{"id":3256,"date":"2026-03-19T21:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T01:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/?p=3256"},"modified":"2026-03-19T21:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T01:00:11","slug":"heat-wave-scorches-western-states-just-as-big-oil-predicted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/?p=3256","title":{"rendered":"Heat Wave Scorches Western States, Just as Big Oil Predicted"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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<\/a> were under heat alerts, and the heat wave will continue expanding and intensifying as the week progresses, pushing temperatures 20\u201330 degrees above normal across the region.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> these corporations predicted their products would cause.<\/p>\n

This heat wave will impose massive costs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This heat event will likely inflict massive costs on the region\u2019s public health, economy, and water availability.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, this event will be \u201cvery dangerous, particularly for those not acclimated to the heat and\/or traveling from cooler climates.\u201d The 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave directly caused<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

Extreme heat also has profound economic effects. Heat waves have cost<\/a> the world trillions of dollars in recent decades, and $162 billion in losses<\/a> in the U.S. in 2024, equivalent to nearly 1% of GDP. This month\u2019s heat wave will undoubtedly drain billions of dollars from the affected families, businesses, cities, and states.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in decades. This heat wave is forecast to melt the region\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

This heat wave is a climate disaster.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Though we\u2019ll have to wait for a weather attribution study to confirm the exact<\/em> 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, \u201cMany locations are likely to set both all-time high temperatures for the month of March and their earliest 100-degree temperature on record.\u201d This intensity is at least comparable to\u2014and possibly more extreme than\u2014prior heat waves that studies have shown were caused by climate change. For example, multiple extreme event attribution<\/a> studies<\/a> determined that the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave would have been \u201cvirtually impossible\u201d without human-caused climate change. A metastudy<\/a> of these kinds of analyses found that climate change made that event between 340 times more likely and infinitely more likely, and that \u201cthe probability of the 2021 heat wave\u2019s intensity in a preindustrial climate was essentially zero.\u201d Scientists have drawn similar conclusions<\/a> about the heat wave that baked the Southwestern U.S. in July 2023. This month\u2019s heat wave is similarly outside the parameters of historical precedent.<\/p>\n

As Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, put it<\/a>: \u201cWe know that in a warming world we see both more frequent and more extreme heat events. In particular, that\u2019s 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\u2019m using that language intentionally because we\u2019re not just breaking records\u2014we\u2019re 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\u2019t for the warming that\u2019s already occurred.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big Oil predicted heat waves like this one and chose to cause them anyway, while lying about climate science.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a> for 71% of all global greenhouse gas emissions generated since 1854, and just 57 companies are responsible<\/a> for 80% of the emissions generated since 2016. Climate attribution science can increasingly quantify the impact of specific companies\u2019 emissions on specific heat waves. A recent climate attribution study<\/a> published in the prestigious journal Nature<\/em> 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\u2014including, for example, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips\u2014made those heat events at least 10,000 times more likely to have occurred, in the median analysis.<\/p>\n

These companies didn\u2019t just contribute to this heat wave\u2014they 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<\/a> 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 \u201csuffering and death due to thermal extremes.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> that predicted, based on \u201cconventional and probably conservative\u201d assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause \u201cmore violent weather\u2014more storms, more droughts, more deluges.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> \u201ccatastrophic\u201d and <\/a>have<\/a> \u201cserious consequences for man\u2019s comfort and survival.\u201d Meanwhile Exxon was forecasting that global warming <\/a>would do<\/a> \u201cgreat irreversible harm to our planet\u201d <\/a>and cause<\/a> \u201csuffering and death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even knowing that their products would cause catastrophic climate disasters\u2014including lethal heat waves like this month\u2019s\u2014Big 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.<\/p>\n

There are numerous internal <\/a>strategy memos<\/a> and <\/a>external materials<\/a> outlining Big Oil\u2019s massive disinformation campaigns. These were designed, in the words of one fossil fuel coalition\u2019s <\/a>mission statement<\/a>, to \u201c[r]eposition global warming as theory (not fact).\u201d<\/p>\n

Documented tactics that Big Oil companies used to deceive regulators, investors, and consumers about climate change include:<\/p>\n