In May 2016, a wildfire ripped through Fort McMurray, the heart of Canada’s tar sands and bitumen mining region, with a speed and intensity unlike anything firefighters had seen before. It created its own weather. And it triggered the largest evacuation in Canadian history, which had to happen within mere hours.
But this fire wasn’t just a freak event. It was a warning of more to come. Since then, Texas experienced its biggest wildfire ever — the Smokehouse Creek Fire — in 2024.
On the latest episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, I talked with John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, to unpack what happened in Fort McMurray and why it matters more than ever today.
A City Built for Oil, Burning on Oil
Fort McMurray exists to extract bitumen — a heavy, tar-like form of oil that’s mined, not drilled. The scale is staggering. It’s one of the largest fossil fuel reserves on Earth, and the city’s infrastructure, economy, and identity are built around it.
John explains how the very thing that built Fort McMurray also made it vulnerable. Warming temperatures. Drier forests. Flammable building materials. More people living in high-risk zones. A city that was a tinderbox.
Why This Story Hits Close to Home
Texas is no stranger to extreme heat and fast-moving fire.
The Fort McMurray fire was one of the first modern wildfires to force a major oil-producing region to confront the new physics of our climate.
But it wasn’t the last.
In the episode, we talk about:
The almost unimaginable intensity of modern wildfires
the Lucretius Problem: the worst or biggest hurricane, flood, fire, etc. is not the worst or biggest possible
parallels between Fort McMurray and Texas suburbs near the WUI (wildland-urban interface)
Why we need to rethink infrastructure, building codes, and land use to have a chance at resilience in the face of extreme fire weather
This is one of the most powerful stories we’ve featured — and one of the most important.
Thanks for checking it out
This work would not be possible without your support. This episode of the Energy Capital Podcast is free, but paid subscribers get access to select episodes, including this one on the future of advanced nuclear reactors with Matt Loszak, as well as Grid Roundups, the full archives, special presentations, Reading and Podcast Picks, and more. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please become one today.
Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction
02:00 – The Fort McMurray Fire
04:00 – Fort McMurray’s economy is based solely on a fossil fuel: bitumen
07:00 – The context of the Fort McMurray fire
10:00 – The physics of modern fires: radiant heat of 900 degrees
13:00 – The toll on firefighters
14:30 – The megawatt equivalent of a wildfire: “this now is what fire is capable of”
16:30 – Fires now create their own weather: pryocumulonimbus clouds
19:00 – The Lucretius Problem and discontinuity
22:30 – The connection between monster firestorms and floods and other extreme weather events
26:00 – Similarities between Texas and Alberta
27:30 – The Texas legislative session and flood response, adaptation
29:00 – Examples of effective adaptation: “defensible space”
32:00 – Texas wildlife risk and Wildland Urban Interface (WUI)
37:00 – Greenhouse gas levels are higher by far than at any time in human history
40:00 – The American Petroleum Institute’s policy reversal
44:30 – Opportunities for business and industry from reducing emissions
46:00 – Who’s leading the race for the future of energy?
49:00 – Could Texas lead the way?
51:00 – Final Thoughts & A Path Forward
Resources
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant
The Fires Sweeping Across Texas Offer a Terrifying Warning, New York Times Op-ed by John Vaillant
The Fire Age by Stephen Pyne
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Northeast Is Burning, New York Times Op-ed by John Vaillant
The Fires Sweeping Across Texas Offer a Terrifying Warning, NYT Op-ed by John Vaillant
Mark Carney should understand better than anyone why Canada is burning. Here’s how he can change course, The Star Op-ed by John Vaillant
Steiner Ranch neighborhood gets second emergency evacuation route | FOX 7 Austin
California Burning by Katherine Blunt
Transcript
Doug Lewin (00:04.984):
Welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. I'm your host, Doug Lewin. My guest this week was John Vaillant. John wrote a book that really struck me, and as soon as I read it, I knew I was going to invite him to be a guest on the Energy Capital Podcast. It's called Fire Weather: On the Frontlines of a Burning World, and I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It was an absolutely fantastic read. It was the story of a fire that went through Fort McMurray, which is a town that exists for bitumen mining sort of a type of oil, but it's not really drilled. It's mined. We get into that in the conversation, but this fire was absolutely horrific. One of the worst that humankind has ever seen. We are dealing with fire weather in Texas in 2024. The Smokehouse Creek fire was the worst fire that ever happened there. And John brings a whole lot of insights. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, National Book Award finalist for this book.
It took seven years to write it, to detail everything about it. Just incredible book. Again, highly recommended. But what really was the takeaway for me from this book was the Lucretius problem, which we talk about in the interview. So I won't talk about it now, but listen to the podcast. And I think you'll also find that that is a really useful construct to think about what's happening in our world in 2025 as we get the worst flood we've ever seen, the worst fire we've ever seen, the worst hurricane we've ever seen, so on and so forth.
The Lucretius problem is a really valuable frame for this. I really enjoyed this discussion with John. Hope you do too. As always, please do spread the news of this podcast to friends, family, colleagues. Let people know about the Energy Capital Podcast, Texas Energy and Power newsletter. Word of mouth is very important and we really do appreciate those five-star reviews wherever you listen to your podcasts. And with that, here's the podcast recording with John Vaillant.
John Vaillant, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.
John Vaillant (01:57.4):
Doug, so good to be with you. I'm glad we finally got it organized.
