Trump’s Anti-Green Agenda Could Lead to 1.3 Million More Climate Deaths. The Poorest Countries Will Be Impacted Most.

New advances in environmental science are providing a detailed understanding of the human costs of the Trump administration's approach to climate change.

Increasing temperatures are already killing enormous numbers of people. A ProPublica and Guardian analysis that draws on sophisticated modeling by independent researchers found that President Donald Trump's America First" agenda of expanding fossil fuels and decimating efforts to reduce emissions will add substantially to that toll, with the vast majority of deaths occurring outside the United States.

Most of the people expected to die from soaring temperatures in the coming decades live in poor, hot countries in Africa and South Asia, according to recent research. Many of these countries emitted relatively little of the pollution that causes climate change - and are least prepared to cope with the increasing heat.

ProPublica and the Guardian's analysis shows that extra greenhouse gases released in the next decade as a result of Trump's policies are expected to lead to as many as 1.3 million more temperature-related deaths worldwide in the 80 years after 2035. The actual number of people who die from heat will be much higher, but a warming planet will also result in fewer deaths from cold.

Leaders from most of the world's countries are now gathered at an international conference in Belem, Brazil, to address the escalating effects of climate change. The absence of the United States, which has 4% of the world's population but has produced 20% of its greenhouse gases, has been pointedly noted by participants. Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino are the only other nations that did not send a delegation to the meeting, according to a provisional list of participants.

Our calculations use modeled estimates of the additional emissions that will be released as a result of Trump's policies as well as a peer-reviewed metric for what is known as the mortality cost of carbon. That metric, which builds on Nobel Prize-winning science that has informed federal policy for more than a decade, predicts the number of temperature-related deaths from additional emissions. The estimate reflects deaths from heat-related causes, such as heat stroke and the exacerbation of existing illnesses, minus lives saved by reduced exposure to cold. It does not include the massive number of deaths expected from the broader effects of climate change, such as droughts, floods, wars, vector-borne diseases, hurricanes, wildfires and reduced crop yields.

The numbers, while large, are just a fraction of the estimated 83 million temperature-related deaths that could result from all human-caused emissions over the same period if climate-warming pollution is not curtailed. But they speak to the human cost of prioritizing U.S. corporate interests over the lives of people around the globe.

The sheer numbers are horrifying," said Ife Kilimanjaro, executive director of the nonprofit U.S. Climate Action Network, which works with groups around the world to combat climate change.

But for us they're more than numbers," she added. These are people with lives, with families, with hopes and dreams. They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world."

The Trump administration, sometimes with the help of congressional Republicans, has dramatically set back efforts to limit climate change, cutting tax credits for clean electricity, fuels, vehicles and manufacturing; easing pollution restrictions on coal-fired power plants; and gutting fuel standards on cars, to name just a few of the climate initiatives that were recently reversed.

Prior to Trump, we had the most ambitious climate policy that the U.S. has ever come up with - our best effort to date by far of addressing this growing problem," said Marshall Burke, an economist at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University.

When we roll these things back, it is fundamentally affecting the damages we're going to see around the world," said Burke.

Responding to questions about the reversals and their projected consequences, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers attacked what she referred to as the Green Energy Scam." America still doesn't buy the left's bogus climate claims," she wrote, without specifically addressing the forecast of heat-related deaths.

The finding that fossil fuels were causing the world to warm first made it to the White House at least 60 years ago, when advisers to President Lyndon Johnson warned that runaway emissions would lead to precisely the extreme events and rapid warming the planet is undergoing today. Scores of experts have denounced the current administration's disregard for climate science, noting there is overwhelming evidence that human-driven climate change is already causing damage that will only get worse.

When Heat Becomes Deadly

The people most likely to die from rising temperatures are those already disproportionately vulnerable to extreme heat: laborers toiling outdoors; the very old; the very young, who lose fluids especially quickly; people with disabilities and illnesses; and people who lack air conditioning and stable housing.

