ways these global forces influence each other.
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. Like the Lucretius Problem, this behavioral dissonance reveals a glitch in human nature.