Doug Lewin (02:01.838):
Yes, sir. I've been trying to make it happen for a while. Because as soon as I read this book, I knew I needed to talk to you for the podcast. I'm talking about Fire Weather: On the Frontlines of a Burning World, a book you released last year, and John, just blown away by the book really truly, just a fantastic piece. I think, you know, wildfires are such a defining feature of this epoch, this era we're in. I think yours and Katherine Blunt's California Burning are probably, I need to have Katherine on for sure, just really the standouts. But why don't we just start with, can you just talk about the book, what it's about, how long it took you to write it? Let's talk about Fire Weather first, please.
John Vaillant (02:42.926):
So I was working on a novel back in 2016. My head was not in fire. I was not even in Canada. And while I was away, Fort McMurray, Alberta, which is the petroleum hub of Canada, almost the Houston of Canada the center of the industry, caught on fire. A wildfire swept into town on May 3rd, 2016. That's still early spring in the subarctic, which is where Fort McMurray is. So there was ice on the lakes. There were car-sized blocks of ice on the river that flows through the city called the Athabasca River. But the temperature record for that day was broken by about eight degrees Fahrenheit. It went up into the low nineties, relative humidity was around 11 percent like Southern California, and an unstoppable fire swept into the city of Fort McMurray, driving the largest, most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times. People got out. No one was quite sure how many actually escaped, but about 80,000 people left.
The fire, meanwhile, stayed burning in the city limits for nearly a week straight, and it shut down the multi-billion-dollar Canadian petroleum, I should say, bitumen, industry for weeks and hobbled it for months.
Doug Lewin (03:57.59):
And it really is this kind of amazing crystallization, because you mentioned bitumen there, right? And we should probably talk about what that is. This is what is often referred to as tar sands, right? This is really oil that has to be it's not really oil, but has to be heavily, heavily refined. So just to give a sense of the setting and the context of this fire, can you talk a little bit about bitumen and Fort McMurray?
John Vaillant (04:23.374):
Sure. I mean, if the oil you know, the sweet crude that you're getting out of the Gulf of Mexico or out of Texas is rum, what you're getting out of the tar sands is molasses-soaked sand. And in order to turn that molasses-soaked sand into a bottle of rum, you have to melt the bitumen out of the sand, which requires billions of cubic feet of natural gas every day just to melt this stuff into something that will fit and flow through a pipeline. Then you need to dilute it with condensate, which is super volatile, super toxic, and then pump it basically a thousand miles south, 700 miles south to the US border to specially designed American refineries that can process ultra-heavy crude. So this crude is so heavy, it sinks in water. And we all know oil doesn't sink, it floats around. This stuff sinks to the bottom.
And so it makes oil spills, bitumen spills, almost impossible to clean up. And it's just a very, very energy intensive fuel. It almost doesn't make sense. And the business model is a very, very different one than you would use in Texas or that the Saudis would use. And it's a very particular animal that ends up being the most dirty, most expensive, most environmentally destructive petroleum product on earth.
Doug Lewin (05:48.864):
And the whole town basically exists to mine that, right? I mean, like there might've been a fort there before that, but like there's a hundred thousand people, I think roughly living there at the time of the fire less now, right? Because not everybody came back, but a hundred thousand people at the time. And it basically is a town that exists for this bitumen mining, correct?
John Vaillant (06:10.446):
Solely, solely to service bitumen mining. And I'm glad you used the verb mining because that is how they extract it. They use gigantic shovels and load them into 400-ton dump trucks that are the size of three-story houses. Then they have another method called SAGD where they pump superheated steam, again, heated by natural gas, into the bitumen deposit and melt the tar out and then suck it out, you know, basically with a giant straw, but it's still not like the way you would pump oil in Texas or the Gulf of Mexico. It's still this incredibly stubborn, dirty, full of heavy metals and other contaminants product. So it requires layers and layers of extensive and expensive and energy-intensive refining to turn it into something remotely sellable, really.
Doug Lewin (06:59.598):
And it's just, I think, a really important reminder that even those that are, and sometimes especially those that are working within the fossil fuel industry are not immune, obviously. They're like the rest of us to the sort of ravages of this extreme weather that's hitting us. So that's the setting. So it's like May 2016. Let's talk about the fire a little bit. I think this is, you know, obviously this is something that affected Alberta. But as you note in the book, California has had what's something, I think this stat was, something like 10 out of the worst 20 wildfires ever in the state have happened in the last few years. Texas, of course, just last year in 2024 had the largest wildfire in its history, the Smokehouse Creek fire. So while this is the story of one particular fire, obviously, the implications are much broader. But can you talk for a little bit about the fire itself and the magnitude of it?
John Vaillant (07:56.504):
So we have conditions that would be familiar to Texans years of drought, record high temperatures, excessively flammable, explosively flammable conditions. But again, we're in the boreal forest. So we're on a latitude the same as Alaska, but we're in northern Alberta. It's really wet up there. It's really the wettest biome on Earth, but it is drying out right now. And so we had two years of drought. We had El Niño. We had record spring temperatures, you know, breaking into the nineties when it's normally in the forties and frosting at night. And now we've got southern summer temperatures and you've got this rock bottom humidity. And so there were five different fires burning around Fort McMurray on May 1st. And, you know, water bombers were on it. Alberta has a very robust wildfire fighting program. Some of the best wildfire fighters in the world reside there.
