‘Just as Big Oil Predicted’: Fossil Fuel Industry Under Fire as Record Heat Broils Western States

Spring has not yet even begun, but as science journalist Rebecca Boyle wrote Thursday for The Atlantic, "it feels like we skipped right to summer" across the Western United States, which is facing record temperatures this week.

As of Monday, 39 million people across California, Nevada, and Arizona were under heat alerts. Temperatures in Los Angeles are reaching "25-35 degrees above normal," records are being "rewritten" in Las Vegas, and Phoenix is facing temperatures of 105°F two months earlier than usual, according to warnings issued by the National Weather Service (NWS) this week.

"This is not normal. Or at least it wasn’t normal in the past," said Boyle, who explained that it was the result of hot air being trapped by "a bizarrely strong ridge of high pressure in Earth’s atmosphere," the kind that would be uncommonly strong even in the summer.

Citing a model created by the nonprofit group Climate Central, she said that human-caused climate change had made these extreme temperatures five times more likely.

The NWS warned that a heatwave in March is "very dangerous, particularly for those not acclimated to the heat and/or traveling from cooler climates.”

Counts by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that 1,600-2,400 Americans die each year from heat-related causes, and they've more than doubled since 1999.

Meanwhile, a report from the Federation of American Scientists last year found that "the combined effects of extreme heat cost [the US] over $162 billion in 2024—equivalent to nearly 1% of the US GDP."

The Western United States has recently experienced its warmest winter on in recorded history, leading to a record snow drought. Scientists say this has depleted water supplies and will make the region more vulnerable to wildfires and drought later this year.

Climate scientist Daniel Swain told ABC News 10 of Northern California that this is only the beginning of how the climate crisis will impact the state in the coming decades.

"The hottest hots are already getting hotter, and they will continue to get hotter. We haven't seen the hottest temperatures that we're going to see in the next 20 or 30 years," Swain said. "We'll see an increasing number of years with severe wildfire conditions... We will also see increased risk of major flood events, either as snowmelt becomes more rapid in the spring or as winter storms drop even more rainfall more quickly."

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen said heatwaves like this one are unfolding "just as Big Oil predicted."

"A relatively small number of major fossil fuel companies are responsible for the majority of all greenhouse gas emissions generated by humanity. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all global greenhouse gas emissions generated since 1854, and just 57 companies are responsible for 80% of the emissions generated since 2016," explained a report published by the group Thursday.

"These companies didn’t just contribute to this heatwave—they did so knowingly," the report said. "For decades, Big Oil companies were internally forecasting exactly these kinds of climate disasters."

However, the report explains, the industry "developed and orchestrated a multidecade, coordinated campaign to defraud the public about the dangers of climate change, and blocked solutions that could have prevented these disasters."

A study published earlier this month by Geophysical Research Letters showed that as more carbon has been pumped into the atmosphere over the past 10 years, the rate at which the climate is warming has doubled.

Following this trend, it may be as soon as 2030 that the globe surpasses 1.5°C above preindustrial averages, at which point many climate risks, such as heatwaves, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity, are expected to be dramatically amplified, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Big Oil companies have, indeed, cost this country and the world," Public Citizen said. "Extreme heatwaves like the one impacting the Western US this month are one of the catastrophic disasters these companies predicted their conduct would bring about. They should be made to pay."