A man holds the body of his three 3-year-old son, who died during a 2015 heatwave, outside the cold storage area at a morgue in Karachi, Pakistan. Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images

Extremely high temperatures kill by overwhelming the body's ability to cool itself. Sweating often ceases. Unconsciousness, organ failure and death follow. Rising temperatures also exacerbate existing health conditions, triggering heart attacks, strokes and respiratory problems that hasten death.

In recent years, climate change has caused the number of deaths from heat exposure to climb around the world. In the U.S., deaths linked to heat have increased more than 50% since 2000, according to a recent study from the Yale School of Public Health.

Hundreds of people died in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, when a high pressure system trapped hot air above parts of the area and caused temperatures to soar well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Many of the elderly victims were found alone in their homes, without air conditioning. One farmworker collapsed in a field, another in a plant nursery. A 65-year-old took her last breath in her parked car and was essentially baked by the sun. A team of climate scientists found that the heat wave would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.

Still, when deaths from both heat and cold are considered together, the total number of temperature-related deaths may not appear catastrophic right away. As the planet warms in the next few decades, the global decline in people dying from cold may almost entirely offset deaths from heat. But in the second half of the century, long after Trump has left office, the number of heat-related deaths is expected to greatly outpace the reduction of deaths from cold.

While the U.S. has emitted more climate-warming pollution than any other country, when deaths from both heat and cold are considered together, it is expected to suffer only up to 1% of temperature-related deaths worldwide caused by the additional carbon emissions, according to a working paper by R. Daniel Bressler, an assistant economics professor at Bentley University who developed the concept of the mortality cost of carbon.

Some of the world's poorest countries will almost certainly struggle to adapt. Niger and Somalia - whose emissions are dwarfed by those of the U.S. - are projected to have the world's highest per capita death rates from increasing temperatures, Bressler found. India is expected to suffer more temperature-related deaths than any other country. Pakistan, which has just 3% of the world's population, is expected to have between 6% and 7% of the world's temperature-related deaths, depending on its ability to adapt to the effects of heat.

Projected Temperature-Related Deaths From Additional Carbon Emissions Compared to Country Population

How disproportionately countries are expected to be impacted relative to their population size.

Note: Some places, like South Sudan and Western Sahara, were excluded from Bressler's analysis. The number of projected deaths may vary depending on how countries adapt to heat.
Source: Data from R. Daniel Bressler.

People in my community will die," said Ayisha Siddiqa, a Los Angeles-based climate activist whose family continues to live in her native Pakistan.

Siddiqa, who co-founded the environmental group Future Generations Tribunal, recalled the effect of heat on her family in 2022, when temperatures in Pakistan and India soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Like most people in the region, the Siddiqas do not have air conditioning. Her father, she said, lost consciousness and had to be hospitalized during the deadly heat wave.

It's unexplainable," she said of the heat. It's kind of like the entire air around you is sticking to your body and you can't breathe."

Progress Reversed

At this time last year, the United States was on track to drastically reduce its emissions.

Under President Joe Biden, the nation made landmark investments to turn away from fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, and harness power from the wind and the sun. Hundreds of billions of dollars were being directed toward reducing emissions through a variety of initiatives, such as putting more electric vehicles on the roads and making office buildings and homes more energy efficient.

Look Up Countries' Shares of Projected Temperature-Related DeathsNote: Only the 100 most populous countries are included in this table. The number of projected deaths may vary depending on how countries adapt to heat. Sources: R. Daniel Bressler, UN's World Population Prospects 2024

Biden also reversed Trump's first-term decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the international deal struck a decade ago in which countries pledged to work together to limit global warming.

But as soon as he returned to the White House, Trump began to undo it all. On his first day back, in front of a crowd of cheering supporters wearing MAGA hats, he authorized the United States to again pull out of the Paris Agreement, which he previously deemed a rip-off." Just 10 days earlier, the World Meteorological Association had declared 2024 the hottest year on record.

Over the next 100 days, Trump instigated more efforts to roll back climate policies than he had in his entire previous term.

