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HOW BIG OIL WRECKED YOUR SUMMER  
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Aaron Regunberg
June 5, 2026
The New Republic
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_ Weather extremes are not natural. They are climate disasters. They
the kind of catastrophes that Big Oil companies predicted their fossil
fuel products would cause—at the same time that they were
orchestrating fraudulent campaigns of climate denial.. _

People try to stay cool on the sweltering streets of Manhattan as the
region experiences another heat wave on July 29, 2025., Photo credit:
Spencer Platt // The New Republic

 

I love the summer. Growing up, it meant family vacations, beach days,
block parties—really, what’s not to like? But for millions of
Americans, the meaning of summer has been shifting
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In many parts of the country, excitement for the upcoming season has
turned into anxiety over the weather events—the extreme heat,
hurricanes, drought, and wildfires—that have increasingly defined
our summers in recent years.

These weather extremes are not natural. They are climate disasters.
And as a report
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published today by my organization, Public Citizen, outlines, they are
exactly the kind of catastrophes that Big Oil companies predicted
their fossil fuel products would cause—at the same time that they
were orchestrating fraudulent campaigns of climate denial to block
solutions that would have alleviated these harms.

To put it bluntly, Big Oil is ruining summer.

Naturally, the most obvious threat is the heat. The last three summers
have been the three hottest
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ever recorded. Since 1985, 80 percent of U.S. cities
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increase in the number of days with a heat index of 90 degrees or
higher. This trend has already extended into 2026, with
record-smashing heat this spring across the western half of the
country, including an average national temperature in March that was
an astounding
[[link removed](AP)%20%E2%80%94%20March's%20persistent,according%20to%20federal%20weather%20data.]
9.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the twentieth-century norm.

This escalation in extreme heat isn’t a coincidence. A climate
attribution study
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of the March 2026 heat wave found that it would have been “virtually
impossible” without climate change. Nationally, scientists have
found that the climate crisis lengthened
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the average heat wave season in the U.S. from 23 days to 70 days over
the last 60 years. Another scientific study concluded
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that last summer, the average American experienced at least one
additional week’s worth of risky heat days due to climate change,
while 32 U.S. cities (home to over 21 million people) experienced 30
or more additional risky heat days.

Scientists are increasingly able to determine the degree to which the
emissions of particular oil and gas companies have contributed to
particular heat waves. For example, a study
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fall in the prestigious journal _Nature_ analyzed a number of major
heat waves, including the extreme heat that hit the American Southwest
in July 2023. The researchers found emissions from each of the biggest
fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell,
and BP—made that lethal heat wave at least 10,000 times more likely
to occur. They concluded that these events would have been virtually
impossible without those emissions.

And it’s not just that these companies contributed to the oppressive
heat that is now defining summer for so many of us—it’s that they
knew full well what they were doing. For decades, Big Oil companies
internally forecast exactly how their fossil fuel products would drive
increasing heat, and how we would experience these changes. In 1996,
for example, Exxon scientist DJ Devlin gave a presentation
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to the Global Climate Coalition, a group of fossil fuel companies that
colluded to spread climate denial, reviewing the science connecting
climate change with “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.”
He discussed how the “elderly, sick, and very 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.”

While the “thermal extremes” of recent summers have been bad, they
occurred during a La Niña, the cooling phase of the Pacific Ocean’s
heat cycle. But this summer is going to be different. Scientists
expect that in the coming months the Pacific Ocean will begin its
warming cycle, or El Niño. And this El Niño is predicted
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be particularly catastrophic—again, largely due to climate change.

Some studies [[link removed]] have
found that global warming may be leading to stronger El Niño events.
More importantly, climate change means that this El Niño will build
on a higher temperature baseline
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which will have the effect of supercharging its impacts. That
constitutes a dangerous cycle. As Defense Department meteorologist
Eric Webb put it
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“Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the
climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major
El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the
baseline upward again.”

And it’s not just heat that will be supercharged this summer.
Climate change is also causing a severe intensification of droughts
and wildfires across our country, turning summer in many areas into a
season of water rationing, air quality alerts, or worse.

The U.S. already experienced its most intense spring drought ever this
year, with the first three months of 2026 being
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record. Over 60 percent of the country is currently experiencing at
least moderate drought. And in many regions, the situation is far more
severe.

Ninety-nine percent of the Southeast
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is in drought, with over 60 percent in severe to exceptional drought.
This has spurred
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record-breaking wildfires across the region—Georgia has already had
eight times
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as many burned acres so far this year compared to the pace of the last
five years. The Great Plains region is facing similar challenges.
Nearly 90 percent of Nebraska
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is in drought, and the region has already experienced record-breaking
spring wildfires that burned over a million acres
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of land across Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. And in the West,
extended drought is reaching a tipping point, following the lowest
snowpack levels in a century. Utah recently announced a state of
emergency
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over its water crisis, with the entire state in severe drought and 22
of 29 counties experiencing extreme drought. Colorado, which also
relies on snowpack, may soon
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follow.

