TPT July 2016

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56 JULY 2016
G LOBA L MARKE T P L AC E
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.)
THE ‘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.
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