Extreme Heat: Climate Violence Caused by the Fossil Fuel System
In the imagination of industrial modernity, fossil fuels have long been associated with innovation, progress, and economic development. Industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, celebrated petroleum refining as a socially beneficial and morally sanctioned enterprise that brought light, heat, and affordable energy to the masses. Coal, and later oil and gas, enabled unprecedented increases in productive capacity—they powered mass industrial production, electrification, global transport systems, and rising material living standards across much of the world. This fossil-developmental narrative persists. Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” is proof of this belief.
Yet this celebratory framing of fossil fuels as the material foundation of modern prosperity increasingly sits uneasily with what fossil fuel combustion has in fact produced: global warming and a rapidly destabilising climate system. The same energy sources once associated with liberation and progress are now the central drivers of the climate crisis. What was historically framed as development must increasingly be understood through a different conceptual register—one that captures the harm of climate change on a planetary scale.
One dimension of this harm is political violence, as I wrote about in my previous essay: in many contexts, fossil fuel wealth has enabled and reinforced authoritarian rule, corruption, and oligarchic power, and contributed to inequality, repression, and conflict. The other dimension is environmental violence. Continued extraction, production, and burning of oil and other fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and drives rising temperatures, extreme heatwaves, droughts, water scarcity, sea-level rise, heavy rains, and floods. Unstable and extreme weather causes harm and economic losses and has drastic impacts on the wellbeing of both humans and other forms of life.
Burning Oil, Burning the Planet
It is an undisputed, well-established fact that burning fossil fuels is the principal source of greenhouse gas emissions and the main engine of climate change. The share of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) in the global energy mix has increased continuously over the last two centuries, from close to zero in the early 1800s to around 80 percent today. Around 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels are now extracted each year. In 2018, global oil production reached 100 million barrels per day for the first time. According to the EIA, oil now accounts for about one-third of the world’s primary energy, while gas and coal are both around 25 percent.
Every year, the combustion of coal, oil, and gas releases billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel burning is responsible for 78 percent of global emissions and about 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide (UN). About half of all these carbon dioxide emissions are taken up by natural sinks such as vegetation, soils, and oceans. The remainder accumulates in the atmosphere and persists there. As of June 2026, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations stand at approximately 427 ppm, the highest level in over 3 million years.
Global average temperature has risen by 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels. This warming has already triggered widespread and observable changes in extreme weather events. Heatwaves now occur more frequently and are several degrees Celsius hotter. Extreme precipitation events have intensified because warmer air holds more moisture. Droughts have become longer and more severe, and wildfires more intense and destructive. The years 2023 and 2024 were the hottest on record, breaking temperature records by unprecedented margins. Right now, Europe is experiencing one of its most severe heatwaves, which has been intensified by climate change driven by fossil fuel combustion.
Attributing Heat to Climate Change
Climate science has advanced significantly over the past decade in linking climate change to specific weather extremes. It has evolved from detecting global trends and averages, such as rising global mean surface temperatures and gradual sea-level rise, to attributing individual extreme weather events to climate change. The so-called attribution research can now determine the extent to which anthropogenic climate change alters the probability and intensity of specific weather events.
The World Weather Attribution initiative, co-founded in 2015 by climate scientists Friederike Otto, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, and Myles Allen, uses large datasets and global climate simulations to analyse how human-induced thermodynamic changes (such as increased atmospheric moisture and temperature) interact with natural climate variability (for example, the Southern Oscillation and the El Niño phenomenon).
The analysis by the WWA team shows that the current heatwave of June 2026 can unequivocally be attributed to climate change. A blocked high-pressure system trapping hot air over Europe and drawing warm air up from the Sahara is a known weather pattern in summer. However, the level of heat would have been impossible just 50 years ago. Human-induced climate change has intensified the event so dramatically that a comparable heatwave would have been about 3.5°C cooler in 1976 and around 2°C cooler in 2003.
It is not just this current heatwave. An analysis of 213 heatwaves occurring during 2000–2023, published in 2025 in Nature, one of the most prestigious and influential scientific journals in the world, shows that climate change made all 213 heatwaves more likely and more intense, with one-quarter of them virtually impossible without climate change. Another study led by Imperial College London analysed the heatwave at the end of June 2025, when temperatures rose above 38°C in twelve European cities. Using historical weather data to estimate how intense the heat would have been in a world without human greenhouse gas emissions and with 1.3°C less warming, the study found that this heatwave would have been 1–4°C cooler.