These droughts, and their subsequent impacts on wildfires, are
directly related to climate change. Climate scientist Kaitlyn Trudeau
described
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the relationship this way: “Climate change is making the atmosphere
thirstier. As it gets hotter, the amount of moisture that is pulled
out of the landscape or sucked out of plants and soils also
increases.” A 2023 study
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journal _Environmental Research Letters_ found that almost 40 percent
of the area burned by wildfires in the western United States over the
last several decades can be attributed to the emissions of the
world’s largest fossil fuel companies. Speaking of the connection
between climate change and increasing dryness that is contributing to
wildfire growth, the author of the study said
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“I’ve never had such a strong correlation in my data before.”

Big Oil companies understood their role in enabling these climate
effects decades ago. In 1981, Exxon scientist Henry Shaw wrote an
internal memorandum
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Exxon’s president of research and engineering explaining that it was
“Exxon’s position” that a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide
from the burning of fossil fuels would result in “major shifts in
rainfall.” In 1982, the American Petroleum Institute commissioned a
report
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warning that climate change would have “serious consequences for
man’s comfort and survival since patterns of aridity and rainfall
can change.” And in 1998, Shell confidentially predicted
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that if fossil fuels were not brought under control there would be
“more droughts” that would “dramatically change” agricultural
patterns and “disrupt eco-systems.” Shell even predicted that
because of these changes, “conflicts would abound” and
“civilization could prove a fragile thing.”

Then there are summer storms. Hurricane season began on June 1. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted
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than average hurricane season in the Pacific this year (combined with
a below-normal season in the Atlantic, where El Niño generally
suppresses the number of storms), forecasting
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between three and six hurricanes, including one to three major storms.

Although hurricanes are not new phenomena, climate change is
increasing their severity in several ways. Higher sea surface
temperatures make hurricanes more likely to intensify—in fact, over
the past 40 years, three times as many
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hundred miles of coasts have intensified rapidly due to warming of the
oceans. Storms are also staying stronger
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did in the past, with warmer sea surface temperatures leading to a
“slower decay” of storms by increasing the amount of moisture they
can carry. They are generating
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more rainfall, as well. For every degree of warming, the atmosphere
can hold
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7 percent more water vapor that could fall as rain. For example, a
study [[link removed]] funded by the
Energy Department looking at Hurricane Ida concluded that climate
change was directly responsible for up to half a million people’s
exposure to the storm’s floodwaters.

Coastal storms are also becoming more dangerous due to rising seas,
whose levels have increased
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eight to nine inches since 1880, and may rise multiple feet
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during this century. A study
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Sandy estimated that sea level rise increased the likelihood of
flooding in that storm by 300 percent.

Big Oil companies were fully aware that climate change would make
coastal storms like these more dangerous. In 1989, Shell Oil Company
produced a confidential planning document
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that predicted, based on “conventional and probably conservative”
assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause
“more violent weather,” including “more storms” and “more
deluges.”

In fact, Big Oil companies demonstrated their understanding of and
belief in these scientific conclusions by modifying
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infrastructure, often at significant expense, to prepare for the
coming reality of worsening storms and rising sea levels. In the
1990s, engineers working for Shell, Exxon, and ConocoPhillips noted
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for natural gas pipelines that there could be a “considerable
increase of the frequency of storms as a result of climate change,”
even specifying for one offshore natural gas platform that an
“estimated rise in water level, due to global warming, of 0.5 meters
may be assumed” for the project’s 25-year lifespan.

Even as these firms were taking action to protect their own assets
from the climate harms they knew were coming, these same companies
were engaging in massive disinformation campaigns to, as one fossil
fuel coalition’s internal strategy document
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put it, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” In the
words
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of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who championed anti-climate legislation
when he was in Congress: “They lied.… 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.”

One of these costs is the carefree summers of our past. Big Oil stole
them from us. So over the next few months, if—or more likely
when—you find yourself baking under the sun of a record-breaking
heat wave that’s making it impossible to enjoy your favorite summer
activities, or stuck inside because the air outdoors is dangerously
smoky from wildfires near and far, keep in mind that this didn’t
just happen. Our summers haven’t simply gotten worse. They have been
made worse by specific companies that knew that what they were doing
would ruin summer and went ahead and did it anyway. We shouldn’t let
them get away with it.

_[__AARON REGUNBERG_
[[link removed]]_ is a contributing
editor at The New Republic, co-host of the Fighting Fascism podcast,
and a climate lawyer.] _

* big oil
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* Climate
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* Climate Change
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* Climate Crisis
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* Fossil Fuel
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* Heat waves
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* heat wave deaths
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* Hurricanes
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* El Nino
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* Climate denial
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* Trump Administration
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* Donald Trump
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* Congress
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