TPT July 2016

G LOBA L MARKE T P L AC E

While acknowledging the difficulty of pinning a particular disaster on climate change, Ms Kolbert asserted that in the case of Fort McMurray “the link is pretty compelling.” In Canada, and also in the US and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Ten million acres burned in the US in 2015, the largest area of any year on record. And according to the US Forest Service, the situation is worsening. A Forest Service report cited by Ms Kolbert declares that “climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970.” Over the past three decades, the area destroyed each year by forest fires has doubled in the US, and scientists with the service project a likely doubling again by mid-century. A study of lake cores from Alaska, to compile a record of forest fires over the past ten thousand years, found that blazes were both unusually frequent and unusually severe in recent decades. The scientists’ judgment: “a unique regime of unprecedented fire activity.” › All of this, Ms Kolbert wrote, brings us to what one commentator referred to as ‘the black irony’ of the fire that has destroyed most of Fort McMurray.” In what does the irony lie? “The town exists to get at the tar sands, and the tar sands produce a particularly carbon-intensive form of fuel.” She further suggested that the bitter opposition aroused by the Keystone XL pipeline project centred on whether the US should be encouraging – “or, if you prefer, profiting from” – the exploitation of the tar sands. (Keystone XL is the TransCanada Corp pipeline, blocked by President Barack Obama in November 2015, that would have transported tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries in Texas and Illinois, and to a distribution centre in Oklahoma.) As to the finger-pointing deplored in advance by Prime Minister Trudeau, Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist who is a Green Party member of British Columbia’s provincial legislature, observed, “The reality is we are all consumers of products that come from oil.” › This is true enough; but it would be a mistake to permit the apocalyptic images from Fort McMurray to fade too quickly. Writing from Calgary in the London Review of Books (“Canada Burning,” 9 May), Ben Jackson took note of one observer’s contempt for “sanctimonious eco-trolls” who celebrate the town’s misfortune. Mr Jackson denied the existence of more than a few such people; but he also asserted an imperative to identify the causes of the conflagration – all of them. “Now may be the wrong time to discuss [climate change],” he wrote, acknowledging the difficulty of drawing firm conclusions from patterns and statistics. “But, since disasters like the Fort McMurray fire can’t be blamed directly on climate change, there may never be a right time.” In the wake of a 60 per cent slide in oil prices since mid-2014, an “avalanche” of bankruptcies in the US industry The rout in crude prices “is snowballing into one of the biggest avalanches in the history of corporate America,” according to Maritime Executive . The Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based

Oi l & gas The burning of Canada’s For t McMurray, gateway to the world’s largest oil sands reserve, leaves ashes and questions “Any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster, I think there’s a bit of a shortcut that can sometimes not have the desired outcome.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking at a news conference on 5 May, was warning that to raise environmental concerns in the midst of a large-scale human tragedy is to risk the charge of insensitivity. And while the fast-moving forest fire that erupted on 1 May, forcing the evacuation of virtually the entire 90,000-strong population of Fort McMurray in Alberta, yet raged, the emphasis had to be on containment and on salvaging whatever might remain of the town some 400 miles north of Calgary. But neither Mr Trudeau nor anyone else could prevent the emergence of a subtext, overt or implicit, in media coverage of an event that one Canadian official described as “catastrophic”, another as a “multi-headed monster.” And when the immediate emergency subsided the question would have to be faced: to what extent can Fort McMurray’s sole industry – the extraction of oil from bituminous deposits, which emit higher carbon emissions than conventional sources – be blamed for its destruction? Staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker would not wait to consider the matter – nor to place it squarely in a broader environmental context. In “Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change” (5 May), she sketched the history of the town on both sides of the Athabasca River in Canada’s near north, whose population tripled during the 1970s and nearly tripled again in the time since. All this growth, she noted, has been fuelled by a single activity: working the Florida-sized formation known as the tar sands. When the price of oil was high, Ms Kolbert wrote, “There was so much currency coursing through Fort McMurray’s check- cashing joints that the town was dubbed ‘Fort McMoney.’” How the Fort McMurray fire started is still unknown, but there is no mystery as to why it raged out of control so quickly as to consume, at this writing, 1,600 houses and other buildings. The province of Alberta experienced an unusually dry and warm winter. Rainfall was low, about half of the norm, and what snow there was melted early. April was exceptionally mild, with temperatures in the seventies, and on 3 May a high temperature of 91° Fahrenheit was registered in Fort McMurray – about 30° higher than the normal regional maximum for that month. (According to Canadian government climate data the previous record of 82°F was set in 1945.) T HE ‘ BLACK IRONY ’ OF THE FIRE “You hate to use the cliché but it really was kind of a perfect storm,” Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

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J ULY 2016