Rising forty thousand feet into the stratosphere, the plume’s colossal umbra lowered average temperatures by several degrees, caused birds to roost at midday, and created weird visual effects as it circled the Northern Hemisphere, including widespread reports of lavender suns and blue moons.

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

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

“At a single stroke,” crowed Richfield’s boosters, Project Oilsand could “double the world’s petroleum reserves.”

Reckoning with the negative aspects of oil and gas is a responsibility that duplicitous marketing, short-term governance, superb engineering, and a certain amount of willful blindness have enabled us to keep at bay for a century. In addition to being extraordinarily flammable, petroleum is lethally toxic, both in its liquid and vapor forms. In ligh

It has been said that helicopters don’t fly; they beat the air into submission. The same can be said of the effort required to turn bitumen back into a usable, marketable fuel.

If all of Alberta’s pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator. Some of these pipelines are four feet in diameter, and much of the petroleum flowing through them is extracted using unconventional methods like fracking, steam-assisted gravity drainage, and

a fire service pilot estimated head fire heights at a hundred yards, and a number of victims perished in their cars, overtaken by flames even as they fled at highway speed. But there was another killing energy released by those fires that moved even faster—at the speed of light. So otherworldly were the fire conditions on Black Saturday that animal

while floods generally follow rivers, and hurricanes follow weather patterns in specific parts of the ocean, fire can occur anywhere there’s fuel, and fire’s menu is astonishingly broad, including virtually everything under the sun save dirt, rock, metal, and water. Furthermore, the paths fire takes are determined almost exclusively by the wind, wh