The Science of Wildfires + Why Cybertrucks Are Bad for Cities

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The Amber Mac Show on Canada Talks, SiriusXM 167

**Jeff MacArthur** (0:10)
Hello and welcome to a midsummer special episode of The Amber Mac Show. Amber's taking a much deserved break this week, but she'll be joining us through two previously aired video interviews she conducted on topics that resonate as much today as they did when they originally aired.
Later in the show, Amber's going to talk with urban planning thought leader Brent Toderian on managing change as our cities evolve, from bike lanes to cyber trucks and beyond. But first up, as hundreds of wildfires burn out of control in the US and Canada, recently resulting in Toronto, New York and Washington DC having some of the worst air quality levels in the world, we've got John Vaillant, the author of best-selling book Fire Weather, to explain why this is happening and what the future holds for our warming planet. Here's Amber's interview.

**Amber Mac** (0:58)
John, thank you so much for joining me today.

**John Vaillant** (1:00)
Really good to be with you.

**Amber Mac** (1:02)
You coined a term in the book called the 21st century fires. What exactly does this mean?

**John Vaillant** (1:09)
Well, it means a few things.
I think a number of fire scientists and climate scientists are all recognizing that we're entering a new era. Stephen Pyne, kind of the eminence Grease, the granddaddy of fire science, calls it the pyrocyn age. But 21st century fire is basically bigger, faster, hotter, more destructive, harder to suppress.

**Amber Mac** (1:32)
Before we talk about the book a little bit further, I know one thing that you do in the setup to this story is talk about a bit of the history of Fort McMurray. How did this place come to be this center that it's known as today?

**John Vaillant** (1:47)
Yeah, the first big extraction project in Canada was beaver furs, and the Athabasca River, Northern Alberta, that region had what were considered to be in the 18th century, the finest beaver pelts in the country, which is saying something.
The numbers of beavers that came out of there, including through the trading post at Fort McMurray, which was founded 150 years ago, in 1870, 175 years ago, were legendary, you know, tens of hundreds of thousands of pelts were taken out of there by hand, you know, killed by hand and then transported by canoe back to Montreal and then shipped to the UK and Europe for hat manufacturing. So that, as those traders discovered these seeps of bitumen and also little bubblings up of natural gas. And they had no idea what the value of those things would be, but they took note and later, petroleum prospectors returned to that area and started trying to extract it. And it's really one of the most difficult projects undertaken by Canadian extractors. There was an enormous amount of US help, and now it's consolidating back into mostly Canadian-owned companies, but those Canadian companies have a lot of foreign ownership. So it's really kind of an international project.

**Amber Mac** (3:16)
It's interesting when I was starting to read your book. I suppose that I wanted to believe that the destruction wasn't as intense as it actually was. But when you read about these early days in Fort McMurray and the upheaval of entire forests and the machinery that they're using to dig up these amazing trees that are hundreds and hundreds of years old. I mean, that is something that I wonder today. Could that even happen in the context of so much social media around and people paying attention? But it feels to me like it was a time where did people just turn a blind eye to what was taking place?

**John Vaillant** (3:55)
Amber, people are turning a blind eye right now.
The forest is still being cleared. The river is still being polluted. The huge tailings ponds that cover many, many square miles of destroyed forest are still expanding. It's around a thousand square miles of forest have been totally destroyed, cleared off, stripped out and mined.
And the tailings ponds which are basically hold effluent from this melting, diluting, upgrading process that is, again, incredibly energy intensive to the tune of billions of cubic feet of natural gas every day, every week, being burned in order to simply to liquefy and separate this bitumen from the sand. This is ongoing to this day, productive even after the fire which shut this, evacuated the city, the largest, most rapid evacuation due to fire in modern times and shut down this multi-billion-dollar industry for many weeks. They've now expanded since then and they've built the city back exactly the way it was before and on they go. So this is not something that's in the past. It's not from a less enlightened time. It's still going and still has ambitious plans to grow even bigger.