Extreme heat: climate violence caused by the fossil fuel system

In visions of industrial modernity, fossil fuels have always been associated with innovation, progress, and economic development. Industrialist John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil company, celebrated the extraction and processing of oil as a socially beneficial and divinely sanctioned enterprise that brings light, heat, and affordable energy to the masses. Coal, later oil and gas, indeed enabled unprecedented development – powering electrification, transportation, mass industrial production, and significantly contributing to the material standard of living for people in most parts of the world. This fossil-fuel development narrative is still with us. Donald Trump’s slogan drill, baby, drill – keep drilling, baby, keep drilling – confirms it.

However, the celebratory framing of fossil fuels as the material foundation of prosperity has come into conflict with what their combustion unquestionably caused and continues to cause – global warming and the rapidly destabilizing climate system. Fossil energy sources are today the main drivers of the climate crisis. What was historically understood as progress, development, and growth in prosperity must now be understood within a different conceptual framework – one that can capture the damage and harm caused by burning coal, oil, and gas on a planetary scale.

On one side is political violence, which I wrote about previously: in many contexts, fossil wealth has enabled the consolidation of authoritarian regimes, corruption, and oligarchic power, and contributed to unequal wealth distribution, repression, and conflicts. On the other side is environmental violence. Ongoing extraction, production, and burning of oil, coal, and gas release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and lead to warming, which manifests increasingly as extreme weather – more frequent and intense heatwaves, droughts, water shortages, floods, and extreme rainfall. Unstable and extreme weather causes damage, harm, and economic losses, and has profound impacts on human well-being and ecosystem health. 

Burning oil, burning the planet

It is an undisputed fact that burning fossil fuels is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions and a fundamental driver of climate change. The share of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) in the global energy mix has steadily increased over the past two centuries – from nearly zero at the beginning of the 19th century to about 80 percent today. Approximately 15 billion tons of fossil fuels are extracted annually. In 2018, global oil production reached a record level of 100 million barrels per day. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), one-third of the world's energy comes from oil, while gas and coal each account for roughly 25 percent.

Burning coal, oil, and gas releases billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Fossil fuels are responsible for 78 percent of global emissions and about 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide (UN). About half of these emissions are absorbed by natural sinks such as forests, vegetation, soil, and oceans. The rest accumulates in the atmosphere and persists for centuries. By June 2026, atmospheric CO2 concentration reached approximately 427 ppm – the highest in over three million years.

As a result of human-produced emissions, the global average temperature has increased by 1.2 °C compared to pre-industrial levels (1850–1900). This warming has already triggered extensive and observable climate changes and increasingly manifests as extreme weather. Heatwaves are longer, more frequent, and several degrees Celsius more intense. Extreme rainfall has intensified because warmer air can hold more moisture. Droughts are longer and more severe, as are wildfires. The years 2023 and 2024 were the hottest in recorded history. Currently, Europe is experiencing a historic wave of oppressive heat and temperature records, which is not a product of natural variability but has been demonstrably amplified by climate change caused by fossil fuel combustion.

Attributing extremes to climate change

Significant progress has been made in climate science over the past decade. Research has shifted from monitoring global trends and indicators, such as rising global average temperature or sea level, to so-called attribution – assigning specific extreme events and phenomena to climate change. Attribution research now can determine how much human-caused climate change alters the likelihood and severity of particular meteorological extremes. The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, founded in 2015, works with extensive data sets and global climate models to analyze how human-induced thermodynamic changes (such as increased temperature and humidity due to emissions) interact with natural variability in the climate system (such as pressure fluctuations in the southern Pacific and the El Niño phenomenon).

Analysis by the WWA team shows that the current heatwave has been clearly intensified by climate change. The high-pressure system that traps hot air over Europe and the influx of warm air from Africa are well-known meteorological phenomena in summer months. However, according to WWA, the level of extreme heat would have been impossible 50 years ago. Human-induced climate change has amplified this phenomenon so much that a comparable heatwave in 1976 would have been about 3.5 °C cooler, and in 2003 about 2 °C cooler.

It’s not just about this year’s record heat. An analysis of 213 heatwaves from 2000–2023, published in 2025 in the journal Nature, one of the most prestigious and influential scientific periodicals, shows that climate change has made all 213 episodes more likely and intense, with roughly a quarter of them being practically impossible without climate change. Another study found that the heat in Europe at the end of June 2025, when temperatures in twelve European cities exceeded 38 °C, would have been 1–4 °C cooler in a climate without anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Thanks to attribution analyses, we know that climate change not only intensifies extreme heat but also other extremes – wildfires, rainfall, floods, droughts. It has increased the likelihood and severity of heavy rainfall that caused floods in the Ahr valley in Germany in July 2021, and intensified devastating wildfires in Australia at the turn of 2019 and 2020.

