EvC BONUS | Fire Weather: John Vaillant on the New Era of Extreme Fire

Energy vs Climate X Climate Books Reviews 

This week we're sharing an episode from Ed's other podcast, Climate Book Reviews, co-hosted with Dr. Roger Thompson of Arizona State University. 

Their guest is John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. (US and International - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World)

Many listeners will know Vaillant from his earlier books The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, both gripping works of narrative nonfiction. In Fire Weather, he turns his attention to the massive 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire and what it tells us about the new era of extreme fire.

In this episode:

• How the Fort McMurray fire burned for a week straight — and why traditional firefighting was useless
• The concept of "fire weather" and why wildfires are now generating their own atmospheric systems
• The oil industry's early awareness of climate change and the shift to deliberate misinformation
• Attribution science: can we prove a specific wildfire was caused by climate change?
• What hope looks like in the face of an altered climate

Chapters:
00:00 Cold Open: When Firestorms Become Unstoppable
01:00 Welcome & Introducing John Vaillant
03:00 The Fort McMurray Fire: Inside the Inferno
09:00 Writing Fire — Craft, Research & the Book's Structure
17:00 Community Heroes & Local Response
20:00 We've Altered the Climate: A Shift in Consciousness
23:00 Fire Tornadoes & Australia's Black Summer
28:00 Attribution Science: Proving Climate Change Caused This
33:00 Fire Weather: The New Physics of Wildfire
35:00 The Oil Industry Knew: The Greatest Betrayal
40:00 The Rising Wave of Wildfire Literature
42:00 Finding Hope in the Age of Fire

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Transcript

[00:00:00] John Vaillant: We're dealing with these kinds of transcendent energy. I'm not saying don't build a fire break that will stop some fires, but when you get into a firestorm, it becomes a different thing. 

[00:00:12] Ed Whittingham: Hey there, it's Ed. I'm sharing another episode of my occasional podcast called Climate Book Reviews. I co-host it with my old friend, Dr. Roger Thompson, director of Writing programs and professor at Arizona State University. Our goal with a pod is to curate some climate and energy related books worth knowing about. In this episode, we dig into fire weather, a true story from a hotter world by author John Vaillant. Many listeners will know valiant from his earlier books.

Like the Golden Spruce and the tiger, both gripping works of narrative nonfiction in fire weather. He turns his attention to the massive 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire and what it tells us about the new era of extreme fire, we covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about Ian's idea that wildfires becoming a new kind of physical regime, almost a different form of weather in a warming world.

We get into a slew of other topics, including how extreme fire events are entering politics and what it means for societies that built themselves and landscapes. That are now prime to burn. If you're looking for one of the most vivid and unsettling climate theme books of the past few years, this one absolutely delivers.

For more info, check out climatebookreviews.com. And now over to Roger. Happy listening. 

[00:01:31] Roger Thompson: We have with us, uh, John Vaillant. Uh, ed and I are co-hosting. Say hi, Ed. 

[00:01:38] Ed Whittingham: Hey, Roger, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while, and I have my signed copy, John, of fire weather close at hand. I can't even tell you how I came to get it signed, indirectly signed, but uh, yeah, this is gonna be fun.

[00:01:50] Roger Thompson: Really want to, uh, express here. What we have is John's. Tour to four. That's the only word I have for it. I really want to welcome you and really wanna thank you for joining us. The book is organized in these kind of three movements. One is kind of grounding of where we're going, but really the centerpiece is this kind of pivoting point of the big fires, uh, up in, uh, way Northern Alberta.

So I'm wondering just as a kind of starting point here. I think everyone globally saw those fires. The, the images were just horrific. Uh, uh, terrifying actually is a word that comes to mind. And, uh, I couldn't help. And at one point you talk about leering at disaster, I watched videos of that over and over again, just, uh, and hearing people's voices and the sheer terror they had.

Uh, during that time. So I can imagine as a writer you saw that and, uh, could feel some motivation, but I'm curious about how you got to, from that fire to kind of, one talking, the, the history behind it makes sense, but then you move it to this last movement, which is really powerful and really, I know we'll spend some time talking about, about the nature of climate change.

So I'm curious what prompted the, the book, uh, of, of the many things you might write about and how you got rolling on it. 

[00:03:03] John Vaillant: Uh, the fire was, was unavoidable, you know, it was international news. It, it burned in for McMurray, which is the petroleum hub of Canada. And Canada's, you know, depending on who's. Asking and telling.

It's the fourth or fifth biggest producer of petroleum in the world. So Fort McMurray is a really important place, and it's the base, uh, for the, uh, the tar sands mining. And that's, it's not petroleum drilling. It ain't Texas. It's not the Gulf of Mexico. It's not Saudi. It's more like a strip mining operation, and it is the biggest one in the world.

