Fire Weather author sounds alarm on Alberta's fossil fuel addiction
At this year's Parkland Institute conference, John Vaillant linked Alberta’s fossil fuel dependence to the devastating Fort McMurray wildfires while embracing the global shift towards clean energy.
The 2016 wildfire that devastated Fort McMurray should have been a wake-up call for Alberta to begin the process of kicking its fossil fuel addiction, says the author of the widely acclaimed bestseller Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast.
On Nov. 15, as delegates gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, for COP29 to attempt to reach a global consensus on how to address the worsening climate crisis, John Vaillant delivered his keynote address at the Parkland Institute’s annual conference to a packed auditorium at the University of Alberta.
At the outset of his remarks, Vaillant alluded to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, noting how that the increasing occurrence and severity of climate disasters serve as “a near perfect allegory for the arrival of an unfettered klepto-fascist regime.”
“These energies move across the land with similar speed, rapacity and destructiveness,” said Vaillant.
The Fort Mac fire may have “drove the largest, most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times,” Vaillant said, but barring major changes to how energy is produced and consumed, things are only going to get worse.
“By now, it's clear to probably everybody in this room that climate disruption, of which fire is just one manifestation, is the issue of our time. It'll impact every aspect of our lives for the rest of our lives,” he said.
Last year was a “turning point” in global temperatures, Vaillant said in front of a graph of sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic that looked something like this:
The sea surface temperatures throughout 2023 and 2024, as represented by the orange and red lines, respectively.
“You see 2023 taking this rather precipitous jump into warmer territory,” Vaillant explained.
The same is true of surface air temperatures over the past two years in the summer and fall:
“We—all of us—must recognize this moment for what it is, the beginning of a new era of civilizational retreat, contraction and consolidation,” said Vaillant.
He emphasized that this is not the time to abandon hope and become complacent.
“To me, it feels like we're getting sober after a really long and wicked binge, and we're coming to now and we're taking stock, and it's better to be sober and it's better to be clear headed,” said Vaillant.
It was in Fort Mac in 2016 that Vaillaint says he got a sense of how quickly climate disaster was becoming the norm.
“The world we thought we knew was changing under our feet because we changed it,” he said.
At the beginning of May 3, 2016, the day the entire city had to evacuate, “it's hard to overstate how unconcerned was Fort McMurray’s citizenry,” said Vaillant, despite the temperature in Fort Mac was 33 degrees Celsius, six degrees higher than the previous local record for May 3.
Vaillant described the apocalyptic scene that unfolded that day by 2:45 p.m. along Highway 63, which connects Fort Mac to Edmonton, courtesy of one of the people he interviewed for the book:
These are fireballs, disembodied fireballs rolling over the road. Flames are 50 meters, 100 meters tall. Everything is on fire. Nothing is moving. It's the Tim Hortons drive through lineup from hell, because everybody is at a t-stop down on 63 because 63 is crawling, because now tens of thousands of people are trying to get out and looking over his dashboard there, he has the misfortune of seeing the tail lights in front of him, and one of those is his daughter's car, and the other one is his wife's car. And there's nothing he can do. He cannot get out. It's too hot. And I asked him if he happened to notice his dashboard thermometer… He said it was 66 Celsius, and while he's sitting there idling with a fan blowing like crazy, a deer on fire runs into his truck.
And it wasn’t just the heat. “More sinister and more invisible was the relative humidity,” Vaillant added.
The humidity of 12% that day was desert dry, equivalent to Death Valley at the height of summer.
“When you transpose record-breaking heat and desert dryness to the boreal forest, which is already a charismatically flammable ecosystem and naturally flammable ecosystem, and you goose it like that, it's like you spray it with gasoline,” explained Vaillant. “You don't just get a fire, you get a fire storm.”
The Fort Mac fire storm is an especially stark illustration of what the endless extraction of fossil fuels wreaks upon communities that depend upon it.
The planet’s debts are coming due, said Vaillant, with weather patterns playing the role of a repo man:
One way to understand capitalism as it's currently practiced is as a global ponzi scheme powered by fossil fuels and leveraged against the future of almost all living things. In light of this, the most accurate way to calculate the debt on this system of fossil fuel power, which is to say fire power, and civilization is by measuring CO2. And if we understand CO2 as debt, then heat is the interest on that debt…
Our CO2 debt level has become unsustainable and the interest unpayable to the point that we now find ourselves in the default zone. And typically when we default on a loan, the bank calls in a debt. They might even repossess your stuff.
So this is one way to understand the steady increase in fossil fuel-enhanced weather disasters. These floods, fires, heat waves and intensifying storms are the Bank of Nature's repo man coming to collect on that debt, repossessing our homes, our cars, our coastlines, our very lives.
These weather events, he said, ought to serve as a catalyst “to mature out of petroleum-powered capitalism's dangerous delusion that: a) nature is some kind of bottomless trust fund that we can draw on at will with no consequences, and b) that we’re somehow in charge.”
Whatever the business, “nature owns 51% of it,” Vaillant added. “Until we recognize the natural world as more than a full partner in everything we do, she will continue to remind us in progressively more violent ways, and she'll continue collecting on that debt.”
While Canadian politicians are fond of repeating that Canada only emits 1.6% of the world’s CO2, this talking point obscures our disproportionate role in delaying climate progress.
In 2022, according to the International Energy Agency, each person in the world emitted an average of 4.3 tonnes of CO2.
Canada, by contrast, emitted 13.44 tonnes of CO2 per capita, just behind Australia (13.64), the U.S. (13.81), and Saudi Arabia (14.64), but ahead of Kazakhstan (11.51) and Russia (11.31).
Albertans, however, emitted nearly 60 tonnes per capita, almost double the number one emitting country, Qatar (33.64). Saskatchewan emits even more per capita at 64.4 tonnes per capita.
Bitumen is so deeply embedded in the fabric of our existence that it’s impossible for many Albertans to envision life without it, even as it burns our cities and parks to the ground.
Vaillant wasn’t arguing to keep it in the ground. He pointed towards Texas, the oil-rich state that, despite efforts from the state’s Republican-dominated government to stymie its growth, is also the largest producer of clean wind and solar energy in the U.S. as a model.
“They’re blowing California out of the water,” he said. “They're still fracking, they're still going hard on oil, but they also know it's not forever, but the sun and the wind are absolutely forever.”
Alberta is getting left behind on this renewables rush because Premier Danielle Smith issued a boneheaded six-month moratorium on approving renewable energy projects last year, effectively killing the industry’s momentum in the province.
“We're in an incredible moment of energy transition. Again, it's very hard to feel that here and that’s why I really urge you to look around at the rest of the world, because amazing things are happening,” said Vaillant.
“And what's happening with battery technology is so exciting and so rapid that we're just going to be in a different energy scenario, maybe not in Alberta, but in a whole lot of other places by 2030.”
Alberta can either embrace the change that’s happening across the world, with or without us, or can continue fighting the future, with benefits accruing to fewer and fewer people while the risks become increasingly widespread.