But the conditions were so explosive that when the embers generated by the inevitable winds that come out of even a small wildfire started, you know, the embers started to fly, they didn't just land and fizzle and sputter. Each one turned into a new full-blown fire. So now you have this almost like imagine a drone swarm of incendiaries flying around. The wind shifted as predicted. By the way, just for the record, all the predictive data going months out was basically impeccable. It was clearly going to be an unusually volatile fire season, 2016, and the weather for early May was going to be exceptional. And the wind prediction predicted to blow into town at noon on May 3rd came to pass like clockwork. And when those embers started landing on houses and yards that were already bone dry, they didn't again just fizzle and sputter. They burst into flames and so by around 1:30 there was a wall of flame about 300 feet tall and six miles wide that basically kind of broke over the southwestern edge of Fort McMurray and just started consuming neighborhoods.
And I learned a lot about radiant heat this book took me seven years to write. I'm not a fire person, not even really a climate person. So I had a very steep learning curve. This was a very complex and dynamic situation. But from the very beginning, when it first made headlines and started being the chyron on the bottom of news shows around the world as Fort McMurray disappeared, it was clear that we were into something different and unusual. And the radiant heat coming out of this fire, the radiant heat is the heat that tells you not to touch the candle, it's invisible. It moves at the speed of light. The radiant heat coming out of this fire into Fort McMurray was about 900 degrees. So that's hotter than the planet Venus. And what that does is it desiccates everything in its path. Every single tree, every blade of grass, every garden is suddenly tinder dry. And not only that, as those excessive heats start hitting vinyl siding, tar shingles, plastic playground furniture, garbage cans, those are all made of hydrocarbons, which are in fact volatile. And when 900-degree radiant heat hits them, they start to off-gas and vaporize. And so by the time the fires landed, what you have is each neighborhood is essentially turned into kind of a gas can of volatile hydrocarbon vapor. So these houses did not catch on fire in the sense that we are used to. They exploded into flame.
And when firefighters started telling me, "These houses burnt from the roof to the foundation in six minutes," you know, my response was, "You know, dude, you know, adrenaline, you're talking to a journalist, you know, there's no way you're looking at your watch when this is happening." Well, I was wrong. And I interviewed a lot of different firefighters working in different parts of the city. I heard three minutes, I heard six minutes, I heard nine minutes. This is how fast these houses were actually burning down. So these are two-story, three quarter million dollar rich oil workers' houses. It's the highest income in Canada, by the way, in Fort McMurray. $200,000 a year per household is the average. And these houses that they had built were going into the basement in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. So this was a kind of supernatural energy and hyper-combustive situation that was sweeping the city from end to end. And so as I learned that, it was clear we're entering a new regime. And then when Stephen Pyne wrote about this same fire in Slate later in May 2016, and that's I'm pretty sure that's when he coined the term the Pyrocene Age, the age of fire. I call it 21st century fire, but it's the same thing. You talk to any wildfire fighter about what their experience was in 2000 and what their experience is now, and it's a different reality. Fire does different things. We saw that in Texas in the Smokehouse Creek fire. That fire became the biggest fire in Texas history in about four days. It killed a fire chief. We lost a fire chief. That is really unusual. He was a volunteer, but he'd been fighting that fire, I think, for five or six days. And I think he had a heart attack. It doesn't matter though, the mode of death, the fire, the stress of that fire, the intensity of that fire, the relentlessness of these fires does enormous physical and psychic damage to firefighters.
Doug Lewin (13:44.31):
Yeah. And this is the Lucretius problem, which I really just so appreciate you introducing that term into my vocabulary. We'll talk about that in just a second. You said 300 feet high, six miles wide. Did I hear that right? That's how big the fire was. So I want to, if you don't mind, John, I want to read you just a little, well, not read you, it's your writing, but read for the audience a little section of the book. So this is the Energy Capital podcast where I'm usually focused on energy and power grids and things like that. I think that this is highly relevant. Obviously the Smokehouse Creek fire started with some utility poles. There's all kinds of connections between wildfires and power sector. But the way you put this in power terms, I think our audience will particularly appreciate. So I'm going to read just a, well, it's not super short, but it also gives the audience a flavor of the writing, which again, I just think is phenomenal.
"Under normal circumstances, head fire intensity, fire's raw energy output, is measured in kilowatts per meter along the leading edge of the fire. One kilowatt is equivalent to the energy produced by ten, 100-watt bulbs or a thousand-watt space heater. Barring excessive wind, a fire of a thousand kilowatts, a million watts per meter, can be managed effectively by a ground crew. But once it jumps above two kilowatts per meter, or two megawatts per meter, even heavy machinery and water bombers may have trouble containing it.
By the time it intensifies to 10 megawatts per meter, 10,000 kilowatts per meter, 10,000 space heaters worth of energy per meter of fire, you have an out-of-control wildfire on your hands. Keeping in mind that a head fire intensity of 10,000 kilowatts per meter represents an uncontrollable fire, consider this, at its height, the Chisholm fire generated 225,000 kilowatts of energy per meter. That's 225 megawatts. That's a decent-sized power plant across a front that was described as miles wide. If you're having trouble imagining a quarter of a million space heaters compressed into the length of a yardstick and then multiplied by several miles, you're not alone. Six scientists from four countries who studied this fire had the same problem. We are beyond the normal scope of fire here. Familiar formulas no longer apply. This is the kind of energy that is not burned but vaporizes, energy more often associated with lasers, atom bombs, and suns."
