Forest Fires in the Northeast? The New Realities of Climate Change

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, the annual climate summit wrapped up in Baku, Azerbaijan over the weekend after much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the amount rich polluting nations should be paying poorer nations to decarbonize and mitigate their climate crises. The deal struck was about a quarter of what they had asked for. This COP29 in oil producing Azerbaijan follows last year’s in the UAE, also a petro state, but which hammered out a landmark commitment to transition away from fossil fuels. But Saudi Arabia has been lobbying to derail that commitment ever since, and hopes that Donald Trump’s return to the White House will help, given his drill, baby, drill policies and his cabinet picks filled with industry execs and deregulators. But as wildfires spread across North America with increasing frequency, the dissonance between that harsh reality and climate policy is being felt. Author John Vaillant details this in his recent New York Times opinion piece, and he’s joining Hari Sreenivasan in this discussion.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. John Vaillant, thanks so much for joining us. You know, Americans and I guess North Americans in general are used to seeing almost now a forest fire season, and we associated with say, California or maybe Colorado. You wrote a piece in The New York Times recently that said, ladies and gentlemen, the Northeast is burning. Why is this significant? What’s the change here?

JOHN VAILLANT, AUTHOR, “FIRE WEATHER”: I think what we’re seeing is this creeping of flammability and like so many other Americans and Canadians, we assumed 10 years ago that wildfires were a California problem, maybe a Colorado problem, maybe an Australia problem. But I live in British Columbia, and that’s a technically a rain forest. And we’ve been having terrible fire seasons for the past decade. And so, I saw it creeping northward up into Oregon, up into Washington, up into B.C. And so, logically, you’d think, OK, this is still moving. And I think in the northeast, where I grew up, where — you know, very familiar landscape to me, we’ve had this sort of sense, well, we won’t be touched by that. You know, that’s a western thing, it’s an Australian thing, but we were nice and wet here. It’s cool and green. And yet, this trend in heating, warming and drying across the continent is spreading steadily and measurably. If you talk to foresters, if you talk to forest hydrologists, they, you know, have the inside scoop on that. And so, they’re not surprised by this. But the United States right now is in the driest year in recorded drought history for the entire country.

SREENIVASAN: You know, help our audience distinguish in their minds what might be weather versus what might be climate, right, because right now, as we’re having this conversation, I’m doing this from New York City, and we just experienced one of the longest dry spells. We’re starting to see all of this from this kind of month and a half, say, without rain. But help us put that into perspective that it’s maybe not just this year or this cycle, what are the longer trend lines?

VAILLANT: So, there are this kind of two tracks that we’re on. And one is natural climate fluctuation. You have warm years and cold years, you have snowy winters, you have dry winters, but then you also have — and so that’s natural to see fluctuation there. On top of that though, we have, you know, fossil fuel emission driven climate change, which is measurably heating the atmosphere and the oceans. And so, that is this extra push from behind. And so, what we’re seeing now is, you know, record temperatures. It’s certainly warmer than normal in the northeast. And, you know, think about your laundry outside on a warmer day, your laundry is going to dry faster. Well, so is the forest floor, so are the grasses. But the other thing, when you look at it globally, it’s not just the northeast that has low reservoirs. The Mackenzie River, one of the great rivers of the Canadian North, is right now at record low levels. There are huge lakes in the Canadian Subarctic, really inland seas, that are at record low levels. The Amazon River is at a record low level. So, this is a global issue. And when you have warmer air, you’re going to have more evaporation.

SREENIVASAN: What is so unseasonable about this? What is it, you know, about this that is so out of the ordinary that even our bodies feel like there’s something off?

VAILLANT: I know I grew up in Massachusetts and I remember snow flurries in October. And I sound like an old man saying that, but I don’t think anybody of any age remembers mass — you know, hundreds of wildfires burning up and down the I-95 Corridor. You know, that is not anybody’s diary, you know, from the past. And so, we really are going through this visible measurable change and we’re feeling it in our bodies. It’s changing our concept of what the seasons are. And so, now out west, people’s concept of summer rather than being this time of kind of liberty and freedom and being outside and the sun and the warmth, is when’s the smoke going to roll in, you know, when am I going to have to stay inside because it’s too smoky? And again, for, say, people in British Columbia or Washington State, that is just not a reality that any of us grew up with. And so, we’re — you know, our consciousness is being sort of forced into this new concept of what seasons even mean. And that creates a real dissonance. I mean, if you think about it, you know, we’ve been around for a long time, not just in North America, but, you know, as homo sapiens on Earth, and we’ve never had to go through a change this rapid where, you know, in a decade or two, we’re actually having to almost redefine what seasons are.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you wrote a fascinating book called “Fire Weather.” And in it you describe — going to the fire that was in 2016 in Alberta, Canada. But one of the things that you mentioned in there is that essentially now fires are burning over at longer seasons and with greater intensity than any other time in human history. I mean, why is that?

