Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World

By Simon Dalby

We are the only species that uses fire. It has determined how we have made our home on this planet and it has propelled us to the role of the dominant species in the biosphere. But at the heart of contemporary climate change is the process of combustion. Simon Dalby explores what a life without burning things might look like, and how we might get there.

Fires make the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is heating the planet, melting the ice sheets, changing weather patterns and making wildfires worse. Our civilization is burning things, especially fossil fuels, at prodigious rates. So much so that we are now heading towards a future “Hothouse Earth” with a climate that is very different from what humans have known so far.

By focusing on fire and our partial control over one key physical force in the earth system, that of combustion, Simon Dalby is able to ask important and interesting questions about us as humans, including different ways of thinking about how we live, and how we might do so differently in the future. Simply put, there is now far too much “firepower” loose in the world and we need to think much harder about how to live together in ways that don’t require burning stuff to do so.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Nov 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781788216531

Simon Dalby

Simon Dalby is Emeritus Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He has written extensively on climate change, environmental security and geopolitics.

Book preview

Introduction: a world on fire

In November 2018 wildfire destroyed Paradise. The town in California, that is. The so called Camp Fire killed 85 people in the town and surrounding area. That year also, fires burned large parts of Siberia, New Zealand and Canada, killed motorists in Portugal and Greece and eradicated crucial ecosystems in Tasmania.

These forest fires are getting hotter and bigger and are burning more places. More than ten million acres of forest burned in the United States for the first time in 2015, and then again in 2017, and in 2020. By late June in 2023, halfway through the fire season, more forest area had burned in Canada than in any previous complete season. The smoke from these wildfires in Canada caused air quality health alerts in New York and elsewhere in the United States.

In July 2023 media reports of wildfire on the island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean showed tourists struggling to escape the flames. A record-breaking hot summer in the region set the scene for wildfire. Heat records were also being broken widely elsewhere, notably in Iran and in India. In August wildfire destroyed the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui the other side of the world becoming the deadliest blaze in modern US history.

The power of these fires when they get going is staggering; temperatures get so hot that trees explode and timber-framed houses and their contents are vaporized (Vaillant 2023). Temperatures over 500°C loft smoke into the stratosphere, generating pyrocumulonimbus clouds and fire-driven weather systems. The level of destruction, of trees, houses, and whatever else gets in the way of these fires is increasing. Fighting fires requires larger and larger efforts; insurance costs for lost property are rising too.

Climate change is clearly making those wildfires worse as droughts and extreme temperatures extend fire seasons. The winter of 2019 was unusually hot and dry in Australia; its wildfires have become an ever-increasing hazard. The following year brought even more extensive wildfires and a terrible toll on wildlife and property. Dramatic pictures of people being evacuated off a beach grabbed the world’s attention.

In Canada wildfires occurred in March of 2019 in British Columbia, long before they are usually expected. Two years later a heat dome event made things even hotter and drier. The town of Lytton burned to the ground. The shocked mayor commented that he had thought that climate change was a problem for the future, but it had turned out that it was very much about the present.

In North America, where until recently politicians have frequently denied climate change is either happening or if it is, that it is a serious matter, even weather forecasters on the nightly news are starting to link their comments about the weird weather and record-breaking events with climate change. In 2022, again in British Columbia, where much of this book was written, there followed a record-breaking drought and numerous heat records were broken in September and October. Meteorologists coined the term hotumn to describe the hot autumn. New words can be useful for new circumstances.

Of course, climate change isn’t only about droughts and huge fires, dramatic though the images of wildfires are these days. The indirect effects of the growing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing extreme weather of various kinds, making storms and heatwaves worse. Extreme rainfall events, more powerful hurricanes and disruptions to the jet stream are all now commonly understood to be key factors in our climate-disrupted world.

In Britain, the Guardian newspaper added carbon dioxide levels to its weather forecasts to make the point that we are changing the climate. Towns and cities across the world are declaring climate emergencies. Some communities are already having to be abandoned as rising seas and flood dangers make them uninhabitable. Reluctant though we are to admit it, climate change is here, and it is accelerating.

The annual climate meetings of the Conference of the Parties, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the so-called COPs, are increasingly highlighting the damage already done in many parts of the world. They are also dividing the world into those states that have done little to cause climate change, and those that have done most of the burning over the past few centuries – the Global North, whose countries have been very reluctant to accept responsibility, or pay to help the Global South adapt to climate disruption. The 2022 COP in Egypt finally, after decades of demands from poorer countries facing increased devastation, acceded to some loss and damage arrangements, although the funding to support these efforts was postponed as a matter for future consideration.