I'm skipping ahead just a little bit. "For fires of this magnitude, we need a different scale of measurement. And in the end, the six authors of a peer-reviewed paper entitled 'The Chisholm Firestorm' resorted to megatons, the units of energy used to measure the explosive power of hydrogen bombs. The energy released during the fire's peak seven-hour run was calculated to be that of 17 one-megaton hydrogen bombs, or about four Hiroshima bombs per minute. This now is what fire is capable of on Earth."
That was kind of a, I had to put the book down after I read that, and like catch my breath. Stunning, absolutely stunning. You can react to that however you want and add in any additional detail. I'm wondering though, has there been one bigger since then? Is that the biggest recorded fire in the history of humanity?
John Vaillant (17:01.39):
So that was the Chisholm fire of 2001 that coincidentally also burned in Alberta, about 200 miles south of Fort McMurray. And it produced a pyrocumulonimbus fire column, which punctured the stratosphere and was mistaken by US military satellite data analysts for a nuclear test in the boreal forest of Canada. And they actually called Canadian authorities and said, "Did you just perform a nuclear test?" And they said, "What are you talking about?" "Well, we have this 45,000-foot-tall plume coming up out of the forest in Alberta. You know, what's up?" That's what it was. That was the Chisholm fire of 2001. So that to me is kind of the beginning. There were other big fires then, of course, but this one was sort of, with fanfare and a lot of charisma, welcome to 21st century fire. And so we have had bigger fires since then. And Fort McMurray was certainly a player. California has generated quite a few pyrocumulonimbus fire clouds. We can talk about that in more detail, but those are effectively firestorm systems that perpetuate themselves. And they were effectively unknown to fire science prior to 1998. The only place you would see gigantic lightning-generating plumes like that that would puncture the stratosphere is over huge volcanoes. Well, now wildfires can generate that same kind of energy. And so that's what we're seeing in California. I'm not positive the Smokehouse Creek fire generated a pyro CB, but Canada in 2023, that record fire season that turned New York City orange and basically changed the sunsets all the way to Europe through the summer of 2023, that was the worst fire season in Canadian history. Canada generated by itself 142 pyrocumulonimbus fire systems. And these were barely on the radar, so to speak, 20 years ago. So we're in a new world now.
Doug Lewin (19:13.72):
So to that point, we're in a new world now. I really think the Lucretius problem is a really great way to sort of characterize, I think, how we need to think about this. And this is one of the reasons I was so keen to talk to you about this, because I really do feel like, and we have obviously an experience of this now with the Smokehouse Creek Fire, but it's like each of these events, and frankly, even the flooding that happened just a week or two ago, right? You get these events that kind of push the limits of human understanding and even comprehension. So talk about the Lucretius problem. And then I want to actually dive into this for a little bit, because I really think that this is, at least for me, that was one of the big takeaways and kind of a central theme of the book is that we have got to reorient ourselves. And if we don't, the consequences are dire. So maybe start by describing the Lucretius problem that we get into talking about a little bit. What is it?
John Vaillant (20:10.392):
So Lucretius was a Roman poet and philosopher, lived about 2,000 years ago. And among his many observations were that people tend to base their assumptions about the future, not only on past experience, which is logical, but also on local experience. The distillation of that is "the fool thinks the biggest mountain in the world is the mountain that he himself has seen." In other words, I live out here in Vancouver. I'm looking at the coast range. There are about 5,000-foot-tall mountains. And it would be like me saying, "Well, these are the biggest mountains in the world," but we know the Rockies are just, you know, a thousand miles to the east of me. And then the Himalayas, you know, are even bigger. And so it's that kind of mindset. And I think firefighters and probably flood managers run into this too. It's like, "Well, we know this river. We know this forest. We had that really bad one back in '85 or that really big one back in '98. And so that's about as bad as it gets. And we've calibrated to be able to handle that." And what all the climate science is telling us and all the very hard-won physical experience is telling us is we are now entering a regime where floods, rain, drought, fire, storms in general can behave in ways that simply exceed or just blow through any past records that we're familiar with and will do so at a speed and with an intensity that we are physically unable to respond to in any meaningful way. And so the Lucretius problem pairs well with a futurist named Alex Steffen's term "discontinuity," which is scenarios wherein past experience and past knowledge cease to be effective.
And what we see though, especially with large institutional response, especially firefighting services and whatnot would be, well, they're designed to respond to 1998-size fire and flood, but we're now in the 21st century and fire is doing things that are simply outside that box. And we're still responding, kind of playing catch-up to this new reality. And also then when we see this new reality, there's a tendency to treat that as a freakish aberration rather than, the bar is actually moved and we need to respond accordingly and actually imagine something even bigger and even worse and even faster in order to have any hope of getting ahead of these disasters which are catching us off shore over and over again to devastating effect.
Doug Lewin (22:58.242):
Yeah, exactly. Imagine and then prepare for. And that's the really hard thing is because, you know, it's very hard to get people, because it's, it frankly costs money. It's expensive, right? To get a warning system, for instance, a river rising 26 feet in 45 minutes costs some money. And, you know, people will say, "Well, river can't rise that fast." Well, this is where we've got to imagine that 26 feet in 45 minutes, the next time it could be 26 feet in 30 minutes, right? I mean, the moisture that is falling out of the air because the temperature is warming, the firestorms that are happening, the droughts that are happening, even the heat waves, right? Heat waves for sure. Like that's another thing we've got to plan for. How much air conditioning demand do you need for your power grid? When you say, "Well, can't ever get hotter than 112." Really? It probably can, right? And then there's one that's a little bit more, the science is a little less certain on this, but it's what scientists will say is like medium confidence around ice storms, right? Texas had Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and 10 million people were without power for days. And I hear this all the time in power circles, like, "Oh, that was," as you just said, like a freakish aberration. Basically people will say those exact words. So we'll plan for a Winter Storm Elliott or 2011-style winter storm. We don't really need to think as much about Uri because that's probably never going to happen again. That's dead wrong. And to the Lucretius problem, there's no reason to think that the next winter storm won't even be worse. We have to not only imagine it, but prepare for it.
