Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

Fort McMurray attempted to rebuild after the disaster, but workers and leadership both envisioned a town that would return to business as usual. However, in a changing world, that would inevitably lead to another fire disaster. This truth was seemingly eclipsed by the citizens’ longing for the days gone by. Fort McMurray is one instance of the environmental disasters all over the world. The changing climate and fluctuating energy market interact to create new opportunities to revise the market.

The global risk assessment firm Moody’s downgraded Alberta’s credit rating in 2019. In 2020, flooding in Fort McMurray and the COVID-19 pandemic tanked the price of oil to the point that the formerly hopeful culture of Fort McMurray became “bleak.” Lower demand for bitumen oil and uncertainty about the future of fossil fuels in light of new climate protection measures led many investors to pull out of Fort McMurray’s oil sand facilities. In this way, the decline of the oil industry parallels the decline of another huge industry: tobacco companies. Bolstered by government and media support, the tobacco industry nonetheless could not prevent the truth about its product from getting out, and its deceit of investors (by claiming not to have known) tanked its reputation.

Although culture seems to be turning against the oil industry, the slow and considered response of financial and governmental institutions to the catastrophe of climate change recalls the response of Fort McMurray’s leadership to the fire looming on the horizon on May 2. Their priorities seem unconsciously skewed toward hoping for the best in order to protect profit margins.

The text compares this to sea otter hunters in North America in the late 1700s and early 1800s. They created a booming market by selling pelts to China but quickly realized that they were running out of otters only three decades in. Instead of revising their expectations and reshaping the market, they raced to individually trap the most otters before the bubble burst. Everyone in the oil industry has always been aware that it will eventually crash, but they will not change anything: They will simply attempt to collect as much capital as they can before the crash occurs. Humanity has become accustomed to the “luxury of fire in waiting” in the form of combustion engines, heating systems, and oil-based industries (343). To disengage from this market before it self-destructs and takes the environment with it, litigation may be the only option.

The scrutiny surrounding the Fort McMurray fire helped expose the negligence and cover-ups that the oil industry used to continue its pursuit of profit. Shell’s CEO, Ben van Beurden, outright admitted that oil executives knew their complicity and the consequences yet chose to do nothing. The American Petroleum Institute engaged in behavior called “predatory delay,” in which they deliberately slowed down social and industrial changes in order to maximize their profits, noting that the “costs will be paid by others” (347). Shareholders and pension fund managers, meanwhile, started a fossil fuel divestment campaign, dumping their fossil fuel stocks en masse and refusing to buy more. This devalued the oil industry, a stunning reversal in less than two decades. In 2007 and 2008, Shell and ExxonMobil were the two most profitable companies in history. Although still big, they are in massive debt and can no longer afford to offer dividends.

Renewable energy, like solar, likewise poses a threat to the American Petroleum Institute. The International Energy Agency, a longtime proponent of fossil fuels, announced in 2020 that solar power is now the cheapest electricity source in history.

Canada, however, is still far behind European Union countries in accepting and integrating new sources of power. It is the only G7 country with emissions that have been rising instead of decreasing since 1990. Canada has yet to reckon with the damage of the oil industry and join the European Union in embracing the International Energy Agency’s recommendation of “achieving net-zero emissions by 2050” (351).

The Fort McMurray fire was not officially declared extinguished until August 2, 2017, exactly 15 months after it began. Although firefighting efforts continued, hotspots kept flaring up no matter what firefighters did. Firefighters and other citizens were astonished that considering the breadth and duration of the fire, virtually no one died during the evacuation. However, the fire continues to take a toll in other ways. Firefighters and citizens of Fort McMurray have health issues due to smoke inhalation, and many people experience post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the fire and the evacuation.

Preemptive evacuation, or the practice of ordering mass egress from an at-risk area before a crisis occurs, is becoming a more standard policy in high-fire-risk regions. This approach is more effective and safer and (most crucially) reduces the risk of psychological trauma stemming from emergency evacuation.

Although, in 2016, the Alberta fires were a frightening but distant story for the rest of the globe, in the ensuing years, many US states and other countries have experienced wildfires caused or exacerbated by climate change. Areas long considered virtually fireproof, like the wet moors of Britain, the Arctic, or the Amazon rainforests, have burned. Even human landmarks, like the Notre Dame cathedral and the Brazil National History Museum, have caught fire, and climate change issues often stymied extinguishing attempts. This hotter and drier world has been “tilted in fire’s favor” (355). A California reporter summed it up by stating that the wildland-urban interface is everywhere now.

Less than a month after the Redding fire tornado destroyed one neighborhood, new green shoots poked up through the ash. This type of natural recovery after a fire is called “revirescence,” and Vaillant notes that rapid revirescence has occurred after every natural disaster throughout Earth’s history, including extinction-level events. Nevertheless, humanity threatens to create an extinction-level disaster for the rest of the natural world as well as itself. Revirescence, however, points toward a strategy for addressing this problem. Vaillant argues that nature is inviting humanity to invest creativity and intellect in regeneration rather than consumption and combustion. Instead of being Homo sapiens or Homo flagrans, humanity must become Homo viriditas: the greening/growing man.