The fossil fuel industry killed at least twenty-five Americans in this week’s heat dome.
Mitchell Ray Cooley was seventy-four. He had a medical condition the Hinds County coroner said impaired his judgment. He went missing Thursday, July 2. His body was found the next day behind a gas station. The cause of death was weather-related heat exposure, with no indication of foul play. Martha Irene Van Egmond was eighty-three. She fell in her garden in Bolton, Mississippi, on June 27. Her husband fell trying to help her up. They called out. Two men from a nearby apartment complex eventually came. It was too late for Martha. “She died surrounded by flowers, doing what she loved,” her husband Rick told WAPT. The chief death investigator for Hinds County attributed her death to the heat combined with her age. In New Jersey, officials reported twenty-two suspected heat-related deaths across ten counties, mostly in central and northern parts of the state. The ages of the deceased range from their mid-thirties to their eighties. Many were found in homes without air conditioning, outside their residences, on the street, or in parked cars.
The New Jersey Department of Public Health said it plain. “This is not a typical summer heatwave. This type of heat can quickly become life-threatening to humans and to animals of all ages.”
The industry did not pull a trigger. Exxon and the other majors burned their product for a hundred and fifty years and the atmosphere caught the heat and held it. They knew, by their own internal science from the 1970s onward, what they were doing to the climate. They funded the doubt about that science the way they funded the doubt about tobacco before it. They traded the lives of people like Mitchell Cooley and Martha Van Egmond for shareholder return. The people who died in homes without air conditioning this week died in a climate the industry’s product altered, and they died without the cooling infrastructure a society that had decided to protect them would have built.
Bill McKibben, in Eaarth, wrote that we are no longer adapting to a future-tense climate. We are adjusting to a planet that has already changed. The Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts 2021 assessment put the statewide average temperature up about three degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, with the winter warming most pronounced in the northwest part of the state. The lake-ice record on Lake Mendota, the longest continuous such record in North America, shows the same arc: the lake averages about twenty-nine fewer days of ice cover than it did at the baseline. In Adams County, the notebook records what those statewide averages mean at ground level. Summer days over ninety come earlier in May and stack deeper into September. The cooling-degree days — the heating-and-cooling industry’s measure of how much air conditioning a building has to push — have climbed every year of the notebook. The first mosquito used to arrive in May. The first mosquito now arrives in March some years.
It does not get as hot in Adams County as it did in New Jersey and Mississippi this week. But the principle that killed Mitchell Cooley behind a gas station is the same principle that has been moving the curve in central Wisconsin for a generation, and the people who will die here when the curve produces a heat dome of its own are the same kind of people. The elderly on a fixed income. The people whose houses are old and uninsulated. The people who work outside. The people without the income or the credit to install central air in a house that did not need it when it was built.
The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement for the second time on January 20, 2025. The same administration rolled back the methane rule for oil and gas operations and rescinded the unspent balance of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program. On July 4, 2025, it signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a law that phased out wind-component manufacturing credits by the end of 2027 and rescinded the IRA’s remaining conservation funding the USDA was running to help farmers adapt to longer and hotter growing seasons. The same administration is now telling people to drink fluids and check on their neighbors. The advice is correct. It is also the cheapest possible response to a problem the administration’s own policies are deepening.
The fossil fuel industry did not kill these people alone. A community that checks on its widow in the heat, installs the window unit for the elderly neighbor, knows which houses on the section-line road cannot survive a hundred degrees — that community survives what the atmosphere hands it. Wendell Berry called this the membership work in The Unsettling of America. We Too Chapter 16 names the contradiction when that membership is gone: Community Collapse. The cooling centers in Newark and Jackson are staffed by people doing what they can. They cannot check on every house that lost its neighbors to foreclosure.
The notebook has an entry for this week. The temperature in Friendship hit ninety-three on Saturday, with a heat index above a hundred. The next heat dome is the question — not whether there will be one, but whether the people in the houses without air conditioning on the south side of the county will have someone check on them when it comes.