“Big Oil’s greed is incompatible with a livable planet and unless governments rein it in, they will make a mockery of international climate targets,” said one Oxfam campaigner.
Brett Wilkins Common Dreams
An analysis published Tuesday highlights how the world’s top fossil fuel companies are expected to rake in nearly twice as much in second-quarter profits as they did during the first quarter of 2026, a windfall that comes as their polluting products help fuel extreme heat that kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world annually.
Oxfam International’s analysis warns that the profits of the world’s six largest oil and gas companies are on track to skyrocket from $23 billion during the first quarter of the year to $45 billion in Q2 as emissions from their products intensify deadly heatwaves.
“Projected full-year profits of BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies amount to $147 billion, more than their combined profits over the previous 21 months (Q2 2024 to Q4 2025),” the report states. “Among the biggest winners, Chevron is expected to report that it has quadrupled its profits to $1,200 a second in the last three months, while ExxonMobil’s profits are expected to have tripled to $1,800 a second.”
“Oil and gas corporations share an outsized responsibility for the climate crisis,” the publication continues. “Emissions from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies were sufficient to cause around 1 in 4 heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023—heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change.”
Conflicts like the US-Israeli war of choice on Iran and the ongoing Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine, as well as Big Oil greed, are among the leading factors blamed for spiking fuel costs.
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that top US fossil fuel executives have sold nearly $400 million in their own companies’ stock since Trump launched the Iran War on the last day of February.
“Fossil fuel corporations are making a killing, literally and figuratively,” Mariana Paoli, Oxfam’s climate policy lead, said in a statement Tuesday.
“As extreme heat, floods, and storms devastate communities across the world, the industry is preparing another bonanza of profits,” she continued. “Families are paying the price three times over—through destroyed homes and harvests, through soaring energy prices, and through a cost-of-living crisis worsened by dependence on fossil fuels.”
“Big Oil’s greed is incompatible with a livable planet, and unless governments rein it in, they will make a mockery of international climate targets,” Paoli added.
The report comes amid a summer of dangerous heat events in the United States, including prolonged “heat domes” that have pushed temperatures to life-threatening levels and contributed to at least dozens of deaths, as well as more record heatwaves in Europe that have left thousands dead and fueled massive wildfires.
“Yet rather than scaling back fossil fuel production and accelerating the transition to renewable energy, the six largest fossil fuel corporations plan to increase oil and gas production by 14% by 2030 compared to 2024 levels, equivalent to pumping an additional 2.5 million barrels of oil a day,” Oxfam noted.
Paoli said Tuesday that “while Big Oil fuels extreme weather events, rich countries are refusing to increase the public climate finance that poorer countries urgently need to cope with the climate crisis.”
“Until governments make the richest polluters pay, fossil fuel corporations will keep driving us deeper into climate chaos,” she added. “Taxing the richest polluters could help close the gap in funding for climate adaptation and speed the transition towards renewable energy. Fossil fuel corporations must feel the heat, not us.”
Oxfam contends that the “rich polluter profit tax” it has modeled could raise as much as $400 billion globally in its first year based on 2024 figures, compared with the estimated $290 billion to $1 trillion needed annually by 2030 to compensate for the loss and damage caused by climate change in the Global South. Unlike one-off windfall profits taxes, the rich polluter profit tax would be permanent.
“We are facing a climate emergency, therefore governments should each impose this tax swiftly,” Oxfam said last month. “Countries across all continents should form a ‘coalition of the willing’ to coordinate and speed up their efforts and counter fossil fuel company lobbying and tax avoidance.”
The Oxfam analysis follows the release earlier this month of a World Health Organization (WHO) report showing nearly 500,000 annual heat-related deaths worldwide in the years 2000-19—a figure expected to grow as extreme temperatures driven by the climate emergency become the new normal.
“Mitigating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions is imperative and urgent to limit the magnitude of human costs from extreme heat,” WHO said.
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