It's, it's devastating, uh, in terms of its impact. You know, it's really rough in Appalachia and really rough in Wyoming, but it's rougher. So this city caught on fire on May 3rd, 2016, and I was, I was in Italy at a writer's retreat working on a novel. You know, I could not have been more out of it. Made the mistake of looking at Twitter and, and saw this very important city in the Canadian consciousness.

You know, really it's probably the wealthiest municipality per capita in, in the country and one of the wealthiest in North America, and that's including Westchester County and Greenwich, Connecticut and Silicon Valley, you know, and, um, so an extraordinary powerhouse of both environmental destruction but also economic might and, and spectacular wages.

And so this place. Had completely disappeared under this giant shroud of, of smoke on May 3rd. And I'm looking at this, you know, from my little retreat in Italy and thinking, wow, you know, I am, I am really in the wrong place right now. And, um, you know, it was clear that this, this was the, the biggest story in Western Canada for whatever that's worth, you know, in a decade, if not a quarter century, and I'm not there.

And then it quickly became apparent that. Even if I was there, you're not getting in there. It was a disaster zone, you know? It became a disaster zone within hours and the fire burned in the city night and day for a week, you know, and, and very few urban fires burned that way. So the great fire of London, 1666 burnt for five days and there was an IDO fire in current present day, Tokyo, the 1750s that burnt for a few days in the city.

Massive death toll. And, and here's a, this is a smaller city, but the fire would not leave. In fact, it, it kept coming back. It would blow through and then turn, and so, you know, I'm. Pondering this as, as a writer and, and, you know, you can relate to this and, and the listeners maybe can, how do I grapple with this story?

Or do I even wanna bother with it? Because already it's international news, it's the Chiron, you know, running under on BBC, and it's the Chiron running on CNN. Most people don't know about this place, and, and it's shocking once you understand how big it is and the impact it is, you know, they're exporting three or 4 million barrels a day.

Of the heaviest of all crudes, which is basically diluted bitumen. This stuff is so heavy, it sinks in water. Oil is supposed to float. This stuff sinks to the bottom and, you know, devastating, horrible stuff that requires much more rendering and, and intervention with natural gas heating to turn it into something that a American refinery can recognize and process.

So it's a, it's the dog of the petroleum world, and yet the quantities are mind-boggling. So. This is all the, the city where all these workers work live, um, and where their kids are. You know, this, this is a permanent settlement, about a hundred thousand people is, was evacuated in what came to be and remains the, the largest, most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times.

And, you know, that's including la you know, this was, they, they executed this at evac in, you know, six or eight hours and with, with no notice really. The tar sands as they're known, the oil sands are infamous, you know, and it's, it's a real black mark, literally, you know, on, on the nation of Canada. And I'm fretting over this and I'm thinking, well, no, I came here to write a novel.

So I'm gonna keep doing that. And if there's something there for me, uh, it will reveal itself. In this studio I was in is a daybed. Uh, it's a kind of, it's a sweet spot up in the top of this. Old Roman signal tower and, um, breezes are blowing and the birds are singing. And I'd take a nap behind the fluttering curtains of this thing.

And I sat up out of this dream. And the dream was a matterhorn like mountain, a faceted, uh, alpine situation, all rock and, and climbing up each face. Was a mountain climber soloing up the face by himself and he had no awareness of the other climbers on the other faces. And so, and they all summit at the same time.

And that's when they became aware of each other. And so I sat up out of the dream and I thought, petroleum industry, fire science, fire behavior, climate science. The automobile, you know, these were na, these were industries, uh, sciences that all started late 18th, early 19th century. You know, the combustion intradural, combustion engine.

And then here we are in Fort McMurray, this very heavy duty oil town now overrun by a climate change enhanced fire. And here was the convergent here. Here was, here was the convergence. Here was a robber as swallowing its own tail. So that's what I understood coming up out of that dream, and then I immediately started working on the proposal and sold it very quickly.

You know, if writers are listening. It's not all just in the newspaper, you know, it's also in your subconscious, you know, it's also in the air. It's also in, you know, what's happening in nature, in history, on the sidewalk, out of the corner of your eye. And there's, there's, there's very valuable information there.

I'm a nonfiction person, you know, very fact-based. Everything needs to be verifiable. Um, so to get inspiration from dreams sounds like the exact opposite of that. But you know, we're, we're working stuff out, you know, all the time. And, and if you're a writer, if you're a narrative, if you're narratively um, oriented, you know, that's what you're unconscious is probably gonna be up to, you know, one way or another.

[00:09:46] Roger Thompson: Working things out, but work, I mean, you work it out beautifully in, in the book. I mean, besides the big movements, what strikes me most that is really powerful is the movement outta the fire, which are, is just harrowing and your descriptions are just visceral at times, really, really powerful. That move to that last part in the reckoning section, which is really about climate.

