Fossil fuel companies are burning alive people who never burned their fuel.
The Associated Press reported that Banda, India — a northern town that has recorded some of the country’s highest temperatures — endures extreme heat at all hours, even in the middle of the night, a phenomenon pushing overnight temperature records across the United States as well. The AP published a photo taken June 21, 2026, showing a woman cooling herself with an ice pack. Residents sleep outdoors, hose themselves down, use whatever they can find. Long stretches without electricity leave homes unable to run basic fans. In 2023, at least 119 people died over several days during a severe heat wave in parts of Uttar Pradesh, the state where Banda sits.
The grid is the binding crisis. When the power cuts last hours — and they do, regularly — the difference between a survivable night and a lethal one is whether a fan can turn. This is not a question of adaptation. It is a question of whether the infrastructure reaches the people who are dying.
I sit at 44°N in Adams County. Banda sits at 26°N. The same carbon dioxide traps heat at both latitudes. Global mean warming has reached 1.1°C; Wisconsin has warmed roughly 3°F since 1950, according to the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts. Lake Petenwell’s ice-out dates trend earlier. The notebook records it. The Wisconsin DNR data confirms it. The lake freezes weeks later than it did a generation ago. The same physics that is pushing Banda’s nights above 95°F is shifting the seasons outside my shop.
But the suffering is not distributed equally. India’s per capita CO2 emissions sit around 2 tons per year. The United States burns roughly 14. The people dying in Banda burned a fraction of the carbon that filled the atmosphere killing them. Those 119 dead in Uttar Pradesh were not statistics. They were parents, neighbors — someone’s people. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America named the extractive mind — the logic that treats land and animals and people as expendable input to a system that benefits someone else. The fossil fuel economy is that logic written in carbon.
The same political coalition that fought the Inflation Reduction Act is now home to most of the factories the law built. Bloomberg reported last year that 21 of the top 25 congressional districts for announced clean energy investment are represented by members who opposed the bill. The battery plants are going up anyway — Toyota outside Greensboro, Hyundai in coastal Georgia, Ford in Marshall, Michigan. More than half the announced projects over a billion dollars landed in Republican-held districts. These are not abstract numbers. They are buildings with roofs and workers and payrolls, in towns that voted against the law that paid for them.
The IRA’s rural energy provisions — $9.7 billion in loans and grants to rural electric cooperatives through the New ERA program — are the part of the story that matters most to the grid question in places like Banda. Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered here in Friendship, is the largest rural electric co-op in Wisconsin. The 1936 Rural Electrification Act ran wire to farms the market said were not worth serving. The cooperative model is running new wire now — solar, battery storage, grid hardening — through the same infrastructure the original cooperatives built.
The grid has to reach the people who are dying from the heat. That is the Berry question — does this solve for pattern, or does it build new dependencies on a new set of distant corporations? The IRA’s energy provisions answer it with a structure that already exists in Adams County: member-owned cooperatives building infrastructure the market will not build on its own.
The IPCC’s 2021 report said the warming is human and the budget for staying under 1.5 degrees is tight — about 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide remaining from 2020. That budget is being spent by whoever burns the fuel. The people paying the price are in places like Banda, where the grid fails during the heat that is now unavoidable. The kind of extreme heat that killed 119 in Uttar Pradesh is now visiting Wisconsin this summer, at a lower latitude and with a grid that mostly holds. The climate is already changed. The only question is whether the infrastructure gets built fast enough to matter — and whether it reaches the people whose names will never make a wire report from a town most Americans will never hear of.