Massive heat events in Asia in early 2022 were followed in Pakistan by huge rainfalls which flooded large parts of the country and raised the spectre of famine and disease. China faced record-breaking heat events in October too, just as the Communist Party gathered to confer a third term in office for President Xi. At the same time the Mississippi River had almost run dry, while another hurricane was bearing down on Central America and parts of Nigeria were flooded. Hurricane season in the United States saw major damage to large parts of Florida, although, in one very interesting optimistic episode amid all the destruction, the solar-powered community of Babcock Ranch, explicitly designed for life in a place subject to hurricane hazards, survived a direct hit by Hurricane Ian more or less unscathed. In 2023 heatwaves in Europe threatened once again to limit traffic on the Rhine due to low water levels, and caused many other disruptions.

Fire is at the heart of much of this; combustion is the chemical reaction when oxygen combines with some sort of fuel. Frequently the result is carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas and the cause of much of contemporary climate change. Fire is both the cause of climate change, and as wildfire is aggravated by climate change, a symptom too. Fires cause air pollution, which is also a hazard, especially for people with health conditions. And, ironically, combustion indirectly causes extreme rainfall and flooding. We are getting both hell and high water in many places. And furthermore, scorched earth where the vegetation has been removed stores less water, which leads to run-off that causes floods.

In 2022 fires also became a word widely used in media coverage of the war in Ukraine. Referring to artillery and missile strikes, the term reminded us all that war too involves fire, or to use the military term, firepower. That Russian troops ran out of fuel in the early stages of the war signalled another use of fire: their vehicles became trapped and were destroyed because there was no source of fire for their internal combustion engines. A salutory reminder that most vehicles in our contemporary world still move because of combustion in their engines. Or at least they do if there is fuel for them to burn.

With war in Ukraine, Europe has faced fuel shortages, in part because of Russian efforts to cut off gas supplies, but also because of the pressing need to find alternative sources to Russian oil and gas. No fuel means no fires for heating and cooking in homes, nor energy to run businesses and factories.

Fuel prices across the world have rocketed too. Given how dependent modern life is on fuel, this energy crisis, which was in part yet another fuel price crisis, has caused disruption and suffering in many parts of the world. In the UK, the government got into all sorts of trouble trying to arrange subsidies for consumers whose energy bills were rising rapidly while not considering either windfall taxes on the fuel companies making record profits because of these price spikes, or implementing a comprehensive programme of insulation and energy upgrades to draughty houses and business to dramatically reduce their use of fossil fuels, although some initiatives on this theme eventually appeared.

Hanging over all these events were alarming statements about nuclear weapons and fears of their possible use in Ukraine, and elsewhere too. Nuclear detonations, both the direct heat from the blast, and the destruction of gas and oil infrastructure when cities are targeted, would cause huge fires. The smoke from a nuclear war would likely reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ground, and cause its own rapid human-caused climate change, a nuclear winter.

Even if such a disaster is avoided in coming years, many military strategists consider climate change and the disruptions to societies and economies from extreme weather, as well as attempts to change energy systems away from reliance on fossil fuels, as potential future causes of conflict. Is climate change a threat multiplier or a catalyst of conflict? This discussion has thrown up all sorts of complicated arguments about conflict, change and disruptions under the label of climate security.

All this goes to show how combustion and its often-unintended consequences are a key part of the modern world, a world that is being dramatically disrupted by burning. Fire in its many forms shapes us and our world. But clearly now we will have to attend to fire – how and where we make it and how to control it – much more carefully. And hence we need to think about fuel too.

Collectively humanity seems to be in the grip of an impulse control disorder, pyromania, the impulse to start fires; we now know the dangers we face, but nonetheless governments and companies go on building fossil fuel infrastructure, making engines that burn things, and relying on cheap natural gas to power industry and heat our homes. Treatment is urgently needed for countries and corporations whose politicians and businesspeople clearly lack the appropriate impulse control, and hence continue policies that make climate change worse. The therapists will have to be citizens understood as members of a much-enlarged fire brigade or fire department. Not only do we need trained people and equipment to put out dangerous wildfires, but we need new fire codes and regulations to prevent construction of dangerous structures powered by energy systems based on combustion. And above all we need to rapidly constrain the use of fuels because burning them produces carbon dioxide, the key gas that is causing climate change.

