Heat Wave Scorches Western States, Just as Big Oil Predicted

The Western half of the United States is entering a historic heat wave that will subject millions of Americans to sweltering conditions and is forecast to break records across California, Arizona, and neighboring states. Already on Monday, 39 million people were under heat alerts, and the heat wave will continue expanding and intensifying as the week progresses, pushing temperatures 20–30 degrees above normal across the region.

This heat wave will have massive costs. Big Oil companies should be required to help pay for these costs, given that this is exactly the kind of climate disaster these corporations predicted their products would cause.

This heat wave will impose massive costs.

This heat event will likely inflict massive costs on the region’s public health, economy, and water availability.

Extreme heat is the most lethal weather-related killer, and a heat wave in March is particularly dangerous, since people are not yet accustomed to such high temperatures. As the National Weather Service warned, this event will be “very dangerous, particularly for those not acclimated to the heat and/or traveling from cooler climates.” The 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave directly caused well over 1,000 deaths. This event, which features a heat dome similar to the one that drove the 2021 disaster, will likely not have as high of a death toll, but mortality could still be considerable.

Extreme heat also has profound economic effects. Heat waves have cost the world trillions of dollars in recent decades, and $162 billion in losses in the U.S. in 2024, equivalent to nearly 1% of GDP. This month’s heat wave will undoubtedly drain billions of dollars from the affected families, businesses, cities, and states.

Also alarming is the effect this event will have on water availability and fire risk across the region in the coming months. After the warmest winter on record, the Western U.S. has already been experiencing one of the worst snow droughts in decades. This heat wave is forecast to melt the region’s already disastrously low snowpack at least a month ahead of schedule, resulting in a summer of serious drought and dangerous wildfire conditions during the upcoming dry season.

This heat wave is a climate disaster.

Though we’ll have to wait for a weather attribution study to confirm the exact causal connection between this heat wave and human-caused climate change, it is clear that global warming is a key driver of this disaster. As the National Weather Service stated, “Many locations are likely to set both all-time high temperatures for the month of March and their earliest 100-degree temperature on record.” This intensity is at least comparable to—and possibly more extreme than—prior heat waves that studies have shown were caused by climate change. For example, multiple extreme event attribution studies determined that the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. A metastudy of these kinds of analyses found that climate change made that event between 340 times more likely and infinitely more likely, and that “the probability of the 2021 heat wave’s intensity in a preindustrial climate was essentially zero.” Scientists have drawn similar conclusions about the heat wave that baked the Southwestern U.S. in July 2023. This month’s heat wave is similarly outside the parameters of historical precedent.

As Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, put it: “We know that in a warming world we see both more frequent and more extreme heat events. In particular, that’s the most slam-dunk type of event when it comes to thinking about extremes and climate change. And this is going to be exactly that type of event. It will be, in a climatological and statistical sense, record-shattering. I’m using that language intentionally because we’re not just breaking records—we’re breaking long-standing records by enormous margins. Essentially to a point where it would be almost impossible to have heat waves of this kind of magnitude if it weren’t for the warming that’s already occurred.”

Big Oil predicted heat waves like this one and chose to cause them anyway, while lying about climate science.

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. Climate attribution science can increasingly quantify the impact of specific companies’ emissions on specific heat waves. A recent climate attribution study published in the prestigious journal Nature found that for a number of extreme heat events, including the 2021 and 2023 heat waves cited above, the emissions of each of the biggest fossil fuel companies—including, for example, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips—made those heat events at least 10,000 times more likely to have occurred, in the median analysis.

These companies didn’t just contribute to this heat wave—they did so knowingly. For decades, Big Oil companies were internally forecasting exactly these kinds of climate disasters. In 1996, for example, Exxon scientist DJ Devlin gave a presentation to the Global Climate Coalition, a group of fossil fuel companies that colluded to spread climate denial during the 1990s, reviewing the science connecting climate change with “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” He discussed how the elderly, sick, and young would be particularly vulnerable. And he explained the idea of threshold temperatures, referring to the point at which temperatures cross a critical limit beyond which mortality rises significantly.

In addition to extreme, lethal heat waves, Big Oil companies projected numerous other dangerous harms from the use of their products. For example, in 1989, Shell Oil Company produced a confidential planning document that predicted, based on “conventional and probably conservative” assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges.”

By the time of this Shell Report, the American Petroleum Institute had already spent years predicting that climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels would be “catastrophic” and have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival.” Meanwhile Exxon was forecasting that global warming would do “great irreversible harm to our planet” and cause “suffering and death.”

Even knowing that their products would cause catastrophic climate disasters—including lethal heat waves like this month’s—Big Oil companies developed and orchestrated a multi-decade, coordinated campaign to defraud the public about the dangers of climate change, and blocked solutions that could have prevented these disasters.

There are numerous internal strategy memos and external materials outlining Big Oil’s massive disinformation campaigns. These were designed, in the words of one fossil fuel coalition’s mission statement, to “[r]eposition global warming as theory (not fact).”

Documented tactics that Big Oil companies used to deceive regulators, investors, and consumers about climate change include:

• Publishing deceptive advertisements with false claims about climate;
• Directing bought-and-paid-for scientists to fraudulently undermine the clear scientific consensus on climate;
• Harassing and attempting to discredit scientists and activists engaged in researching and communicating the actual climate science;
• Deceptively attacking renewable energy efforts and policies;
• Greenwashing to falsely promote Big Oil products and brands as climate solutions.

There is also substantial evidence this conspiracy has delayed climate mitigation and adaptation measures that could have prevented climate disasters like this heat wave. In the words of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who co-sponsored the resolution that prohibited the U.S. from ratifying the international climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol:

“I was misled. Others were misled. When [fossil fuel companies] had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly — I mean, they lied.… It would have changed everything [had they told the truth]. I think it would have changed the average citizen’s appreciation of climate change.… And mine, of course. It would have put the United States and the world on a whole different track, and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are. It’s cost this country, and it cost the world.”

Big Oil companies have, indeed, cost this country and the world. Extreme heat waves like the one impacting the Western U.S. this month are one of the catastrophic disasters these companies predicted their conduct would bring about. They should be made to pay.