We built
our world with fire. Now heat is destroying our lives
John
Vaillant
We fell in
love with the power and speed that fossil fuels brought us. But the price being
paid in California, and around the world, has become too high
Sat 11 Jan
2025 13.43 GMT
Zero per
cent contained. In layperson’s terms, that means “out of control and burning at
will”. It’s a common designation for a wildfire – in the wild. But when a fire
like this enters an urban area such as Los Angeles County, the most highly
populated metropolitan area in the US, it becomes an exploding bomb, and this
one has been detonating since last Tuesday.
By now, the
energy release from this wind-driven, drought-fuelled firestorm turned urban
conflagration is into the megatons, and the nuclear-scale destruction is there
for all to see: block after block and neighbourhood after neighbourhood
levelled – roughly 12,000 structures destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, 55 sq
miles of city and mountain burnt, nearly 200,000 residents evacuated – so far.
There is more to come.
The death
toll has risen above 10 but, given the hurricane-force winds, the ignescent
blizzards of flying embers, the frantic just-the-clothes-on-our backs
evacuations, the gridlock, the wholesale terror, and the massive scale of this
already historic event, such low fatalities are a kind of miracle.
Watching the
news, as I am in Orange County, 50 miles south of the city, you might think
these were the only fires burning when, in fact, they are a regional flare-up
in a much larger planetary event.
We call
ourselves humans, Homo sapiens (wise man), but ours is a fire-powered species,
so much so that Homo flagrans – burning man – might suit us better.
Fire has
been our constant, if unreliable, companion since long before we found our way
out of Africa: its spritely charisma and night-cancelling, animal-intimidating
power was instrumental, not only to our ancestors’ survival, but to our
evolution – to us becoming us.
So integral
has fire become to our daily activities, and to our identities, that we
scarcely notice it any more. Almost invisibly now, its superhuman potency
enables and amplifies virtually everything we do: cooking our food, heating our
homes, powering our energy grids, and driving us – in our teeming billions –
through the world at lethal speeds by land, sea and air.
Fire,
represented by its avatars, coal, oil and gas, is our superpower, pure and
simple, and we can almost be forgiven for believing that we’ve mastered it. But
we glossed over a crucial detail: we aren’t the only ones being supercharged.
Due to the colossal scale on which our fire-powered civilisation now operates –
including 50,000 seagoing ships, 30,000 jet planes, and nearly 2bn motor
vehicles, powered by 100m barrels of oil every day – we have also supercharged
the atmosphere.
These fires
are the beginning of a reckoning that begins with the question: are fossil
fuels liberating us, or holding us hostage?
Our
atmosphere is a weather engine, and it is energised by heat. Thanks to the
historic amounts of CO2 and methane generated by emissions from the
unaccountable fires we ignite every day, we have empowered fire much as it has
empowered us, enabling it to burn hotter, faster, longer and more broadly
across any environment containing hydrocarbons (a steadily broadening menu that
now includes the margins of Greenland, and which could, in our lifetimes,
include Antarctica).
All that
extra energy released by our combustive activities (talk about 0% containment)
causes normal weather events – such as wildfires in southern California – to
metastasise into full-blown catastrophes that violate natural boundaries of
season, geography and historic norms. The LA fires, as shocking as their damage
is to behold, and as traumatising as they are for those affected by them, are
just one manifestation of the atmospheric monster that fossil fuel emissions
have loosed upon the world.
It may sound
cruel to say this, but you could see this fire coming a decade away, and many
did. So, we need to be frank here: climate science ain’t rocket science. If
you can read a calendar and a thermometer, and you have noticed how laundry
dries more quickly on hot, dry, windy days, you are well on your way to being
able to predict the likelihood of wildfire. I am in southern California by
sheer coincidence, visiting family, but the first thing I thought when I got
down here was: “It’s January, and boy, those hills look dry – dry enough to
burn.”
Iwas not
aware there hadn’t been rain in eight months, or that this current drought
follows the hottest summer in LA’s history, but you can see it, and you can
feel it: the region is a tinderbox. All of SoCal could burn as viciously as LA
is burning right now, as viciously as Valparaíso, Chile and the Texas panhandle
burned last spring, or Lahaina, Hawaii did in 2023, or Australia in 2020, or
Paradise and Redding, California in 2018, or Santa Rosa, California in 2017, or
Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016. These fires are only the beginning of a
historic reckoning that starts with the question: are fossil fuels liberating
us or holding us hostage? There is a clear answer to this, and it can be found
in the ledgers of petroleum and automobile companies, and with the investors,
banks, governments, insurance companies, lobbyists, churches and media outlets
that enable them.
As I write,
late on Friday night, the several major fires burning in and around Los Angeles
are still spreading and multiplying at will, their containment still near 0%.
More strong Santa Ana winds are expected in the coming days, and there’s no
relief in sight.
The same
goes for survivors’ grief and rage and PTSD, injuries that may take lifetimes
to contain, thousands upon thousands of them.
John
Vaillant is the author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
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