If we focus on fire in its various forms, it allows us to think more clearly about how the world is changing, and what needs to be done. When you do that, combustion is shown to be of critical importance to the whole story of how humanity has (re)made its home on this planet. It is so obvious that we often don’t focus on it; it is time we did. That’s exactly what this short book does.

The book

The following four chapters focus on fire and how it has changed us and our planet. Chapter 1 explores firepower. While firepower is obviously a military term, using a broader understanding of the term, one focused on the power that controlled fire gives humans over nature and each other provides a broader contextualization of our current circumstances. Drawing on Stephen Pyne’s argument about humanity as the fire species this chapter points to the power of fire to transform humans and their environment. The Promethean moment when humanity gained partial control over a basic physical process shapes global politics today, even if many citizens and politicians have been very slow to grapple with the consequences.

All of which means that we are now living in an increasingly artificial world, a growing technosphere powered by the massive combustion of fossil fuels. Geologists talk about this in terms of a new era in planetary history, one shaped by human actions, hence the term Anthropocene, the age of humans. Or perhaps that should be the Technocene? While fire facilitates numerous things by powering much of the modern world, it simultaneously endangers it too. The chapter will argue that political action is key to the future use of fire and will determine whether humanity will constrain the use of combustion to make a sustainable future possible, or see the planet accelerate towards a drastically disrupted climate system, a hothouse world.

Chapter 2 traces how fire has been a key part of history. Understanding the current situation globally requires thinking through human history and how our growing use and control of fire has been key to the growth of societies, states and empires. This chapter deals with this history, from the early use of fire for cooking, protection and then land clearing through to smelting, weapons manufacture, the industrial revolution’s harnessing of steam power and most recently internal combustion engines.

The early history of farming may have generated enough methane and carbon dioxide to prevent the Earth slipping back into a period of glaciation, which suggests that farming has been contributing to climate change for a much longer period than has been realized. Indeed, the conquest of the Americas by Europeans, which caused the death of many millions of native residents and the abandonment of agriculture across the continents, may have caused a notable reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide due to reforestation and brought about the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. Coal and subsequently oil and then natural gas overtook timber as a fuel source more recently, and in the process has dramatically increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

The search for fossil fuels, particularly oil, has influenced much of the geopolitics of the twentieth century, alongside the advent of dramatic new military firepower, and is the subject of Chapter 3. While geopolitics has traditionally been about the rivalry of great powers, their attempts to control places and appropriate resources to enhance their relative power and economic capabilities, the new understandings of just how much these processes have changed how the Earth system works mean that many things need to be rethought. The contradictions between fossil fuel vulnerability and state rivalry were highlighted in 2022 by the war in Ukraine. This chapter focuses on efforts to reimagine fire and its technologies, as well as the political campaigns that have emerged in recent decades, to try to move societies away from the dangerous reliance on fossil fuels. The health dangers of fossil fuels are contrasted with the advantages of electric technologies, and the potential of renewable electricity to power more sustainable futures.

Divestment campaigns have grappled with the financial power of investments and tried to shift them from fossil fuels to less damaging sectors of the economy. Green new deal proposals have garnered headlines as attempts to link justice, employment and welfare together to make better societies. Protest movements, like Extinction Rebellion, climate strikes and Tyre Extinguisher actions add to the struggles for a more sustainable future. All of which require rethinking the role of fire and consumption and a recognition that the most important issues of politics are no longer the rivalry of great powers but the practical matters of shaping a sustainable technosphere.

Chapter 4 on Shaping the Future suggests that to do so requires civic action based on rethinking our relationships with combustion, and cultural shifts that don’t fall easy victim to populist politicians. But if a sustainable future, within a relatively stable climate system is to be achieved in the coming decades, firepower, in both its forms, needs to be dramatically constrained.

The alternatives in terms of renewable energy, new modes of urban transport and such things as building code innovations, suggest possible ways of doing things much more sustainably but this will inevitably involve dramatic political change, especially for fossil fuel producing countries. The possibilities of a different, new world emerge from these proposals. But there has been intense pushback from fossil fuel industries determined to maintain their profitability despite the consequences that follow from using their products. The possibilities of using novel technologies and geoengineering emerges from these efforts too. Stopping and thinking about the political labels used in