John Vaillant (24:34.666):
Exactly. And the science is all there. If you look at CO2 levels, which hit 430 parts per million for the first time in three million years this year, if you look at methane levels, which are rising even faster, I think, than CO2, we can extrapolate out where temperature is going to go and where storms will then follow. And so we really have to look at who benefits from inaction. And it's pretty clear in Texas who the beneficiaries are and, you know, that rugged individualism, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," put that to one side. And on the other side, look at excess deaths for the state over the past few years and track that through this current administration and just see where you are. You know, how there's a lot of dead, rugged individuals out there. And, you know, we understand about community and Texans understand about community and we keep each other alive. We take care of each other. And that's how a lot of people were saved from that terrible flood is because the community showed up.
Doug Lewin (25:41.26):
Yeah. Yeah. And to make sure that in the next flood, and this is where I think, John, this is really important, right? And I think one of the reasons why it's so just intriguing and fascinating, and I mean, what's the word? Almost like it's such an amazing coincidence of sorts that it happened in Fort McMurray is that the very fossil fuel interests that are trying to stop the reduction of emissions are being impacted as well. Maybe this is just the hopeful optimist inside me, but I'd like to think we get to a point where enough people even within that industry go, "Okay, look, we're going to continue to produce oil and gas, but we have to do so in a way that reduces emissions. We're being impacted too." Dare to dream.
John Vaillant (26:25.93):
Yeah, I think it is a dream. And I think as your Texan listeners may know, Alberta is really your twin, is the Canadian twin to Texas. And toxic libertarianism is alive and well in the province of Alberta and in the state of Texas. And you can really see it in the response to the Fort McMurray fire. The most expensive weather disaster in Canadian history. And their response was to rebuild the city exactly as it had been out of the same materials and expand bitumen production and refused to talk about climate or climate change. And you know, that status quo is lethal. And Fort McMurray was really lucky in that last fire, but that luck is going to run out. There have been numerous evacuations in Fort McMurray since then due to fire, because it's been almost 10 years, as well as devastating floods. So many of the same issues that Texas faces and is resistant to taking meaningful action are Alberta's reality too, and for many of the same reasons.
Doug Lewin (27:37.422):
Yeah, I think one of the areas where I think there is some, and we'll see, Texas is about to, by the time this podcast comes out, probably will have started a special session. The Texas legislature only meets every two years unless called by the governor. There's going to be 18 things on the call. The biggest headline item is going to be mid-decade redistricting, but one of the 18 items on the call is going to be disaster preparedness. And it's going to be very interesting to watch what the response is. Is it just a very localized solution where all they're going to do is fund a siren warning system on the one particular river, the Guadalupe River, and then kind of dust their hands and say, "We're done"? Or is there a much more comprehensive approach taken?
I'm curious, since you've written the book, or even in the process of writing the book, have you seen examples of places around the world where adaptation is really done well? Because I wrote an article a week or so ago and cited your book and Lucretius problem. I called it "failure to adapt." And I think that is one of the stories of just being alive as a human being anywhere in the world in 2025. We can talk about mitigation. We're clearly not doing what we need to do to reduce emissions. There's also this kind of parallel path of even if we brought emissions down to zero tomorrow, we've already baked a lot of the changes that are happening in, and the adaptation is just not keeping up. Do you have examples of places you've come across where you're like, "Here's a place that has really done the early warning system, has mastered evacuations," anything like that you can point to?
John Vaillant (29:21.526):
Yeah, there are a few different examples, and all this is with the caveat that we just can't underestimate the inertia of the status quo and the incentives, which is mostly petroleum-based, to maintain the status quo at really at all costs, including the cost of human lives. But there are communities in Canada and I think most notably in California where people are really managing, you know, what's called their "defensible space." And these are these concentric rings around a given value, which would be say a house or a school or a community, where people are really trying to manage the fuel load, thin out the forest, ideally create multiple escape routes. Because that's a real issue, especially in new developments. There's only one road out of these places. And if that road is blocked, could be by two T-boned escaping vehicles or could be by fire or fallen trees, you're trapped in there. You are literally in a fire trap. And so that killed a lot of people in Paradise, for one.
So it's very sporadic. You see some of it in building materials. So people are deploying metal roofs more often. There are lots of low-cost, easy-to-install external sprinkler systems that are basically modified garden sprinklers that will create a water curtain over your house. And that's really good for flying embers and small fire. Another example would be in what's called "fire smarting" up in Canada where, and I know they have that in some communities in the US, where firefighting service representatives will come out to your community, to your backyard, to your cul-de-sac, to your town meeting and talk to you about how to make your own home less flammable. So that would mean moving wood piles, taking down the wooden fence and putting up a metal one. There are a lot of different conduits for fire. And so what these firefighters can help you do and what I tried to do in Fire Weather is kind of invite the reader to look at the places where they live through the lens of fire. So how does fire take advantage of your spaces and in fire conditions, the mulch in your flower bed will turn into a fuse that can lead right to your house and set your porch on fire. A wooden fence can do the same thing. That beautiful juniper bush that you have growing outside the window that you meant to prune but never quite got around to it, so now it blocks the whole window, that thing will set your house on fire by itself.