This is where, uh, again, maybe one of the sides of the, the, the mountain that you're talking about, you're, you're essentially. History of the oil industry's tackling of climate change and the way it changed so dramatically. I haven't yet read such a lucid accounting of that where, and as even handed accounting of that, the way that.

The industries and governmental bodies took seriously this threat for so many years from the fifties forward until a, a couple key moments shifted the story. And really what what emerged then and kinda outta my field of rhetoric is a, a, a very incredibly effective propaganda campaign that has continued to hold sway over the American consciousness in particular for.

I don't know since at least the late seventies or early eighties. And what I'll say about that is that the, the narrative you give there about the, the sincere engagement with these issues was actually quite hopeful. To me, it suggests, despite the fact that we have years of, uh, misinformation, disinformation.

Uh, heightened rhetoric in really problematic ways at root. We had initially anyway, and we still do in certain corners, uh, even within those industries, attempts to really take this seriously and make change, and that gives me tremendous hope. And I wonder how many folks now who've grown up under kind of regimes of persuasion.

I, I kind of want to point them all to those chapters and say, no, no, no. What you've learned here isn't right. And I just find that those opening chapters are reckoning. I see as like probably a, I would describe it as an incredible public service you've done. I, I find myself wanting to snip 'em out, mail them to people I know who.

Who need to know this history and, and the way you narrate it is just absolutely compelling. I just, I, and maybe it's your journalistic background, uh, fact-based storytelling on complicated and very complex issues to kind of lucidly raise those things. It's just striking. It was just, uh, I reread those sections.

I just thought they were so great. 

[00:12:25] John Vaillant: Thanks and, and, and, and I, and it was really, really hard to do. Not a scientist, you know, don't have a background in that. It's a little bit like jazz. You know, you, you can tell those guys are geniuses. Even if it just sounds like a bunch of noise. And, and you can tell climate scientists and petroleum chemists, they are really, really good at what they do.

Uh, the language is complex. The concepts are complex. And so I had to spend a lot of time, you know, with those articles. And I would go back to, you know, the, the original article that, you know, came out in 1968 or, or 1856. Where people are waking up to what CO2 is or that, um, you know, maybe the issue isn't invisible smog, but in the stuff we can't see, maybe that's where the real hazard is.

And so you see these articles where people are literally, the likes are going on for them. These are new discoveries. They have no baggage associated with it. 'cause they don't even know what's there. They don't even know how to feel about it. No one's told them how to feel about it. It's nonpartisan. It's just, it's what's, what, what's in here.

And, and so you get to see that freshness and, and also that earnestness and, you know, scientists at Exxon had it. And, uh, the Stanford Research Center. Institute, I think it was had it, that was, you know, a seminal article. It came out in 1968. The uh, energy and man conference in, uh, 1959 at Columbia, you know, was another semi seminal moment when a whole bunch of very smart, powerful people, scientists, journalists, ERs.

Heard about CO2 and its impact on climate for the first time, once that can of worms was open in the fifties, the data began to pile up and pile up and pile up. And again, because it wasn't a partisan issue, you had Republicans and Democrats taking a sincere interest. You know, and, and you know, you and I found, uh, in the congressional record, you can see people having these conversations with.

Uh, climate scientists like Roger Revelle, who came out of the, uh, Scripps Institution in La Jolla, California, you know, a a a, a founding father of CLI of American Climate Scientist, a brilliant guy. And the, the intuition these guys had along with working with pretty limited resources was phenomenal. And they were right.

You know, that's what is shocking is to hear, to read these transcripts from the 1950s on Capitol Hill. You know, that's, it's not science fiction. It's science, it's speculative science, but it was based on hard information, which is irreversible, like it's happening now, and yet it, this skepticism has now been institutionalized.

And you know, it is arguably the greatest betrayal in the history of the human race. And we are living in the middle of it. And it's being perpetrated, promulgated, perpetuated by the US government who used to be a leader, 

[00:15:36] Ed Whittingham: um, been listening in, in rap attention, and John just won a plus one. What Roger said, I'm a big fan of the book.

I'm sitting here with my sign copy next to me, as I said, and the, the story indirectly is. Uh, and I'd love to talk about the Jasper fire in a bit, but I went and had a beer with Kenmore's Mayor in late July. So it was the weekend after the July, think 22nd, 2024 Jasper Fire. If I might, the folks in Jasper, if I've got the date wrong by a couple days.

When the town was evacuated, like Fort McMurray was, uh, at sun notice because of a terrible wildfire. And we had a beer. And, uh, I urged him to read your book. Uh, and this, by the way, the Canmore mayor got a call from the province the morning after and said, how much money do you need to move forward on fire breaks?

