“Dangerous and record-breaking.” Heat wave will wither West over the weekend. About 42 million people are under heat alerts Friday across the West, Rocky Mountains and southeast Texas.

Record-breaking, dangerous and deadly – even without Houston power outages in the wake of Hurricane Beryl. Every day new reports arrive about heat-related deaths in this country – and elsewhere.

Last year, the Centers for Disease Control logged more than 2,300 death certificates citing excessive heat, the most in 45 years of records. And overheated bodies can trigger underlying pre-existing conditions.

Also in May, the World Health Organization reported that “[t]he number of people exposed to extreme heat is growing exponentially due to climate change in all world regions.”

Last month more than 1,000 pilgrims died during the Muslim Hadj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, as temperatures reached 125F.

Soaring electric bills for the lucky ones and death for the less fortunate are just collateral damage to Big Oil, which has known of its role in global warming for more than 50 years, and Big Finance, which creates nothing but money for its shareholders.

Earlier this month, Influence Map reported research that “finds that the oil and gas industry has used a playbook of narratives and arguments to systematically oppose, weaken, and delay the energy transition since at least 1967.”

Under this longtime playbook, IM notes, the campaign against electric vehicles and renewable energy “has been stifled,” while “the Carbon Majors database shows that the cumulative emissions associated with the sale of the associations’ members fossil fuel products have grown significantly.”

Big Oil propaganda, according to International Map, focuses on three narratives: solution skepticism, policy neutrality and affordability and energy security – “represent a continuation of historical climate science denial tactics that have been prevalent within the fossil fuel industry.”

But Big Oil could not produce its polluted profits on its own. It has willing accomplices among the biggest banks in the world.

Oil Change International – obviously concerned with more than car maintenance – and Friends of the Earth United States reported in April that “between 2020 and 2022, G20 governments and the multilateral development banks [MDBs] provided $142 billion in international public finance for fossil fuels, almost 1.4 times their support for clean energy in the same period [$104 billion].”

Their conclusion is inescapable. Big Oil and Big Money, working in concert, put immediate profitability ahead of the sustainability of planetary life.

“Instead of catalyzing just and equitable transitions that provide fair access to clean energy for all,” the report states, “many of these international public finance institutions continue to pour more fuel on the fire, by using their international public finance to bolster the very industries driving climate chaos.”

The results continue to prove devastating, “[f]rom record breaking heat, raging wildfires to deadly floods.”

Some climate-conscious activists have spent parts of the summer protesting [and getting arrested] at Citigroup’s headquarters in Manhattan in a “Summer of Heat of Wall Street” demonstration to draw attention to the collaboration.

Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams quoted one protestor as saying: “We are on the cusp of a ruined planet, and the big banks like Citi are funding it, to the tune of trillions.”

In a bit of political theater, Wilkins reported, “Members of the group Third Act – who are mostly aged 60 and older – led a “funeral procession” near Citigroup’s Manhattan headquarters in remembrance of the senior citizens who have died during recent dangerous heat waves.

The elderly, children and outdoor workers are among the people most susceptible to heat-related illnesses.

The Oil Change International/Friends of the Earth report explains:

“There is no shortage of public money available to fund the solutions we need for globally just and equitable transitions that provide fair access to clean energy for all. Public finance is not scarce, it is just poorly distributed. It is flowing to fossil fuels despite the science being clear that new fossil fuel development is incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

One of last week’s protestors, Margaret Bullit-Jonas, an Episcopalian priest, told Wilkins: “Citibank is destroying the world that God loved into being and entrusted to our care.

“At this decisive moment in history, we teeter on the brink of climate chaos. Now is the time for Citibank to choose life and to stop financing fossil fuels.”