Those are really explosively flammable torches. So this kind of thinking means for actually relatively little money, it will turn into a fuse that can lead right to your house and set your porch on fire. A wooden fence can do the same thing. That beautiful juniper bush that you have growing outside the window that you meant to prune but never quite got around to it, so now it blocks the whole window, that thing will set your house on fire by itself. Those are really explosively flammable torches. So this kind of thinking means for actually relatively little money, you can modify your space and probably reduce the flammability of your house and yard by probably double digit percentages. And that's not going to stop a firestorm, but there's a lot we can do when it's just embers and ash that are flying. But it means admitting that this is a possibility and that's hard to do to think, well, my house could actually burn down. And that's a psychological and emotional leap that a lot of us are resistant to making.
Doug Lewin (32:37.442):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's not like a fun topic. Nobody wants to think about this, but it's absolutely essential that we do. In Texas, you know, we've talked a little bit about Smokehouse Creek in the Panhandle, but the central part of the state, you know, basically from Dallas down to San Antonio, where a lot of the state's population lives, particularly west of the I-35 corridor, at various times can be a tinderbox. I mean, there's just a ton of cedar out there. I think various studies have put Austin and San Antonio and kind of the hill country, the same area that just flooded. So there's less risk right now because it just flooded. But in future years, when drought inevitably returns, those areas are some of the most fire prone in the country. And then you have, and you talk about this a lot in the book, the wildland urban interface. I want to talk about that a little bit where a lot of these suburbs and the exurbs are sort of growing into areas that used to be wildlands and kind of burn from time to time and are meant to do that, but now we suppress them. And so now you've kind of got these tinderbox areas with a whole bunch of homes in them. So I do think we've got to start thinking about this much more comprehensively, both from a community aspect. You mentioned the only one road out. There was actually a fire in a neighborhood in Northwest Austin called Steiner Ranch several years ago. Might've been 10 years ago now, where that was exactly the thing. There was one road out. There were arguments for years after that about punching another road through there to give people another way out. So we have to think comprehensively at like a community scale, those kinds of issues, and then also individually. Do you, I don't know, again, if you've come across in any point in the research for this book, I mean, this is almost an impossible question to ask, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Like, how do you get over like these, because really what we're talking about is there's the physical response, but there's like the bigger barrier, I think, is the psychological response, right? A, people don't want to talk about it, and B, even if they do want to talk about it, they're going to say, the biggest fire we ever had was this, so that doesn't look like that much of a problem.
John Vaillant (34:43.479):
Boy, I think we are very well defended psychologically. And then if you have a kind of a libertarian culture, for example, which is super independent minded and frankly, very reactive, you know, we'll deal with the problem when it comes. And then you, if you add very deep religious faith, you know, that, you know, God's going to cover me here, that can make it a lot harder to look squarely at the science and look squarely at things that are hard to see. Temperature is invisible, but it really impacts our reality. Off gassing, vinyl siding, and tar shingle and mattresses, it's invisible, but it will turn your house into a bomb. And if you want to see a really graphic example of that, Underwriters Laboratories has a video on YouTube comparing an old fashioned sort of grandma living room with cotton and wool and horsehair stuff sofa with the modern living room, which is all polyurethane and laminates, and they set them both on fire the same way. The grandma's living room takes 25 minutes to become uninhabitable. The modern living room explodes like a refinery fire at three minutes and 20 seconds. Three minutes and 20 seconds, and the room blows up. And it blows up because the heat from that fire that's burning in the sofa, starts the cushions off gassing, which starts the synthetic carpet off gassing, which starts the nylon curtains off gassing. So even before they ignite, they're just filling the room with flammable vapor that reaches a certain density and blows up. It is shocking to watch. And that's where most of us live now. You got three minutes.
Doug Lewin (36:40.052):
It's heavy stuff. I want to talk about a couple other things here. Number one, you mentioned that, you know, we haven't reached 420 parts per million in the last three million years. There's been a lot. I think it originated with a Joe Rogan comment a couple of weeks ago where he had a Washington Post chart up. We can try to find this and drop it into the show notes, but it went back like, you know, a half a billion years and says, well, you know, actually 420 isn't that uncommon for the history of the earth. But I think it's important to remind people humans, even hominids, pre-humans, have only existed for a few million years. We're in that like Goldilocks zone of climate that has now been changed. And 500 million years ago, it doesn't matter that much to us. Like it's two and three million years that we've existed.
John Vaillant (37:29.442):
Yeah, and I don't agree with Joe Rogan on all that many things, but I think we can certainly agree that through the lifespan of planet Earth, the past couple billion years, there have been some very high CO2 levels. What makes this era unique is the speed with which it has happened. So there's no other era in the history of planet Earth where CO2 and methane rose at the precipitous rate that it is doing in our era, and that is directly attributable to the combustion of fossil fuels. And so that is just a different scenario that we have created. Most geologic change, with the exception of a meteorite impact, happens very gradually over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. We are doing this in decades. All of us, most of us listening to this podcast, can remember normal winters and normal summers. So in our lifetimes, basically in the past 50 years, we've seen extraordinary changes to our environment so that spring, summer, winter and fall are behaving in ways that would not have been recognizable to us or even conceivable to us when we were 10 years old. And that has never happened before. And we did that. And that is, it's hard to take responsibility for that, especially if you're from a petroleum driven province like Alberta or a petroleum driven state like Texas. And somehow we have to be able to quantify and show gratitude for the gifts that petroleum has given us, which are too many to number. But even now, those gains are being taken away from us by another byproduct, another unmeasured externality of this petroleum well. And that is CO2. And that's the hard math we have to do.
