When Mental Health is an illness (and neurodivergence a diagnostic category) don’t expect more than 5% to understand weather systems, the motive power of the sun, or indeed that the Earth rotates eastward..

Every summer, heatwaves are narrated as if they were disaster movies. We are shown maps turning red, temperature records being shattered, and endless survival tips on how to stay cool. But when heat is described only as weather, history gives way to fate.

Heat appears as a natural calamity to endure and adapt to, rather than as a socio-ecological crisis shaped by history.

The climate crisis is not a mere ecological accident of the Earth system, but the historical expression of a global regime of capitalist accumulation. Under fossil capitalism, accumulation has long relied on turning the atmosphere into a planetary waste dump.

The temperatures Europe is reaching today cannot be understood as purely natural. The same atmospheric pattern that decades ago might have produced 35–37°C can now generate 39–43°C because it operates on a much warmer climaticbaseline.

Responsibility is unequal because emissions accumulate over centuries. Today’s heat is inseparable from generations of carbon emissions tied to fossil capitalism, extraction, colonial processes, and unequal ecological exchange.

This produces a profound asymmetry: those most historically responsible for the crisis — above all the Global North — are often best equipped to shield themselves from its effects, while those who contributed least will suffer the most.

Vulnerability is unequal because the ability to survive a heatwave depends on concrete material conditions: housing quality, insulation, access to air conditioning, and the ability to afford keeping it running amid rising energy costs. It depends on whether one can stop working when temperatures become dangerous, or whether survival itself requires remaining exposed.

Every heatwave becomes a social X-ray of capitalism: a map of class power, revealing who can buy protection and who is left exposed to suffering and death.

Even heat is political.

Cover image by @nikakolac (via Instagram)