And a plan had been sort of sitting on a shelf and today. The firebreaks that are going in are spectacular and incredible in the sense that when you see them, it's almost hard to believe you're seeing breaks this large in the Beau Valley. It's altering trails, but it's necessary and it's actually creating habitat patches as well.

But I let I lent to my book. He read it and before he gave it back to me, he attended, uh, get Together with you at Peter Pool's house in Banff, and I think it might have been on the Mountain Book Festival. And, uh, the mayor came up to you and he said, Hey, this isn't my copy. It's my friend Ed's. Would you sign it?

And you've got a very nice inscription in there. 

[00:17:09] John Vaillant: Oh, great. Oh good. Yeah, no, that was all a blurred, that was a great meeting though. And just a real, beautiful indicator of what. Can be done at the community level and to have that kind of buy-in. I think there was a fire chief there and parks people and all kinds of thoughtful, concerned citizens who really love that place as they should.

And you know, you had an interesting situation in Canmore, Alberta, which is a, another beautiful mountain town just down the road from Banff. For those who may not know, um, there's some huge development. I understand that's in the process of going in near Canmore. And that, um, what I, I've just, I've been spending time with fire chiefs.

I, I gave a keynote at the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, and I was just in Ottawa with them again. And, um, what they're seeing is all this development without new fire halls and fire stations. So it's, you know, build, build, build, but without the, um. Facilities or personnel or, uh, anything to actually protect these new communities that are now, especially in places like where you live, more vulnerable to fire than they've been in a century.

[00:18:20] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And uh, you know, I actually give props to, uh, the local folks, the fire chief, um, local politicians, fire ecologists. Uh, who are putting in massive fire breaks and doing it in a way that it is, I said, it can be visually jarring and it might for some ruin your favorite mountain bike ride. For some it's like, wow, this is now a very, uh, a really varied trail, but entirely necessary, and you can draw a direct line between that and the Fort McMurray fire and also what happened in Jasper.

But I just want to build on a couple of your points. This, this, the way that the misinformation and disinformation campaigns today. How do we counteract them? Well, you can counteract them through lawsuits and, uh, to, at the risk of a shameless plug for my other podcast, energy versus Climate, we had a guy on named Ben Franta, who was a senior fellow climate litigation program at Oxford Sustainable Law, and he talked about how we can use lawsuits to counter the disinformation.

And we have to, because. The climate science has been well established, and we've gone, we've, well, we, we, we've, we've established how it's been countered by the oil and gas industry in particular, we understood the fundamental, the physics of the greenhouse gas effect of which gases, uh, get trapped in the atmosphere.

You know, savante, our hennia, you know, identified in the late 18th cen late 19th century, uh, how changes in CO2 would alter temperatures. The first popular press article on the climate problem was in the 1950s in the New York Times, and the first report that really nailed the signs and says what risk it poses for the United States was in the Johnson Adminis Administration, the 1960s.

And when you look at what's happening in the climate today, a lot of it is on track with models. Predicted the effects in the early 1990s. So the science has been very stable. But I'm thinking of your book, the wonderful contribution, I think is you write about wildfire, not just as a disaster, but almost as a new physical force, like a a, and to quote your title like a new species of weather.

And I'm wondering, at what point did you in your research realize that? It isn't just a case of climate change makes fires worse, but then we've actually, now we've crossed into a new regime altogether and drawing it to present day. I still think people aren't really prepared for this new regime. Like our mental models around fire are around the old regime, not around this new regime.

[00:20:56] John Vaillant: That's, it's exactly right. I mean, so much of this issue is really. Demands a, a shift in consciousness and people, you know, want action and they want fire breaks in a way that the first thing that needs to happen is to really be able to grasp that we have altered the climate so profoundly. It has been altered so profoundly that, um.

Processes that we grew up with and took for granted now behave in new and different ways. And so who really coined that and articulated that beautifully as Stephen j Pine started out as a, a wildfire fighter on the North Rim. I think of, uh, the Grand Canyon back in the sixties got into fire science and he is the greatest living chronicler of fire.

On Earth. And he writes about fire all over the world, the cultural, the history, the science of fire. And he's got a, you know, his own bookshelf basically, uh, books that he's written. And so after the Fort McMurray fire in 2016, he wrote a piece for slate. Uh, basically saying, you know, this is a different kind of fire we have.

We are entering what I, uh, Steve and J Pine, I'm going to call the pyro scene age. An Age of fire. And I read that article, it just felt intuitively right. So I was, you know, following the science and following Roger, uh, Stephen Pine, who I, you know, have, have admired prior, you know, he's a, just a terrific writer and, and makes beautiful sentences too.