Doug Lewin (39:29.282):
Yeah, for sure. And this is interesting. I obviously live in Texas. I work in Texas. I work within energy in Texas. So I do talk to a lot of folks very regularly that work within and for fossil fuels. I do think there is a pretty high awareness at the individual level of what is going on with extreme weather and rising emissions and the change of our climate at the institutional level, it's much, much slower. You talk in the book, and you called this, I think I captured this correctly, is a direct quote, the most consequential policy reversal in the history of human civilization, the American Petroleum Institute's decision to leave the climate task force many, many years ago. Can you talk about that? You talk about that a lot in the book and why you think that's the most consequential policy reversal?
John Vaillant (40:26.796):
Yeah, in so doing, we can give a shout out to the petroleum industry. Petroleum is why we get to live the lives we're living right now, why we have the mobility that we have, the wealth that we have. Countless products that we have now are thanks to that industry. And they are very good at what they do. They also have very good scientists. And when CO2 level rise became measurable in the 1950s, thanks to Charles Keeling, who came out of Caltech with some new equipment that enabled him to do that, enabled us to do that. The petroleum industry earnestly, with good intention, got concerned, got interested, because they knew that fossil fuel emissions contain a lot of CO2, coal does, gas does, oil burning. So they studied it. And they studied it with the same zeal and skill with which they studied other aspects of the petrochemical industry. And they discovered in the late 70s, actually earlier, that fossil fuel anthropogenic CO2 had the potential to alter the climate in very destructive, possibly irreversible ways.
So they knew this in the 1970s and 80s, and the evidence hadn't shown up yet. The temperature hadn't risen enough to prove the theory, but they gamed it out. And if you look at their graphs of volume of CO2 generated by a naturally growing fossil fuel industry through the 90s through the 2000s into the 21st century and where temperatures would be and where CO2 levels would be, they're spot-on for 2025 and they figured that out almost 50 years ago. So they predicted almost 50 years ago where we would be today. And that's why people say Exxon knew, Shell knew. They didn't know in the sense that the temperature hadn't got there yet, but they had good scientists and they used the scientific method to predict this. So fast forward to 1982, 84, there's an oil glut. There is a lot of depression. I think there's a recession going on at that time. The oil industry is really struggling and the API makes this decision to basically disavow the science. It would be too costly to the industry to respond in a meaningful way to the CO2 generated by the fossil fuel industry. Because if we think about it, at root, the fossil fuel industry is a fire industry. And if you're in the fire industry, you're in the CO2 industry. And as they demonstrated with their excellent science, if you're in the CO2 industry, you're in the climate change industry. They understood that and leaders at the top, you know, who have names, made the decision to say we're not gonna go down that path and we're going to deny that this is an issue and we're going to distract and obfuscate. And that's where this notion of the merchants of doubt came in. They used many of the same methods that the cigarette industry used.
And so we still live in that world now and we're paying increasingly heavy consequences in human lives and human jobs and human quality of life for this intensifying heat and fire and weather disaster. So this is all traceable. And right now, if you're interested, the American Petroleum Institute, the API, is trying to pass legislation that would reduce protections for oil workers in hot climates, in dangerously hot conditions. So it's a ruthless entity. And while individuals who work in that industry may be lovely people and contributing to their community in all kinds of ways, the organism that will stop at nothing to survive and that will stop at nothing to appease shareholders and squeeze every last dollar out of the industry before we tip over into renewables has no conscience. And that's what we've seen for the past 50 years. And we're suffering.
Doug Lewin (44:39.33):
There is, I think, a sort of a thread of hope here in the sense that there could be bigger business opportunities with lower emissions, particularly when you think about global markets and how fast they are moving. Asia and Europe, you know, the United States is, you know, huge and a behemoth, but we are, you know, at the end of the day, part of a bigger world. And I think that that is where some of the change, maybe not at the API level, but within some of their member companies is coming from. I think there's two things. One, while their organizations, as you say, act differently, the individuals are people and have families and kids and grandkids and nephews and nieces and look at that and say, what kind of a world are we leaving them? We have a responsibility. That's not enough, right? But when it matches up with, maybe there's a market opportunity here to market a low emission fuel, to get into using oil and gas experience in the geothermal industry or capturing carbon and storing it or any number of these different sort of potentials.
That's where I think there might be something. And I think John and I, I'm curious what you think about this and this might be a good place to end. I mean, there's so much more to be said about this. But there is this long history, which is really tragic, of an industry as a whole really, as you say, obfuscating, really sowing doubt and sort of intentionally misleading. Here we are in 2025. We are seeing the impacts in fires and droughts and floods and heat waves. I am more interested in what people do from this point going forward than I am in the past. The past matters. We can't whitewash it. We're talking about it. It's important for people to understand that history. But what matters to me right now is what people do going forward. That's what I'm watching.
