Climate

After images of oil-slicked waterfowl and marching protesters, there is perhaps no visual more representative of the fossil fuel crisis than the flaming faucet in Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary GasLand. The film, which investigated how the fracking boom pollutes local communities, memorably included a scene of a man lighting his kitchen tap water on fire as methane spewed out through the contaminated water line. As one reporter wrote several years after its initial release, GasLand was the film that made “fracking” a household word in the United States.

Over 16 years and about a quarter of a million more American oil and gas wells later, the climate crisis caused by human use of fossil fuels has grown ever more acute. The emissions from burning those hydrocarbons have made the weather more extreme and unpredictable, of course, but they’re also reshaping the human landscape. In 2021, a team of international scientists published a report warning that a third of the world’s population, some 3.5 billion people, may be forced to leave their homes over the next 50 years due to the increasingly hot and unstable climate.