Uh, along with his great research. When I came to understand better what. Occurred in the Fort McMurray fire, the temperatures that were achieved, the speed with which it moved, the, the totality of the combustion. You know, there's, so there's, you know, these are three quarter million dollar houses that weigh 50 tons.

And, uh, you know, when they're standing and there is literally nothing left, but a pile of nails and the, the burnt shell of a refrigerator and the husk, you know, of a car. And that's all of, you know, nothing else. Everything else is combusted. And you know, apparently in some of the homes they couldn't find the toilets.

So toilets are porcelain, you know, they're made in kilns, you know, they're, they're creatures of intense heat. And they had basically vaporized the psychological impact on been many fires like that now that have burnt that way. The psychological impact for the homeowner who, um, is now looking at this.

Absence and there's, and there's nothing left. And, and so to, to have your, your life and the lives of your family, uh, erased. So totally is a very strange and terrible experience. And it, and it stays with you. 

[00:23:44] Roger Thompson: And struck here real quickly, just briefly, that harrowing narrative you have, uh, uh, it's in the reckoning piece I believe.

Of, of the Australian fires and the moment of the kind of tornado fire, tornado never before seen, and now by chance captured in the way that I think you described something like 300 acres just suddenly explode into, or, or gone just in this, in an instant, 

[00:24:11] John Vaillant: in a 10th of a second. It's on video and it, and it looks like a nuke went off.

There's a, there's a hillside there with a funnel cloud behind it and fire all around. And then there's a flash and it's gone. And that's what fire can do now. And, and, and that happened again in red and California in 2018. Um, and Jasper, there were, uh, tornado winds that, um, picked up a, you know, a huge shipping container like a ccan.

Threw it into the Athabasca River. Um, and there were these very, very heavy duty campsite drills made of heavy steel pipe, you know, made obviously to withstand fire, but also to be immovable by drunk campers. And, uh, these things were ripped out of the ground, thrown all over the place and totally deformed.

This isn't corrugated piping, this is solid steel, uh, tubing, you know, so the shocking energy was released, uh, even in that, even in that fire. So that's becoming the norm now. And it's, and these are, this is unsurvivable energy and it's also, you can't respond to it. There's nothing a firefighter can do, you know, a, a water bomber can't do anything.

It's not safe even to be around winds like that. I, I, you know, totally respect the decision to make giant fire breaks. They're doing it around White Horse in the Yukon also, but that is not going to stop a firestorm because it's the embers that. Burn the houses down. Generally, it's not the wall of fire, it's, it's the embers that are cast and and generated by these.

Absolutely ferocious winds that these giant, uh, fires generate. So they become their own weather system, their own storm storm system. And then the embers, uh, do the rest. And, and that is, you know, we saw this in LA too. The embers lit the houses on fire and then the houses ignited each other. So it has nothing to do with a fire break.

It has nothing to do with fire retardant. It has nothing to do with a fire truck or a fire hydrant. You know, there's, those are become irrelevant. So we're, we're dealing with these kinds of transcendent energies. I'm not saying don't build a fire break that will stop some fires, but when you get into a firestorm, it becomes a different thing.

[00:26:30] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. That's the fire chief of Fort McMurray and I, I forget the Northern Englishman that you wrote about, you know, personify the fire, calling it the beast. In actuality, it's a beast, but it's like a psychotic beast because as Jasper showed. It can be unpredictable, not just in the way it moves and behaves, but it can be unpredictable and it can take out a block of houses.

But leave one home I'd. I'd love to know, John, how you struggle or how you deal with the attribution science debate, because part of it, those who like you very capably, make the link between. Climate change and these increasing severity and frequency of wildfires and new fire machines. And yet I remember talking to Allison Karp, Allison on again, on the Energy Versus Climate Podcast.

Another shameless plug, uh, forgive me, she's a molecular paleo college. She was at Yale when we talked to her. She was now colleague of David Keith, at the University of Chicago. And she is, you know, true to form, you know, saying, well, we can say this fires because of climate change and this fire isn't the same way.

You can't say this class, five hurricanes 'cause of climate change. This one isn't. You ascribe a likelihood, you know, so this fire has a 50% likelihood of, of being related to, to climate change. And of course that's a nuance that's lost when you're trying to advocate for action on climate. And, and wildfire and just get people to properly protect themselves.

And it's nuance that sso, I often find in the environmental community that when there is a fire, there's a, at times I think, and it's counterproductive, almost like ambulance chasing and very quick to attribute that fire to climate change. And now look at me in my issue. How, how do you wrestle with it in the book?

