“The Fort McMurray disaster wasn’t just the scene of the biggest urban fire in North America or the largest fire evacuation in North American history. It was also the perfect symbol of the catastrophe that humanity has created through the consumption of fossil fuels. Fort Mac is, after all, an instant city created by our appetite for oil. And not just any oil: the synthetic crude produced by refining tarry bitumen is the most carbon-intensive oil in the world, requiring the burning of mind-boggling amounts of natural gas to liberate it from deep below ground and then to separate usable hydrocarbons from sandy gunk.”
“In one section, Vaillant discusses the power released by a forest fire, which is measured in kilowatts per metre - that is, energy released for each metre of the burning front. At 1,000 kilowatts per metre, ground crews can manage a blaze with hoses and shovels. Above 2,000, it may be a challenge for water bombers. At 10,000, it’s totally out of control. In 2001, a record-breaking forest fire in northern Alberta, known as the Chisholm fire, hit 225,000 kilowatts per metre. How powerful is that? Vaillant cites a research paper showing that at its peak, the Chisholm fire released four times as much energy as Little Boy— the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan—every minute”
“‘This deep allegiance to the internal combustion engine posed a major problem,’ Vaillant writes. ‘Residents owned so many vehicles, recreational and otherwise, that it was impossible to drive them all out.’ Left behind, many of these vehicles became bombs waiting to be detonated, along with the tanks of welding gas in the garages of serious do-it-yourselfers and the propane barbecue tanks on nearly every deck and balcony.”
“Contributing further to the disaster was the way many modern homes are built and furnished. Vinyl siding, asphalt shingles, laminate flooring and countertops, and furniture made from hydrocarbon-based synthetics contributed to the speed of the inferno.”
"”If twenty-first-century fire has taught us anything,” he writes, “it’s that there is no top end.” Since 2016, there have been recordbreaking fire seasons in Australia (in 2020), record-breaking temperatures in Lytton, British Columbia (in 2021), and “worst air in the world” alerts in major cities across western North America. This year, such alerts were issued for Toronto and New York City”
“IT’S NOT AS IF WE WEREN’T WARNED. THE EFFECT of releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere has been known far longer than most of us realize. It was proposed by the physicist John Tyndall in 1859- the same year as the drilling of Pennsylvania’s first oil well, which helped kick-off the petroleum age. Almost a century later, in the run-up to the 1957 International Geophysical Year, the oceanographer Roger Revelle issued a warning to the United States Congress that threatthe burning of coal, oil, and natural gas ened to return the planet to the atmospheric conditions of 100 million years ago. Weather data already showed that the climate had been warming since about 1900.”