“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.
Activists hold a demonstration to remember the 2,700 people who died during a recent heatwave and call for climate action, on July 13, 2026 in London.
(Photo by Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Jul 28, 2026
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.
Report Shows How Trump’s Fossil Fuel Agenda Is ‘Making Everyone’s Lives More Expensive’
Between 2026-40, the average wholesale price of liquefied natural gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade, thanks to Trump’s acceleration of exports and the construction of AI data centers.
A barge moves along the water past ExxonMobil and QatarEnergy’s Golden Pass liquefied natural gas facility in Port Arthur on April 2, 2026.
(Photo by Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
Stephen Prager
Jul 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
As President Donald Trump’s push for artificial intelligence data centers sends demand for natural gas soaring, a report released Tuesday projects that wholesale prices will likely double by the late 2030s if his energy and AI policies continue, driving up household energy bills.
The report from the climate activist group Oil Change International, which argues for an end to reliance on fossil fuels, found that recent surges in wholesale natural gas prices are being driven by Trump’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda, which has cranked up natural gas exports.
In his second term, Trump has resumed and accelerated approvals for new natural gas export terminals following a pause on permits under the Biden administration.
Nearly 90 million metric tons of new annual liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity reached a final investment decision as of June, on top of 60 million that had already been under construction, the report found. Combined, the researchers predicted that these projects could double US LNG exports by the early 2030s.
While pursuing energy dominance, Trump is also pursuing “AI dominance,” which has included the breakneck development of data centers specifically built to run on fossil fuels, including natural gas.
His administration has fast-tracked federal permits for data center developers, loosened environmental review processes, and directed his agencies to provide incentives to finance the data center boom.
Gas is expected to power much of the near-term energy use from these data centers. The facilities, which operate 24/7, are being constructed faster than transmission lines can keep up, meaning that new gas plants are being proposed as an alternative.
The report finds that the demands of the AI data center boom could increase gas consumption by 17% by the early 2030s. With the cheapest gas being rapidly depleted, more demand will require producers to expand drilling in parts of the country where it’s significantly more expensive to operate, like the Haynesville shale region of Louisiana and East Texas.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have gutted federal support for wind power construction and other renewable energy sources, which will further increase dependency on gas.
In addition to pumping more planet-heating greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the report finds that this increased demand will likely cause prices to soar for consumers.
Citing fluctuations in the Henry Hub gas price benchmark, the report projected that between 2026-40, the average wholesale price of gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade of US LNG exports, which it notes was “a decade when energy price volatility was already causing hardship in the US and LNG-importing countries.”
“Trump’s policies are making everyone’s lives more expensive while Big Tech and the fossil fuel industry cash in. Our research shows that the cost-of-living crisis will only escalate in the coming years if Congress and government agencies don’t intervene,” said Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International.
“Our leaders must stand up to Trump, phase out LNG exports, stop the reckless data center build-out, and transition the US economy off of fossil fuels to make energy affordable again,” he added.
Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, argued in an op-ed for Common Dreams on Tuesday that Oil Change’s report, as well as another recent report demonstrating how the fossil fuel industry had hidden the climate damage caused by natural gas from the public for more than half a century, showed that it’s long past time to “make gas a dirty word” in a similar fashion to oil.
“Politicians locking us into natural gas are guaranteeing that our kids will spend much of their lives paying far more for energy than they should—and far more than people in the rest of the world will be spending,” he wrote.
McKibben noted recent reporting in The New York Times detailing how, in the wake of Trump’s war in Iran, which has caused LNG prices to soar across Europe and Asia, nations are beginning to “unshackle” themselves from it as an alternative fuel source. Not so in the US.
“The natural gas industry,” he wrote, “is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.”
Between 2026-40, the average wholesale price of liquefied natural gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade, thanks to Trump’s acceleration of exports and the construction of AI data centers.
A barge moves along the water past ExxonMobil and QatarEnergy’s Golden Pass liquefied natural gas facility in Port Arthur on April 2, 2026.
(Photo by Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
Stephen Prager
Jul 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
As President Donald Trump’s push for artificial intelligence data centers sends demand for natural gas soaring, a report released Tuesday projects that wholesale prices will likely double by the late 2030s if his energy and AI policies continue, driving up household energy bills.
The report from the climate activist group Oil Change International, which argues for an end to reliance on fossil fuels, found that recent surges in wholesale natural gas prices are being driven by Trump’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda, which has cranked up natural gas exports.
In his second term, Trump has resumed and accelerated approvals for new natural gas export terminals following a pause on permits under the Biden administration.
Nearly 90 million metric tons of new annual liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity reached a final investment decision as of June, on top of 60 million that had already been under construction, the report found. Combined, the researchers predicted that these projects could double US LNG exports by the early 2030s.
While pursuing energy dominance, Trump is also pursuing “AI dominance,” which has included the breakneck development of data centers specifically built to run on fossil fuels, including natural gas.
His administration has fast-tracked federal permits for data center developers, loosened environmental review processes, and directed his agencies to provide incentives to finance the data center boom.
Gas is expected to power much of the near-term energy use from these data centers. The facilities, which operate 24/7, are being constructed faster than transmission lines can keep up, meaning that new gas plants are being proposed as an alternative.
The report finds that the demands of the AI data center boom could increase gas consumption by 17% by the early 2030s. With the cheapest gas being rapidly depleted, more demand will require producers to expand drilling in parts of the country where it’s significantly more expensive to operate, like the Haynesville shale region of Louisiana and East Texas.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have gutted federal support for wind power construction and other renewable energy sources, which will further increase dependency on gas.
In addition to pumping more planet-heating greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the report finds that this increased demand will likely cause prices to soar for consumers.
Citing fluctuations in the Henry Hub gas price benchmark, the report projected that between 2026-40, the average wholesale price of gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade of US LNG exports, which it notes was “a decade when energy price volatility was already causing hardship in the US and LNG-importing countries.”
“Trump’s policies are making everyone’s lives more expensive while Big Tech and the fossil fuel industry cash in. Our research shows that the cost-of-living crisis will only escalate in the coming years if Congress and government agencies don’t intervene,” said Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International.
“Our leaders must stand up to Trump, phase out LNG exports, stop the reckless data center build-out, and transition the US economy off of fossil fuels to make energy affordable again,” he added.
Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, argued in an op-ed for Common Dreams on Tuesday that Oil Change’s report, as well as another recent report demonstrating how the fossil fuel industry had hidden the climate damage caused by natural gas from the public for more than half a century, showed that it’s long past time to “make gas a dirty word” in a similar fashion to oil.
“Politicians locking us into natural gas are guaranteeing that our kids will spend much of their lives paying far more for energy than they should—and far more than people in the rest of the world will be spending,” he wrote.
McKibben noted recent reporting in The New York Times detailing how, in the wake of Trump’s war in Iran, which has caused LNG prices to soar across Europe and Asia, nations are beginning to “unshackle” themselves from it as an alternative fuel source. Not so in the US.
“The natural gas industry,” he wrote, “is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.”
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