Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org and David Hillman is director of Stamp Out Poverty.This coming week, as record-breaking heat has morphed into killer wildfires, major oil and gas companies will report their second-quarter earnings and are widely expected to announce profits that have doubled or even quadrupled in the last three months. The obscenity of that contradiction is impossible to ignore. Oxfam analysis, released as the Q2 earnings season gets underway, shows that the world’s six largest fossil fuel corporations - BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies - are on course to nearly double their combined net income compared with the first quarter of the year, from $23 billion to around $45 billion.Their projected full-year profits of $147 billion would exceed everything the six firms made combined over the previous 21 months. Chevron’s profits alone are expected to have quadrupled to $1,200 a second over the last three months; ExxonMobil’s have roughly tripled to $1,800 a second. The juxtaposition of profit on that scale, arriving in the same weeks that communities are counting the cost of deadly heatwaves, forest fires and high energy bills, is increasingly difficult to ignore.Covering the cost of climate damageNot long ago, the idea that fossil fuel companies should contribute directly towards the cost of climate damage was dismissed as activist rhetoric. Today it is reflected in legislation, litigation and mainstream policy debate.