VAILLANT: All right. there are a couple of factors. And one of them — you know, the simplest one is the heat that we’re generating. So, I mean, what the irony is that our economy, our civilization is powered by fire. We think about oil and gas as energy, but it does not become energy until we burn it. So, we are burning literally trillions of fires around the globe in our engines, in our furnaces, in our hot water heaters, in our stoves globally, there’s a huge amount of fire and also emissions coming off of all of those fires. So, that’s impacted the atmosphere in terms of CO2 and methane, making the whole planet hotter. And the irony is that makes the planet more conducive to burning. And so, you couple that then with 100 years of very successful fire suppression, especially in North America. So, now, you have these huge buildups in the forest, including, you know, in the northeast, which, you know, was logged off 150 years ago. There’s a lot more forests there now. But with these elevated temperatures, it’s — and more evaporation, you have drier forest and it’s easier for fires to get going. And so, in Fort McMurray, that this — the petroleum hub of Canada, which is 600 miles north of the Montana border in the Subarctic, it was 93 degrees. There was still ice on the lakes, it was 93 degrees and the relative humidity that day, May 3, 2016, was 12 percent, which is equivalent to Death Valley in the month of July. And so, we’re having these conditions that create opportunities for fire that we’ve really hardly ever seen before.

SREENIVASAN: There were, in the fire that you’re talking about, 88,000 people that were evacuated, right? And when you see images of fire approaching different communities, especially in the United States, you see this sort of mix of reactions. Some people are like, I can’t wait to get out. Oh, my gosh, I’m stuck in traffic. This is horrible. I don’t want to die here, right? And then there’s other people, similar to a hurricane, who end up trying to hunker down and trying to say, this is my really, really precious home, whatever, I’m going to stand here with a fire hose. What explains how this affects people in figuring out their kind of personal relationship to fire, the environment, their belongings?

VAILLANT: Hari, this — I really think this is sort of the question for our decade. You know, it’s one of the big questions as fire impinges on our communities more intensely because it burns faster and more intensely now because of heat and, you know, The Journal, in fact, made that their cover story, the changing nature of wildfire and how fast it moves. And so, many people who live in fire prone places, especially out west, have a kind of outdated notion of fire and what they might do to combat it. And now, fires are moving faster and with such intensity, so they can project radiant heat of close to 1,000 degrees. You know, a human can’t survive that. But what if your home is uninsured or what if you live on a ranch, and, you know, your grandfather fought fires and your mom fought fires? And so, you’re going to too, except now it’s 110 degrees. And the relative humidity is in the single digits. And so, this fire is now — it’s not just going to be a fire on the land, it’s going to be a firestorm rolling over you. And yet, there’s this — you know, I think there’s a natural stubbornness and wish to protect what’s ours. But again, if you don’t have the means to replace it, if you don’t have insurance, which fewer and fewer Americans have now, that’s going to change your calculus. So, there’s a few different factors, but some of it too, is, again, going back to consciousness and thinking about how — we’re needing to catch up with the climate. The climate’s moving beyond us right now. We still have outdated notions of it and it’s capable of new outrages now. We’ve seen it in the flooding, you know, after Hurricane Helene, and we’ve seen it in the fires in Paradise and Lahaina, really shocking energy.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder why has it taken so long for the capital markets, the insurance providers to reflect this kind of climate realities, right? I mean, we see now there are a number of states where I think 12 insurance — or seven out of the 12 insurance carriers pulled out of California just in the last couple of years because they don’t want to be insuring wildfires. I wonder, like, why haven’t the capital markets reflected this risk appropriately?

