John Vaillant on How Fossil Fuel Extraction Intensifies Wildfire

KQED's Forum

KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather” chronicles a devastating wildfire that struck Fort McMurray, Alberta in May 2016. It forced more than 85,000 people to flee their homes, inflicted billions of dollars in damage to the Canadian oil industry and continues to serve as a warning in our increasingly flammable world. Vaillant lays out the linked histories of North America’s fossil fuel industry and its rapidly changing climate – with sidebars that explain the science behind petroleum products, recap two centuries of industrial development and explore the economic and environmental tensions in modern oil boom towns. We’ll speak with Vaillant about the lessons that fire-prone regions, including California, can learn from the devastation of Fort McMurray. And we’ll hear from you: Has your sense of fire awareness changed over time? How so? Guests: John Vaillant, journalist; author, "Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World," which was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His other books include "The Tiger" and "The Golden Spruce." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:33.3	From KQED.
0:49.7	The From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, this is Forum.
0:52.7	I'm Mina Kim.
0:53.8	Once again, wildfires this summer in
0:55.6	California have forced people to leave their homes, darkened our skies with smoke and ash,
1:00.2	and we brace for more fires to come. While we know climate change is driving larger, more intense,
1:05.2	and more destructive wildfires, we don't often hear how that's happening and what fire is doing.
1:10.7	In his acclaimed book Fire Weather, John Valiant examines the causes and consequences of the megafires we're seeing through the story of Fort McMurray,
1:18.9	the oil boomtown in Alberta's Boreal Forest that burned so intensely in 2016, it generated its own weather system and prompted the biggest single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.
1:29.6	Valiant shares the lessons California can learn from Port McMurray. Join us.
1:36.6	Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. In Canada this week, visitors and residents of Jasper National Park have been ordered to evacuate
	...

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