John Vaillant (46:40.75):
Yeah, I'm with you 100 percent on that, Doug. And unfortunately, who's owning the future is China. And I'm surprised that this doesn't sort of gall that competitive American spirit. I know Americans are fighters, are competitors, are inventors, super creative people. And yet China now is running away with the renewables industry, is running away with the EV market. And Ford is content to, you know, offer an F-150 Lightning, but is leaning hard on gas powered F-150 pickup trucks, which is a 20th century vehicle that has no relevance or real utility in the future that most of us would like to inhabit, which is one that has some kind of stable climate. And the F-150 is not contributing to that. And that's a super popular truck. Ford sells a million of them and American oil companies are happy to gas them up, but that is not where the future is.
Right now, China is installing more than a... So a gigawatt of energy will power roughly 750,000 to a million homes. And China is installing maybe one and a half or two gigawatts of renewable energy every day in that country. And the EV market, BYD and four or five other electric vehicle companies that none of us can pronounce has run away globally with the EV industry. They are stealing the 21st century from us in terms of energy. And who controls the energy really controls everything dependent on that energy. It has been oil. Oil has owned it for 150 years. They are not gonna own it for the next 150 years. And no one is saying, ban oil, but we need to respond meaningfully. We need to look at the writing on the wall, not the wall that's just in Texas, but look globally. And that's where the current regime is really hobbling us. It's no time to take a provincial stance. It's no time to be kind of willfully protectionist and not respond to the needs of the rest of the world, which are one, a need for a stable climate and reducing CO2, and also for the incredible abundance and opportunity offered by renewables now.
Solar is the cheapest energy ever invented, and battery technology is in its nascent. It's exploding right now. And so the possibility of having a stable renewable grid is well within grasp, and this is where Texas is actually a leader in the country. I think you're installing, Texas is installing more renewable energy than even California. So this is again where that independent mindedness and hardworking horse sense of Texas can really take advantage of the future and be a leader.
Doug Lewin (49:48.49):
And competitiveness, John, right? Because this is the future. Like, you know, the Financial Times called China "the world's first electro state," right? The idea that they're going to control the supply chain on electricity should be scary to Americans, particularly those that are worried about China dominating the 21st century. The world is going to want these low emission products and services. We should be using American ingenuity and innovation to compete. And particularly Texas, Texan innovation and ingenuity. And like you said, oil has provided so many advances. I think a lot of times in discussions around climate change that is left out. And I think that's very off-putting to folks within the oil and gas industry. They don't think of themselves as bad people. And like you said, they're active within their communities, their identities of good people. And they're like, hey, we're trying to provide something the world needs. Granted, the world has needed and continues to need oil and gas.
Where there are alternatives that are lower emission, we should use them. Where there aren't, we should reduce emissions as much as possible, right? And that is the formula for competitiveness, because the world is going to demand these products. China sees this, and it's stunning to me that American leadership doesn't really seem to get this, at least yet. John, I'm going to give you a chance. I'll ask you in just a second, if there's anything I should have asked you that I didn't that you want to add. But I will just say to the audience again, I said at the beginning, I'll say it here at the end, this book is just remarkable. And no matter what your belief system is or what your background is, like read this book. I actually don't think it is primarily a climate change book. I don't know how you think of it, but it is a book about a fire in a place. And no matter what your beliefs are, I think you will read it. It is a page turner. You know, usually people think of page turners as fiction. This is one of those great non-fiction works that just keeps you from putting the book down. So kudos on a great book. And is there anything else you want to add in closing?
John Vaillant (51:50.146):
Well, thank you, Doug. I really appreciate that. And I, you know, I think one reason the book does resonate is I spent a lot of time talking to firefighters and people on the ground. You know, it's not climate scientists' opinions of what happened. It's the experience of people who actually went through this and lived it. And that gives it a kind of credibility. And the other thing I would say is CO2 and methane will not wait for us to get our act together. They will keep rising and they will keep intensifying weather behavior. And so it really behooves us to take note of the science, take note of CO2 and methane, and recognize that it doesn't care if we flood or burn or flourish. It really doesn't matter to those gases. And we have it in our power to moderate the increase of them. And if we allow them to increase rapidly, as rapidly as they have been, we are going to have a world that is increasingly difficult to live in and that our children will be increasingly unable to flourish in or even envision a future in. And so that's where we can have our opinions and our feelings about our modes of energy, but the science doesn't lie and the science doesn't wait.
Doug Lewin (53:10.378):
And a different path is possible. Like we can reduce emissions. We can get better at adaptation. We totally. We're going to have to. John, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
John Vaillant (53:21.048):
Really a pleasure to speak with you and I'm so glad that it was worth the wait, I hope. I really enjoyed it.
Doug Lewin (53:27.054):
Absolutely it was. Absolutely. Thanks, John.
John Vaillant (53:29.464):
Yeah, take care Doug.
Doug Lewin (53:31.65):
Thanks for tuning in to the Energy Capital Podcast. If you got something out of this conversation, please share the podcast with a friend, family member or colleague and subscribe to the newsletter at douglewin.com.
That's where you'll find all the stories where I break down the biggest things happening in Texas energy, national energy policy, markets, technology policy. It's all there. You can also follow along on LinkedIn. You can find me there and on Twitter @douglewinenergy, as well as YouTube @DougLewinEnergy. Please follow me in all the places. Big thanks to Nathan Peavey, our producer, for making these episodes sound so crystal clear and good, and to Ari Lewin for writing the music. Until next time, please stay curious and stay engaged. Let's keep building a better energy future. Thanks for listening.
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