[00:28:12] John Vaillant: I, I really look more at, at the conditions on the ground. You know, I, I, I mean I hold a lot of store by, um. Attribution science, you know, it's a real thing and, and you can definitely, we definitely have the models now and we certainly have the, the historical weather data to compare to. You don't have to be a statistician or a climate scientist or a rocket scientist to understand that what happened in reading California in 2018 that generated the, the first.

Fire tornado, EF three tornado generated by fire in the Northern Hemisphere or the Fort McMurray fire in 2016. The temperatures that day were extraordinarily high and they, and they arrived preceded by days, or sorry, weeks or months or even years of drought. So you have extraordinarily dry conditions now, cranked up to, um, record breaking temperatures.

If you set that environment on fire, you are going to get an extraordinary event that you're not gonna have where I live in Vancouver in December, where it's 45 degrees and a 110% humidity and everything is soaked. You know? And so, and I think the simplest way to think about it is think of your own laundry.

If I put a bed sheet out to dry today at, at my house, it's gonna be wet this evening. It might even be wetter than when I put it out. If you put a bed sheet out in, in Fort McMurray on May 2nd, 2016, it w it would've been dry in 20 minutes. And because the, it May 3rd broke the record temperature for that day by 10 degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity.

Was 12%. Most of us don't think about humidity percentages very much, but if you. Think about it at all. And then you look around to see, well, where is it normal to have 12% humidity? And that's how I approached it. Again, I'm not a climate scientist. I didn't even know how to interpret particularly, you know, I know what a hundred percent humidity is.

That's really wet and hot and sweaty. And if you're from New England as I am, you know, you, you, uh, you know, you know that that's not comfortable summer weather, but 12% humidity, what does that mean? Well, where 12% humidity is normal is death Valley. In the month of July, we know that is an extraordinarily hot, dry place Now, transpose those conditions to Northern Alberta to one of the most flammable ecosystems on earth.

The Boreal forest, which is designed to burn, and then you goose it with Southern California desert temperatures on the heels of a two year drought. Anybody can put that together. Something incredible is gonna happen. You're not just gonna have a fire, you're gonna have probably a firestorm. And that's exactly what happened.

So there's, there's, if you think of it that way, and then, you know, the attribution is, is sort of Monday morning quarterback and it's sort of too late then. But meteorologists and climatologists are very, very good at what they do. They're as good as petro chemists are. You know, they're, they're as good at figuring out, you know, their corner of the scientific world as petro chemists are, you know, figuring out is this a good place to drill?

How are we gonna render this quality of oil into something we can sell? They know how to do that. Climate scientists and meteorologists know how to predict and all the predictions. For Fort McMurray, likewise for Jasper. You know, we knew weeks out that the conditions were ripe for a catastrophic fire, and so then it's just a matter of where the ignition come from, comes from, and it really doesn't matter if it's from the muffler of a motorcycle or a lightning bolt or an arson it, an arsonist.

I really don't think it matters. What, what matters is the conditions. That enable these ignitions to not just be ignitions, but to blow up into catastrophic events with extraordinary speed. And that's what we're seeing over and over again. Now, just look at the weather. It's really that simple. All of us look at the weather every day.

You know, we're actually pretty good at that. As, as civilians, you know, then you have a guy like, uh, a fellow I interviewed, uh, who worked in fire but was also a, a marathoner or you know, cross country runner. And so he was, happened to be in Fort McMurray in early May, and he said, yeah, I went out for a run and the pine cones were crunching under my feet, like it was August.

We know like, oh, that grass looks really dry. That's sort of August grass. That's not May spring grass. And so we all, we are, we know a lot more about the weather than we may give ourselves credit for. And, uh, 'cause you know, we are animals tuned to our environments, you know, to varying degrees. And so there's a lot of data out there.

And, you know, I, I, I think there's a place for attribution science, but I don't think we need it to motivate us to. Be more defensive around fires and certainly to decarbonize because it, it's clear, you know, where we're going, which is a hotter and, and more unpredictable weather scenario. 

[00:33:35] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. You know, who actually thinks of things like relative humidity of 12% and Fort McMurray?

Well, it's you climate scientists and, uh, molecular pale ecologists like Alison Kap. However, to your point, who's thinking about fire these days? Many, and I just look at my personal life. So my personal life, my niece Kayla, is now working as a forest firefighter in the summers. Just spent her first summer in Dawson Creek.

That's a booming industry. Young people, you know, advantages and disadvantages, pluses and minuses. But it's unfortunately a booming field. Look, I've had a conversation at the tussle with my insurer around my rebuild value of my home, and that was directly precipitated by the Jasper wildfire and realizing, holy shit, I'd better check.

And you, you write, by the way, you have this wonderful story about the, uh, the insurance agent who came from the south, I want to guess Mississippi, the African American woman, and, and as a proud Canadian, the better treatment that she had up in Canada than where. She is from herself, uh, under very difficult circumstances.

