Vaillant, J. (2023). Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. Knopf

“Fire has no heart, no soul, and no concern for the damage it does, or who it harms. Its focus is solely on sustaining itself and spreading as broadly as possible, wherever possible. In this way, fire resembles the unspoken priorities of most commercial industries, corporate boards and shareholders, and, more broadly, the colonial impulse.”

Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast is an eye-opening book that works at multiple levels: from the riveting story of the Fort McMurray Fire, to the climate context that created the conditions for this devastating fire, to the hungry fire beast that has emerged in our existential nightmares. And John Vaillant speaks directly about our culpability.

The book begins with the image of human civilization as a fire culture. “Never in Earth’s history, or in ours, have so many fires been ignited in so many places on such a continuous basis. At the most basic level, consider every candle, lantern, and cook fire across the globe: approximately 3 billion people around the world still cook and/or heat their homes with open fires. Then, consider every gas stove, furnace, and water heater; every coal-fired and biomass-burning power station; every generator; every human-caused brush and field and forest fire. Already, we are into many billions of fires per day, worldwide, and that is not even counting matches, lighters, or pilot lights, or more rarified sources like oil refineries, incinerators, and war. Nor does this tally take into account automobiles.” As for the internal combustion engine, with over a billion and a half engines igniting a half-million times each hour of operation, the number of fires each day is in the trillions. Fire is the basis of our civilization, when it is in our control. But when it is not, it is an existential threat.

From this compelling metaphor of fire, Vaillant describes the Fort McMurray Fire through the eyes of fleeing citizens and the first responders trying to wrap their thinking around something they had never witnessed before. The description is spellbinding, as the fire approaches the city, and crosses the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) into Fort McMurray, breaking all the rules. The fire is a Beast, as it devours home by home. Neighbourhoods transform into its energy source, as our dependence on petroleum-based building materials and furnishings becomes manifest. Fathoming the unfathomable sends people bolting for their lives. It is horrific to read.

But Vaillant doesn’t leave this simply as an account of a terrible disaster. First, he describes the weather conditions that allow for such a blaze to energize to such proportions. And then he soundly links these conditions to our changing climate, and our own culpability. And our culpability is directly related to our dependence on fossil fuels: “According to another energy historian, Daniel Yergin, the world economy was worth around $90 trillion in 2019, and nearly all its energy (84 percent) was derived from fossil fuels. We are burning through this energetic trust fund like there’s no tomorrow: on any given day, the human race consumes about 100 million barrels of crude oil”.

An important revelation pertaining to our dependence on fossil fuels is presented, as petroleum companies and (captive) governments choose to ignore the mounting scientific evidence of carbon dioxide emissions and the greenhouse effect, beginning in the 1930s onward – even evidence and projections compiled by trusted scientists working within the petroleum industry. Vaillant writes: “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. It is a downside to our species’ extraordinary adaptability that appears to be triggered by artificial abundance and exacerbated by the profit motive, which could be defined as ‘commercial entitlement’ (or greed). Once an arbitrary standard has been set for production, profits, and their attendant gratification—something fire and fossil fuels have enabled us to do as never before—that expectation, however unsustainable, becomes the new baseline, and anyone attempting to revise it, or even question it, faces serious social and economic consequences.”

While ignoring the swelling mass of scientific evidence, the frequency and intensity of fires continue to increase around the world. The author compiles global fire events and shows the face of the Beast that is stalking our civilization. The Beast, Vaillant argues, is beginning to create its own habitat. It is a positive feedback loop that with each catastrophic fire, more greenhouse gases are emitted which, in turn, create the climate conditions that encourage more and larger fires: “Since roughly 2000, an inversion has begun: the world’s great terrestrial carbon sinks—the Amazon rain forest and the circumboreal forest, along with many other less famous forest systems around the world—have become net carbon emitters. In other words, what used to be a reliable source of carbon storage is now generating more CO₂ than it is sequestering. This grave reversal is one of the most pernicious developments of the Petrocene Age. 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.” It is one of many dimensions of run-away climate change, where the notion of humanity being able to restore the climate to habitable conditions has exceeded our grasp.

The conscious decision not to act on scientific evidence was augmented by acts of deception, ‘predatory delay’, which is defined as is “the deliberate slowing of change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will be paid by others.”  Meanwhile, the largest financial institutions in the world have loaned publicly-traded global petroleum companies $3.8 trillion since 2016. Largely, it seems, this accrued debt represents a massive liquidation of the value of the corporations to shareholders, leaving the banks (and, therefore, the government) with enormous and unpayable debts. It is a crime that we are watching in real time.

In Fire Weather, Vaillant courageously tells the story of the future. And it is grim.