Violence of climate change

Extreme weather events cause damage to people and nature. They usually lead to huge economic damages, as well as social and cultural losses. Extreme heat kills, worsens health, burdens hospitals with increased admissions, causes drops in productivity, infrastructure damage, drought, crop failure, and livestock deaths. Last year's heatwaves, for example, caused an estimated 16,500 deaths. The current heatwave has already claimed dozens of lives and caused material losses. France recorded over a thousand excess deaths due to the heatwave, along with a sharp increase in heart attacks and overload of emergency systems.

Wildfires and floods caused by heavy rains are other destructive disasters that cause extensive ecological, economic, and social damage – injuries, deaths, poisoning, destruction of homes, property, and infrastructure, water contamination from wastewater, chemicals, and debris, soil degradation, and loss of biodiversity. The Australian bushfires at the turn of 2019 and 2020, also demonstrably intensified by climate change, caused over 400 human deaths, thousands of hospitalizations, over 3,000 homes destroyed, and extensive infrastructure damage. They killed billions of animals and severely damaged ecosystems, including parts of the Gondwana rainforests, which are UNESCO World Heritage sites. Floods in the Ahr valley in Germany in 2021 claimed 184 lives, destroyed thousands of homes, wiped out entire villages, and caused damages exceeding 30 billion euros, making them among the most destructive and costly floods in Europe.

Extreme weather and the disasters they cause bring death, destruction, and damage. Like other forms of violence, they harm and destroy: they take human lives, cause health and physical injuries, psychological and emotional harm, significant property and financial losses, and have social impacts. This is the violence of climate change. It is not violence in the narrow sense of physical assault by one person on another, but structurally caused serious damages and harms. The current extreme storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves are not purely “natural” phenomena but are amplified by warming, with their destructive power intensified by human activity. They are socially produced risks rooted in human actions embedded in economic, political, and legal structures that sustain high greenhouse gas emissions. 

Framing it in terms of violence is therefore appropriate. It is also supported by the fact that the risks of extreme disasters are predictable and preventable. Climate science has been warning us for decades, with increasing accuracy and urgency, that continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to the destabilization of the stable climate and to weather extremes. Governments, financial institutions, and fossil fuel and other corporations have long had access to this knowledge. The ongoing expansion of fossil fuel extraction and combustion cannot be understood as morally neutral rational choices but as actions carried out with full awareness of their likely consequences – as actions that consciously, predictably, and systematically expose society to serious risks. Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, a prominent and outspoken critic of fossil capital and structural violence of fossil extraction, expressed this quite clearly and bluntly: extraction and production of fossil fuels directly lead to the loss of human lives and are a form of structural environmental violence committed by corporations and states that are unable to stop it.

Leave the oil in the ground

In the climate community, there is broad consensus that preventing dangerous warming of the planet by more than 1.5–2 °C, and thus avoiding risky climate destabilization, requires rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a very simple calculation: if this temperature threshold is not to be exceeded, the atmosphere can only absorb a certain amount of carbon dioxide. Since roughly four-fifths of global CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels, this goal primarily means a rapid end to burning coal, oil, and gas.

In English, the strategy of moving away from fossil fuels is called keep the oil in the soil. According to a study published in Nature Communications, nearly all known reserves of coal, about 80 percent of natural gas, and 70 percent of oil must remain underground. The study also suggests criteria for deciding which reserves to leave untouched – mainly, deposits in biodiversity hotspots and areas with high endemism (e.g., rainforests), protected areas, urban zones, and territories inhabited by indigenous peoples and ethnic groups living in voluntary isolation. In other words, a significant portion of the world’s fossil reserves are unexploitable and unburnable. Although it sounds radical, it is neither technologically impossible nor economically unthinkable. The International Energy Agency (IEA) Net Zero Roadmap (and other reports, such as the World Economic Forum tracker) describes this trajectory as an achievable transformation with available technologies, based on immediate phase-out of fossil fuels, rapid expansion of renewable energy infrastructure, increased energy efficiency, and methane emission reductions. The only obstacles are persistent political barriers and aggressively promoted economic interests of the fossil fuel industry. 

Tragically, the reliance on fossil fuels is actually increasing, and the planned global fossil fuel production for 2030 according to UNEP exceeds by more than 100 percent the level compatible with limiting warming to 1.5 °C. Under current – insufficient – plans for fossil fuel production and climate commitments, we are heading toward approximately 2.5 °C of global warming by the end of the century. Deliberate expansion of fossil fuel extraction and combustion creates climate conditions conducive to intensifying heatwaves, floods, droughts, and wildfires, and simultaneously condemns society to increasingly risky levels of warming and destruction – to ever more brutal and intentionally inflicted environmental violence.

The author is a political scientist. She currently works at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. She specializes in research in international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was created with the support of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, representation in the Slovak Republic