And then many of us, and I too, I've been touched now by knowing people personally who have lost their homes in a wildfire. And the first one for me was Bill Hamilton, a wonderful octogenarian. And he lost, uh, his place at Carbonate Landing on the West Bank of the Columbia River, ironically called Carbonate Landing.

So that's happening, and yet now we've got this pushback coming from conservative politicians. Trump blaming wildfire on poor forest management. Danielle Smith blaming wildfire on arsonists, and nothing to do with climate change. So we're at this push-pull moment where I think awareness of wildfire has never been higher.

Even if I said earlier, the extent of it and the full force of it, the magnitude and the threat, we might, our perception might still be a bit low. We've got some senior, you know, politicians in the highest places of office who are still trying to steer us away from root causes and find bogeymen out there to blame fires on.

And I'd love to know where you sit now and years past the publication of this book. What do you think about the public consciousness and what do we do about these politicians trying to steer us away? 

[00:35:50] John Vaillant: So, you know, that's a sickness in the culture and. And you have to be deeply diluted and willing to be diluted to, to fly in the face of the obvious science that was established.

You know, when basically when Trump was a young man, it was already pretty much settled. And so this is so clearly kind of Orwellian machinery and manipulation. It's not helpful to confront it 'cause you're not going to, they, they. They have the intellect to know better, and they've decided that it's expedient to take this other path, and generally because they have been bought.

You know, I, I don't think it's a philosophical thing for Danielle Smith or, or Trump, I think. They are mercenaries and, and they just value differently. It's not an argument you're gonna win. And therefore that brings us back to the courts, which you brought up at the top. The courts are not working very well in the United States.

They're limping along, but that, you know, the Supreme Court is effectively compromised and China is, is leading this century Now China is gonna, you know, be setting the tone and everyone is gonna have to negotiate with them, and they do wanna negotiate. They are rational about climate change and they, you know, they are leading the world many times over in the rollout of renewable energy and they fully understand its value.

Canada and the US are both still captive to the petroleum industry, and it's shocking and embarrassing and extraordinarily dangerous. But they're not the whole world and there's no, we are in an energy transition right now. There are people in industries who don't wanna admit that shareholders have way too much influence over, over this process, but it's happening anyway.

And you know, the, the petroleum industry's response to that is. Going into plastics, you know, the demand is for petroleum is dropping. Uh, and, but they're gonna pick up that slack, you know, through plastics and if you wanna really ruin your day. Um, but you should have her on the show. Beth Gardner just wrote a book that's coming out, I think in a month or two called Plastic Incorporated.

It's the Silent Spring of petroleum and uh uh, so that's Beth Gardner really. You know, I had the privilege of blurbing it, and it's a really disturbing book, so. There's a lot of the world that is still science-based and what's happening in the United States is completely unsustainable. And so just, you know, how badly does it have to collapse before we rebuild, but reality, we will win in the end.

And climate science is a part of that reality. Renewable energy and how incredibly cheap, efficient, and available it is. Uh, you know, it's the most abundant energy, the cheapest energy ever conceived and. Uh, a lot of the world is super interested in expense, cheapness and abundance. Literally, I just finished what ended up being basically a two and a half year tour and nothing to do with the publisher, just people like you who, who wanted to engage with this really urgent subject around the world.

I just got back from Peru and in did a, an interview with a climate scientist down there who's studying fires in the Amazon and you. Pretty amazing to be from the, from Canada, from the Boreal Forest and and sharing common cause and common dilemmas with a Peruvian Amazon jungle scientist. They're both burning, both those to the Boreal and the, and the Amazon jungle are both burning in ways that they did not used to, to transform a global energy system like the pet petroleum, uh, system.

Um, you know, that's a, that's a hundred year task and you know, we're, it's early days now, but when you look at what's happening with batteries, how quickly that, that technology, how quickly the cost is dropping, the um. The storage is developing and then the materials like lithium is almost pass passe at this point.

You know? And by 2030, by 2035, there are gonna be batteries of sizes, weights and materials that, you know, we can't even conceive of. And, uh, and I, you know, and, and I don't, for, just for what it's worth, I don't think the answer is ai. You know, I think it's there, there's gonna be, it's the answer's in good science and, and, and human beings.

Um. Working together as we always have to surmount the seemingly insurmountable, you know, that's what we're good at. That's really our superpower as a species. 

[00:40:40] Ed Whittingham: I, I, I will say one of the contributions you've made, John, is now I've seen a wildfire explosion, pardon the pun, of books now coming out on fire in ecology and climate.

