If you want to know how many lives our rulers are willing to sacrifice to defend the fossil fuel industry, you could start by looking at Europe. A heatwave that swept over huge swathes of the continent in June may have killed as many as 25,000 people, according to one estimate from Indiana University. More than 3,000 in Spain and more still in Germany. The French national health agency has recorded more than 5,700 excess deaths. In many cities and towns, temperatures reached above 40 degrees Celsius.
Extreme heat is a major cause of weather-related death, if not the major cause. It is a brutal way to die.
As the body desperately tries to offload heat by redirecting blood flow to the skin, the heart comes under increasing strain. Internal organs can start to disintegrate and leach toxins into the bloodstream. You can lose more than a litre of fluid every hour through sweat, which can cause a drop in blood pressure and lead to kidney failure.
Extreme heat also aggravates existing health conditions, which is why older people are particularly vulnerable. In France, about two-thirds of the excess deaths in June’s heatwave were people aged 75 and older.
The effects of extreme heat also intersect with the inequalities entrenched by capitalism. Women spend 30-50 percent more of their working day above heat stress thresholds, according to University of London researcher Laurie Parsons in an interview with DW, and they are over-represented in heatwave deaths. A 2021 study found that extreme urban heat exposure has increased drastically since the 1980s—mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.
Europe has been trapped under a heat dome: a mass of high-pressure air that traps heat like a lid and prevents clouds from forming. This in turn led to diabolical wildfires across France and Spain in July that forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee for safety. In such extreme weather conditions, wildfires can generate their own thunderstorms. The technical term is pyrocumulonimbus, but NASA calls them “fire-breathing dragon” clouds.
This is the hellish world capitalism is creating for more and more of us every day. It’s not just happening in Europe but all over the world. As a result of climate change, formerly extreme and rare weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense under the impacts of climate change. More heat domes, more mass deaths and raging infernos.
Analysis by a consortium of climate scientists from World Weather Attribution found that the June heatwave in Europe would not have been possible without climate change. The pyrocumulonimbus cloud produced by the fires in France was the first one ever to be recorded in the country.
We know what’s behind all this: the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels, driven by capitalism. The CSIRO states that about 90 percent of the world’s fossil fuel carbon emissions—the main cause of global temperature rises—comes from the burning of coal, oil and gas. In 2024, it was estimated that half of all planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions could be traced back to just 32 companies, according to figures from the CarbonMajors database.
And cooking the globe is extremely good business. According to research by Oxfam, the six biggest fossil fuel companies doubled their profits for the second quarter of 2026, raking in $46 billion compared to a measly $23 billion in the first three months of the year. They’re planning to increase their oil and gas production by 14 percent by 2030.
And this is not just a question of a handful of unregulated cowboy companies holding the rest of the world to ransom. CarbonMajors notes that in 1924, 17 of the top 20 carbon-emitting companies were state-owned, rather than private corporations. More to the point, fossil fuels are profitable only because of capitalism’s insatiable demand for them. Energy grids are built around them. Global shipping networks depend upon them. They’re a key ingredient in the production of plastics, fertilisers and construction materials. Militaries could not function without them.
The whole system of capitalism is defined by the competitive drive for profit. Capitalists control the world’s productive resources and will put those resources into motion only if they can turn a profit and secure a competitive advantage over their rivals. As long as this remains society’s motive force, the rich and powerful will go on burning fossil fuels to the very last drop.
Little wonder, then, that Europe’s far right have nothing to say about the devastating impacts of climate change other than to cast doubt on them. Figures like France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen paint Muslims as a threat to European civilisation while championing the industries that are destroying the basis for human life on Earth. They blame migrants for unemployment and homelessness while hundreds of thousands flee their homes and livelihoods under a pall of black smoke.
But this is a crime of a whole system, one defended not just by the far right but by the parties and institutions of the political mainstream. Their beloved flim-flam schemes like emissions trading programs and net-zero pledges have arguably done more to keep the planet cooking than far-right climate denialism.
As the continent sweltered, the Guardian reported that Europe’s “most effective method” of cutting greenhouse gas emissions—the Emissions Trading System (ETS) in place since 2005—was at risk of being watered down. But the ETS is an utterly neoliberal mechanism with no hope of averting climate catastrophe. Watering it down is like taking a bit of air out of the smallest lifeboat on the Titanic.
The only solution is a complete break with capitalism and its competitive, profit-driven logic. Only a system that puts the world’s productive resources under collective, democratic control—placed in the hands of the people who do the work—and harnessed to the logic of cooperation could we even begin to get ourselves out of the hellish mess capitalism has got us all into.
The Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote about society being faced with a choice between socialism or barbarism. She may not have predicted fire-breathing dragon clouds, but 21st-century capitalism continues to prove her right.