Human-induced climate change is amplifying not only extreme heat but also other weather events—wildfires, precipitation, floods, and droughts. It is proven that anthropogenic climate change increased the probability and intensity of the July 2021 extreme rainfall that triggered the devastating flash floods in the Ahr Valley in Germany, and intensified, by at least 30 percent, the devastating bushfires in Australia in 2019–2020.
Violence of Climate Change
Weather extremes cause harm to humans and nature alike. They produce social, cultural, and economic losses. Severe heatwaves kill people, worsen health conditions, reduce labour productivity, damage infrastructure such as roads and railways, disrupt education, and cause crop failures, livestock losses, and growing stress on ecosystems. The 2025 European heatwave alone killed around sixteen thousand people. The current heatwave has already resulted in heat-related fatalities and widespread disruptions. Hospitals in France are reporting sharply increased cardiac arrests and emergency systems overwhelmed.
Wildfires destroy land, infrastructure, and kill animals. They also undermine ecosystems on which human communities depend for clean air, water, and livelihoods. The 2019–2020 Australian “Black Summer” bushfires, also intensified by climate change, caused over 400 human deaths, thousands of hospitalisations, more than 3,000 homes levelled by flames, and extensive damage to critical infrastructure. The fires also devastated biodiversity, killing billions of animals and severely damaging ecosystems, including parts of the Gondwana rainforests, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Flash floods wash away infrastructure, settlements, and farmland. They contaminate water systems with sewage, chemicals, and debris, increasing post-disaster health risks such as disease, mould exposure, and waterborne illness. The 2021 Ahr Valley floods in Germany killed 184 people, destroyed thousands of homes, wiped out entire villages, and caused over €30 billion in damages, making it one of Europe’s deadliest and costliest flood disasters.
Weather extremes, most of them intensified by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel extraction and combustion, cause death, destruction, harm, and disruption. This is the violence of climate change—not violence in the narrow sense of direct physical assault, but structurally produced harm. Today’s storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves are therefore not purely “natural” occurrences, but climate-amplified extremes whose destructive force is intensified by accumulated emissions produced by humans. They are socially produced risks attributable to human agency embedded in economic, political, and legal structures that have shaped and sustained high greenhouse gas emissions.
Framing weather extremes in terms of violence is further justified by the fact that the risks of climate catastrophes are predictable and avoidable. For decades, climate science has warned with increasing precision that continued greenhouse gas emissions would lead to more frequent, more intense, and more persistent heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires. Governments, corporations, and especially fossil fuel producers have long had access to this knowledge. The continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction and combustion is not a morally neutral rational choice, but action taken in full awareness of its likely consequences, namely to expose society to serious risks. Andreas Malm, a prominent and outspoken critic of fossil capital and the structural violence of fossil fuel extraction, has put it bluntly: the extraction and production of fossil fuels directly lead to the loss of human lives and constitute a form of structural environmental violence perpetrated by corporations and states that fail to stop it.
Keep the Oil in the Soil
There is now a broad consensus across the climate science and policy community that keeping the planet from becoming dangerously hot—limiting global warming to 1.5–2°C above pre-industrial levels—requires a rapid and drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. It is a matter of simple math: the atmosphere can absorb only this much carbon dioxide before critical temperature thresholds are exceeded. Since roughly four-fifths of global CO₂ emissions originate from fossil fuels, rapidly phasing out coal, oil, and gas is indispensable.
Climate science has also become increasingly clear about what this means for fossil fuel extraction itself. A study published in Nature Communications concludes that achieving the 1.5°C target requires leaving virtually all known coal reserves, around 80 percent of natural gas, and 70 percent of oil unextracted. The study further identifies entire categories of places that should remain permanently off limits to extraction, including biodiversity hotspots, protected areas, centres of endemic species, urban areas, and the territories of Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation. In other words, a substantial share of the world’s fossil fuels has become, in climate terms, unburnable. This pathway is neither technologically impossible nor economically unimaginable. The International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Roadmap outlines a feasible transition based on an immediate decline in fossil fuel use, rapid deployment of renewable energy, improvements in energy efficiency, and reductions in methane emissions.
Tragically, the world is doubling down on fossil fuels. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), planned global fossil fuel production for 2030 exceeds by more than 100 percent the level compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Under current—and demonstrably inadequate—fossil fuel production plans and climate commitments, the world is on track for approximately 2.5°C of warming by the end of the century. The deliberate expansion of fossil fuel extraction and combustion is creating the climatic conditions for increasingly severe heatwaves, floods, droughts, and wildfires, while locking societies into ever more dangerous levels of warming and destruction—in short, into ever more brutal and deliberate forms of environmental violence.
The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.