And, uh, I've got one sitting on my, my nightstand, uh, dark Days at Noon by Ed Streek. I don't know if you know Ed, but he's, 

[00:40:57] John Vaillant: yeah. That he's, he sort of led the charge. He wrote the first, um, well there's been probably five books written about the, for McMurray fire, but he got his out, which I think is called Firestorm, a year after it came out and really helped, uh, kind of set the table and, and educate the, he did a lot of media.

Uh, it's a, it's a very good book and. Really help move the needle on understanding. And then, yeah, dark days at noon is his follow up to that. I think it just came out a year or two ago and, uh, but yeah, he's terrific. 

[00:41:31] Roger Thompson: I want to kind of close this out here, John. I just want to kind of give you a final word, but I can't do that without leaving you, uh, some of your language in the Air Force.

Right. Uh, there's this wonderful, kind of the best analogy I have is a kind of Carl Sagan like moment where you're kind of zooming back and looking at the planet as a whole. And you, you, in this one section with this phrase that I. I hope some poet picks up on and, and uses in some way. And that is, we are here by a strange and precarious grace.

Uh, the, the idea that this planet that we're sets, its in atmosphere, we're in this kind of, it's just beautiful. It gives me goosebumps, which I actually literally have right now. I, that, that phrasing is just so wonderful. And so I guess I want to close out here with you giving us a, a, a word on what do we do with that wisdom?

That we are hereby strange or precarious grace. What would you, what would you advise us toward? 

[00:42:20] John Vaillant: Boy, you know, I, I'm 63 years old now and, and again, spent mo basically my fifties, you know, working on this book. And I've got a couple of kids who are growing up, you know, in this, you know, precarious grace, but also real, you know, climate precarity.

You know, it really is uncertain. We don't know exactly what's coming, you know, to me, uh, that just emphasizes the need to really understand the power of love. For, for each other, for, for the people around us, for the ideas that resonate for us, for the land that supports us and nurtures us and enables everything.

And as invisible it is, as it is for the climate and, and for the weather, you know? And, and which, you know, is really. You know, that's the atmosphere is really, if you think of like an amniotic sack, you know that that contains everything and that nurtures us, you know, through this, you know, vulnerable time.

Um, that is kind of what our atmosphere is. You know, we live in this, this, this sack of vapor and and gas, and it enables everything we do. You know, it enables every argument we have and every joy we experience, and every lesson we learn. And every, uh, piece of wise advice that we ignore, you know, it, it enables us to do all those things.

It gives us enormous freedom. And so, you know, to, to celebrate that and honor that, uh, in ways that nurture each other and nurture the chances. Of the systems that keep us alive continuing, uh, to be able to do that for as long as possible. And we, you know, we as humans are really the only species that gets to decide that, that's what's really extraordinary.

It's not a, it's not a wholesome burden for any species to bear. We shouldn't have that much power, but we do. And, and there are systems that we can engage in that can move that needle in different directions. And it's incumbent upon us to learn what those are in our communities. Figure out where the levers are, figures out, figure out the ones that we can actually grasp onto and move whatever skills and resources we can bring to bear and to engage in that.

Actively, but it's also an incredibly exciting time. You know, it's a period of wide awakening and, and incredible speed of events, you know, both on the natural side and on the, uh, technological and cultural side. And so we've really never lived in a more dynamic, fast moving time, but, um. We have brains and, and bodies that, that can handle that and, and social systems, uh, that can handle it.

And, uh, but it, it, you know, requires a conscious engagement with all of those. And so it's galvanizing. 

[00:45:11] Roger Thompson: I would say that I love ending with love, and I can say that in reading this book, despite some of the harrowing narrative and the difficult history of confronting us in it, um, it is, it is obvious the love for our planet that shines through in this.

And, and, and lemme just say for lovers of language, you will be rewarded by picking up any. John Vaillant book, and this is no exception to that. So, John, thank you so much for joining, uh, ed and me, and, uh, um, hope to connect with you in person sometime in not too distant future. 

[00:45:47] John Vaillant: Let's do it in Arizona or Alberta.

You know, two of the greatest places in North America. Uh, you're lucky to be there. And, um, yeah, no, this is, you know what a, what a really. Pleasant way to, to spend a rainy morning. So I really appreciate that and thanks for your interest. Thanks for reading and, uh, let's hoist one sometime. 

[00:46:06] Ed Whittingham: Sounds great.

Yeah. Thanks John. Thanks for listening to Energy Versus Climate. The show is created by David Keith, Sara Hastings Simon and me, Ed Whittingham. And produced by Amit Tandon with help from Michael Edmonds. Our title in Show Music is The Windup by Brian Lips. This season of Energy Versus Climate is produced with the support of the North Family Foundation, the Consecon Foundation, the Trottier Family Foundation, and you our generous listeners. Sign up for updates and exclusive webinar access at energyvsclimate.com and review and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. Really does help new listeners define the show.