Taking the Heat, and How it Got this Way
By Jeff Jones, Alliance for Clean Energy New York
We all know Earth is warming, with record-setting temperatures now an annual, even monthly occurrence. At ACE NY, our work addresses the climate crisis through our advocacy for renewable energy and the electrification of buildings and cars. So it’s not like we need to read every article and book written to convince us of the need to act. But we also don’t want to miss current writings, new information, and perspectives that help us better understand the nature of the changes taking place – to nature – in real-time.
Fire Weather, the new book by John Vaillant, is a must. I first heard about it at a talk in November at New York University Law School by New York’s Public Service Commission Chair and CEO Rory Christian. He was clearly deeply concerned by what he was reading and urged others to take a look. So I did.
Published in the fall of 2023 by Alfred A. Knopf, the book is a deep dive into the global phenomenon of increasingly virulent wildfires. In the past few years, we have witnessed devastating, unprecedented fires burning out of control in Australia, Canada, Siberia, and the U.S. The haze we experienced here in New York last year as the result of a Canadian wildfire turned the sky orange, sent respiratory-impacted emergency room visits soaring, and rivaled COVID as a cause of school absences across the northeast.
Vaillant demonstrates that the warming planet has reached a new stage: the Petrocene, which he traces to the blooming of the petroleum-based energy system going as far back as the 1870s. Providing a detailed history of the warnings from scientists about the potential and now unarguable impact of fossil fuels, his focus is the Fort McMurray fire in northern Alberta, Canada, in 2016. But it could be many others, like the Paradise fire that wiped out a town in Northern California several years ago. The irony of the story is, of course, that Fort McMurry, located nearly 500 miles north of Calgary near the Arctic Circle, is at the heart of the bitumen industry – the tar sands – where some of the most environmentally destructive fossil fuel mining in the world is taking place. The essence of the story is that the warming of the planet has evolved to create weather situations such that the conditions exist for uncontrollable wildfires that, like the Fort McMurry fire, can essentially wipe out a city that interfaces with the wilderness in a matter of a few explosive days, even hours.
Fire Weather brings together much of what we now know about climate science. The book also documents how an industry, aware of its potential impact, chose profit over responsibility, bringing us ever closer to catastrophic change. It is, at best, a warning and an inspiration to strengthen the efforts to create a post-fossil fuel world.