VAILLANT: There is extraordinarily — there’s extraordinary dissonance in the financial sector. And so, where you have the insurance industry who does the math and they realize we cannot afford these losses anymore, I understand that 50 insurance companies have pulled out of Louisiana and Florida alone in the past four years. I didn’t even know there were 50 insurance companies there. So — and they’ve realized they can’t — they can no longer afford to cover losses on, you know, multibillion dollar disasters, which are happening almost annually now. So, the insurance industry, in a way, is sort of the grownups in the room who are actually observing the damage done and tabulating it in this quite objective way. Meanwhile, you have the petroleum industry and financial markets who are very bullish on anything that appears to make money. And so, there’s a lot of investment in offshore drilling right now. So, there’s this terrible disconnect and really conflict of interest, even within the financial markets. And so, that’s another reckoning, you know, for the 2020s that we’re going to have to square up or nature is going to square it up for us.

SREENIVASAN: You know, at the moment, the nominations that President-Elect Trump has for, you know, his pick for EPA chief is Congressman Lee Zeldin. I mean, he’s got a fossil fuel executive who might run other parts of the division. So — and I wonder — and he’s made no secret about wanting to withdraw from the Paris Accords, as he did the first time. What does that do to any kind of cohesive policy?

VAILLANT: Hari, it puts us in a really vulnerable position. When you effectively have a policy of climate denial, which the province of Alberta does and which it looks like the Trump administration may have. So, when you have the leaders saying, this isn’t happening, this is not an issue, and yet, we’re having billion-dollar disasters that are uninsurable every year, we’re having bigger fires, bigger floods. And so, there is — you know, we can’t really function as a society in a world that is living by two different realities and two different standards. And so, with that — I mean, the upshot for the citizen is suffering and confusion and the upshot for the states is they’re going to have to take more individual responsibility at the municipal level, at the state level for managing their own climate policy when, in fact, the science is objective.

SREENIVASAN: What does that scenario look like as the map becomes less than habitable for different climate reasons?

VAILLANT: Exactly. Where do you go? There’s a kind of contraction that’s going to happen and it’s going to be driven by the insurance industry. And some people will still — will remain without insurance, but you’re really exposed. And that’s a kind of vulnerability that makes it hard for societies to function well, and this representative — or I think Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island put it really well when he said you know, without insurance, well, climate disruption makes places — makes homes uninsurable. And when a house is uninsurable, it’s really hard to get a mortgage. And without a mortgage, that impacts the housing industry. And without a functioning housing industry, you don’t have a functioning economy because that’s one of the pillars of the American economy. And so, it’s not rocket science. You know, it’s really quite simple that when you put people in these vulnerable situations, when you don’t deal with climate, don’t deal with CO2 and the world becomes more flammable, more floodable, that is going to have direct impacts, measurable impacts as we’re seeing in the insurance industry on our entire economy. And so, it really seems like good business sense to address climate in a meaningful way, which we have absolutely the tools to do.

SREENIVASAN: Is the global community able to get its arms around this? I mean, because we seem to have these COP meetings increasingly in states whose primary economic driver is the fossil fuel industry, right? This time it’s in Azerbaijan. It was in Qatar before. And I wonder, you know, there are efforts to try to create funds to mitigate climate disasters, but it always gets hung up on, well, who’s going to pay for it and how much are the — you know, the smaller countries who might actually feel a greater brunt of it just by their geography, how much do they are they — how much are they entitled to? How much do the people who are generating the fossil fuel emissions owe?

VAILLANT: There’s — there is no mitigation fund that’s going to cover the global climate damage bill. You know, when you lose an entire island, when you lose an entire neighborhood, my understanding for the — even just for Hurricane Helene, which is just one hurricane, I think that the tab for that is over $150 billion. And then, Milton, right on the heels of that, you know, that’s right up there too, no one even talks about Hurricane John, which came in at the same time and trashed the resort City of Acapulco for the second time in 11 months. So, that’s a whole tourist city. That’s a whole economy basically wiped out. Who’s going to build there now? So, you know, these hundreds of millions that people are talking about are drops in the bucket. That’s really going to be tens of trillions. And again, that just highlights the dissonance, this kind of there is a — there’s a deep longing we have to maintain the status quo. And that uneven transition into renewable energy, which is happening in parallel with these other things we’ve been speaking about is — you know, it’s underway. I’d feel confident that it’s unstoppable, but it’s a patchwork effort at the moment.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “Fire Weather,” author John Vaillant, thanks so much for joining us.

VAILLANT: Hari, it’s great to be with you.