In March, his Environmental Protection Agency celebrated the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history" when it announced a slew of actions intended to reverse his predecessor's efforts to rein in climate change. Among them were regulations that restrict emissions from cars and trucks, limit air pollution from oil and gas operations, and require power plants to capture planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Then came the One Big Beautiful Bill," Trump's nickname for the domestic policy megabill he signed in July. The act cut tax incentives for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles; made it easier and cheaper to drill or mine on federal lands; reversed efforts to cut emissions of methane, another greenhouse gas; and increased government support for coal.

Calculating the Lives Lost

To understand the consequences of these moves, ProPublica and the Guardian used the results of modeling from Rhodium Group, an independent, nonpartisan research firm that analyzed the policy changes from this year. The group came up with a high, low and midrange estimate of the amount of additional emissions expected to be released in the next 10 years as a result of the rollbacks the EPA announced in March and the bill passed this summer. (The modeling also reflects changes due to market forces and other factors.)

For our calculation, our starting point was Rhodium Group's midrange number: 5.7 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions through 2035. (Using the firm's other estimates would result in between 571,000 and nearly 2.2 million extra temperature-related deaths due to Trump's policy changes. The Princeton University-led REPEAT Project conducted a similar analysis and came up with 6.9 billion metric tons, which would result in even more projected deaths.)

To translate those emissions to deaths, ProPublica and the Guardian turned to the field of climate economics, which links human-generated emissions to measurable economic costs. A model that calculates what's known as the social cost of carbon by Nobel laureate William Nordhaus has been used in federal policy since 2009, guiding everything from requirements mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission to EPA regulations.

While Nordhaus estimated the broad economic cost of climate change, Bressler, the Bentley University professor, used Nordhaus' model as a starting point but focused on just temperature-related deaths. Drawing also on public health research, Bressler estimated the amount of additional carbon dioxide expected to cause one death over 80 years: 4,434 metric tons. The figure is equivalent to the average lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans or 146.2 Nigerians. Using the same estimate, Bressler also calculated how many deaths are expected over the course of 80 years from each additional metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. He published his findings in Nature Communications in 2021.

In response to questions for this story, the EPA, which recently stopped considering the social cost of carbon at Trump's direction, rejected Bressler's scientific analysis. The agency called it an exercise in moral posturing, not rigorous science" and said that the calculation of deaths per metric ton of carbon is based on unvalidated extrapolations" and ignores the dramatic uncertainties that dominate long-term climate projections."

Climate scientists, however, said that the mortality cost of carbon is a valid metric. Peer reviewers for the 2021 paper that laid out the concept described it as valuable and intuitive" and relevant for designing policy. After publishing the study, Bressler went on to serve as climate staff economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Others have emphasized that, because Bressler's model focuses narrowly on the direct effects of temperature, the estimates it generates are vastly lower than the total death toll from climate change. It also does not capture the serious but non-deadly effects of extreme heat, such as reduced productivity and increased misery.

Bressler acknowledges that his work produces estimates and that the true number of additional deaths due to greenhouse gas emissions will depend on several unknowable factors, including how quickly people adapt to changing temperatures and market forces. Critically, future presidents and other countries could also upend predictions by taking new steps to reduce emissions.

Bressler's 2021 paper previewed multiple possible futures for the planet. Under what he calls the pessimistic" scenario, global emissions wouldn't level off until the end of the century. It was under this scenario that Bressler estimated that, by 2100, climate change will have caused 83 million people to die of temperature-related deaths around the world. This is the scenario that would result in 1.3 million deaths by 2115 from the additional emissions released over the next 10 years as a result of Trump's policies.

If global emissions were to drop to almost zero by 2050, the total projected toll from temperature-related deaths due to climate change would fall to 9 million by 2100. Even then, Trump's policy changes this year alone would still result in an additional 613,000 deaths.

Experts agree that, while both of the scenarios Bressler lays out are possible, the most likely amount of emissions will fall between these two extremes. Still, Bressler said, the projections underscore what's at stake.

If you do things that add emissions, you cause deaths," he said. If you do things that reduce emissions, you save lives."

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