Fire Weather

According to the energy historian Vaclav Smil, every gallon of gasoline represents roughly one hundred tons of marine biomass, principally algae or phytoplankton, that has gone through an inconceivably long crushing, cooking, and curing process deep underground.

Nobody tracks the incidence and costs of natural disasters as closely as insurance companies. In so doing, they provide us with some of the most objective and reliable data on the impacts of climate change and its accelerating severity.

Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than six hundred horsepower as she draws a six-ton trailer at sixty miles an hour while talking on the phone and drinking coffee, in gym clothes on a frigid winter day. Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or a pharaoh could have summoned such power, and its equiv

Despite being virtually unknown outside of Canada and the petroleum industry, Fort McMurray has become, in the past two decades, the fourth-largest city in the North American subarctic after Edmonton, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. In terms of overtime logged and dollars earned, it is, without a doubt, the hardest-working, highest-paid municipality on t

Forensic analysis of the scene on Buenaventura concluded that the tornado’s wind speed was somewhere between 140 and 165 miles per hour, and that “peak gas temperatures likely exceeded 2,700°F”—the melting point of steel.

Dissonance (if you are interested) leads to discovery. —William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Since roughly 2000, an inversion has begun: the world’s great terrestrial carbon sinks—the Amazon rain forest and the circumboreal forest, along with many other less famous forest systems around the world—have become net carbon emitters. In other words, what used to be a reliable source of carbon storage is now generating more CO2 than it is seques

A bitumen mine is not a place you would let your child play, but it is excavated using equipment familiar to any four-year-old conversant in Tonka technology—and with a similar grandiosity of ambition. In order to access the bitumen, the forest above it must first be removed. In industry parlance, this living material is referred to as “overburden,

In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience. Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with twenty-five thousand petroleum-infused boxes and