On the eve of the summer solstice, the National Weather Service was baking cookies inside a car in San Angelo, Texas. The agency used the stunt to warn about record-breaking heat across the region, but rolling up the car windows on a sunny day is a pretty good analogy for climate change in general.

The more you roll up the windows, the more heat gets trapped in the car. Not so different from blanketing the planet with heat-trapping carbon from fossil fuels. When it comes to car windows, everyone recognizes the crime of child endangerment. But the absent-minded parent is being held to a much higher standard than fossil fuel companies who are fully aware they are causing much greater harm and have spent decades distorting evidence and fighting measures to reduce the death and damage.

In San Angelo, thermometers hit 114 F for two days in a row this week — new all-time records, let alone for June. That’s 45.5 C for those of us in the rest of the world. (Canadians tend to be metrically muddled and bake in Fahrenheit. For the record, the inside of a car has to reach at least 165 F to ensure the eggs are safe.)

San Angelo wasn’t even the hot spot in Texas. Rio Grande hit 118 F and several locations breached 120 F on the heat index accounting for humidity. The heat dome is centred over Northern Mexico where Chihuahua hit 42 C at almost 1,500-metres altitude and Nuevo Laredo had consecutive days at 45 C.

Heat waves are striking hard and early in the Northern Hemisphere. In northern India, “so many people are dying from the heat that we are not getting a minute’s time to rest,“ one hearse driver told The Associated Press. “On Sunday, I carried 26 dead bodies.” With the local morgue beyond capacity, families were told to take their relatives’ bodies home.

There are far too many records to list and they are spread across the hemisphere. In Iran, Zabol hit 50.8 C on the solstice. Pakistan has cities baking at 49 C. Beijing reached 41.1 C on Thursday, not so far off Corsica at 41.6 C but well behind Xinjiang at 45 C.

Last week we looked at the sizzling seas. I’m afraid those spiking charts are even more “bonkers” this week with marine heat waves in both the North Atlantic and the North Sea and a parade of hurricanes forming much too early in the year.

We hold pet owners more accountable for rolling up the windows than we do companies who insist on fuelling this heat by expanding oil, gas and coal. Roll up the car windows, head into a store and you’re in big trouble with the law. Use the car as directed and industry cooks us like cookies, raking in billions and immune from accountability or prosecution.

That's changing. There are now over 40 local and state governments in the U.S. bringing litigation and suing Big Oil for damages. There are over 2,000 climate lawsuits at various stages around the world.

Earlier this month, the town council of View Royal, B.C., voted to work with other local governments and bring a class action lawsuit against global fossil fuel companies to recoup a share of climate damages. The town is the second in B.C., joining the town of Gibsons.

And on Thursday, the most populous county in Oregon sued big oil companies over the 2021 heat dome that killed more than 1,000 people in the Pacific Northwest.

“The heat dome that cost so much life and loss was not a natural weather event. It did not just happen because life can be cruel, nor can it be rationalized as simply a mystery of God’s will,” states the lawsuit. “Rather, the heat dome was a direct and foreseeable consequence of the Defendants’ decision to sell as many fossil fuel products over the last six decades as they could.”

You’ll probably remember that attribution studies found the heat dome to be “virtually impossible” without climate change. The county is seeking $50 million in damages from the 2021 heat dome as well as $50 billion for climate adaptation and $1.5 billion in future damages.

“These businesses knew their products were unsafe and harmful, and they lied about it," said County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson. "They have profited massively from their lies and left the rest of us to suffer the consequences and pay for the damages. We say enough is enough."

Interestingly, in addition to the usual suspects from Big Oil, the lawsuit names enablers and trade associations: McKinsey & Company along with the American Petroleum Institute and the Western States Petroleum Association.

Also this week, a court case wrapped up early in Montana. Sixteen Montana youth sued the state for violating its constitution by continuing to issue oil and gas permits. The constitution requires that “the state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”

The case ended early because the state decided not to call its roster of witnesses, including well-known climate contrarian Judith Curry. The lawyers pulled the plug after embarrassing testimony by environmental staff, one of whom said he’d never heard of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That’s a pretty extreme example, especially for an environmental bureaucrat. But much of the public suffers from a more understandable form of myopia. Fifteen or even 10 years ago, it was edgy to claim we didn’t need fossil fuels. The lack of alternatives was the fossil fuel industry’s real defence.

Things have changed so quickly, you have to have not been paying attention to realize conventional wisdom has been completely overturned. Today, even the UN secretary-general and head of the International Energy Agency are urging policymakers to catch up with the world that’s already here.

If there are any visuals to match the frightening trajectories of global heat and ice loss, they are the ones compiled by Rocky Mountain Institute this week.

One person who has been paying very close attention is Dave Roberts, longtime energy journalist and host of the Volts podcast.

“I'm not sure it's widely understood that we basically know how to decarbonize everything in the energy system now,” Roberts says. “There are areas and sectors where the solutions remain quite expensive, but we know how to bring down costs over time. Jets, ships, steel, concrete — all known.”

There are sources of climate pollution where the solutions are less clear. We don’t know how to get agriculture to zero emissions, for example. But for the vast majority of carbon pollution, the problem is deployment.

“That's where the climate/clean energy fight is now,” says Roberts. “We know where we need to go, we know how to get there, and we know it's going to be a massive economic and quality-of-life improvement. We are held back by status quo powers that profit off the current misery.

“That's a very, very different story than the ‘shiver in the dark in order to save the polar bears’ narrative that for some reason *still* seems stuck in the popular imagination. This is the big challenge for climate communicators and storytellers: update that popular narrative.”