Since beginning his second term in office, President Trump has taken a sledgehammer to climate action.
His administration has made plans to expand offshore oil and gas drilling, canceled billions of dollars in clean energy projects, rolled back tax credits for EVs, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, released a report that downplays the risks of climate change, and on and on.
Climate experts have been vocal about the fact that Trump sets back climate action, which puts the entire world at risk.
The U.S. is the second-most polluting country in the world, behind only China, which has been investing heavily in renewable power, and China’s total emissions have been dropping as a result.
Now, a new analysis by ProPublica and the Guardian attempts to quantify what that setback could actually look like.
What the analysis found
Trump’s anti-climate policies could release so many extra greenhouse gases over the next decade that they could lead to as many as 1.3 million more temperature-related deaths globally, in the 80 years after 2035, the analysis found.
That estimate covers heat-related deaths, minus the fewer deaths that will occur from cold temperatures. Already, heat is the leading cause of all weather-related deaths, and climate change has led to a noticeable uptick in heat related deaths.
In the U.S. alone, heat-related deaths have increased by more than 50% since 2000, according to the Yale School of Public Health.
The 1.3 million excess deaths does not include, the outlets note, the “massive number of deaths” from climate change’s broader impacts, like droughts, floods, diseases, hurricanes, wildfires, and even lower crop yields.
The number is, admittedly, a small figure when compared to the total number of deaths caused by temperatures changing because of climate change.
A 2021 study on the “mortality costs of carbon” projected that, between 2020 and 2100, the planet will see 83 million temperature-related excess deaths under a “business as usual” emissions scenario.
The ProPublica/Guardian analysis acknowledges this, but adds that the figure attributed to Trump’s policies speaks “to the human cost of prioritizing U.S. corporate interests over the lives of people around the globe.”
How the research was conducted
To conduct the analysis, the outlets used scientific models to estimate how many additional emissions will be released into the atmosphere because of Trump’s policies. They also took into account the “mortality cost of carbon” metric, which predicts temperature-related deaths from emissions.
In responses to questions from ProPublica and the Guardian, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) contested the science underpinning their analysis, dismissing it as “moral posturing.” It added that the core calculation method ignores “the dramatic uncertainties that dominate long-term climate projections.”
But climate scientists say the metric is valid, they report.
“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,” Marshall Burke, an economist at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University, told the Guardian.
“When we roll these things back,” he added, “it is fundamentally affecting the damages we’re going to see around the world.”