To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
As corporate influence grows, independent journalism is more important than ever. If you value reporting that puts people and the planet first, please support Common Dreams this Giving Tuesday. We couldn't do it without you—thank you for keeping independent journalism alive.
"These are people with lives," said a spokesperson for the US Climate Action Network. "They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world."
As he skips out on this year’s annual climate summit in Brazil to the chagrin of world leaders, a new analysis shows that President Donald Trump’s climate agenda will cause a massive increase in excess deaths in the poor nations least equipped to deal with—and least responsible for—rising temperatures.
The analysis, published Wednesday by The Guardian and ProPublica, found that the emissions released over the next decade due to Trump's acceleration of fossil fuel usage, combined with his killing of renewable energy, will result in an estimated 1.3 million more preventable heat-related deaths worldwide over the next 80 years.
Most of them will occur in poor, hot countries in Africa and South Asia, which the report notes "emitted relatively little of the pollution that causes climate change," but "are least prepared to cope with the increasing heat." On the contrary, the US, which has just 4% of the world's population, has emitted around 20% of the world's greenhouse gases.
The estimate of excess deaths is based on a widely recognized peer-reviewed metric known as the "mortality cost of carbon," which finds that every 4,434 metric tons of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere translates to about one additional excess death. Notably, that metric only includes direct temperature-related deaths from conditions like heat stroke, while not taking into account indirect deaths from drought, famine, disease, wildfires, and other disasters that climate change is worsening.
An analysis from Carbon Brief, based on modeling from Princeton University, found that an additional 7 billion metric tonnes of carbon—roughly the equivalent of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter—will be released through 2030 as a result of Trump’s policy actions. These have included the shredding of pollution regulations; the near-total elimination of investment in wind, solar, and electric vehicles; and the dramatic expansion of oil and coal extraction.
As the rest of the world makes great strides toward a renewable future, the global Climate Action Tracker says Trump is carrying out “the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback” it has ever analyzed.
"We are quickly emerging as the planet’s rogue nation, determined to deny climate and slow the energy transition as best we can," wrote environmental journalist Bill McKibben last month in Common Dreams.
The new analysis follows research published last month by the University College of London, which found that the climate crisis has already led to a huge spike in excess deaths. An average of more than half a million preventable heat-related deaths occurred globally each year between 2012 and 2021, a 23% increase since the 1990s.
While still an unfathomable loss of life, the 1.3 million projected to die as a result of Trump's climate policies are a drop in the bucket on top of the 83 million excess deaths that the mortality metric predicts if emissions continue at the same rate.
“The sheer numbers are horrifying,” Ife Kilimanjaro, executive director of the non-profit US Climate Action Network, told The Guardian and ProPublica. "But for us, they’re more than numbers. 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 report comes amid the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, which the US was one of only four nations in the world to skip, drawing condemnation from numerous world leaders.
One of them was Maina Vakafua Talia, the climate envoy from Tuvalu, the small Pacific island nation that is expected to be one of the first countries to become uninhabitable due to sea level rise and fiercer storms, and has already begun planning for mass evacuations over the next two decades. Trump's pullout from the Paris Climate Accords, he said, demonstrated a “shameful disregard for the rest of the world."
But while the brunt of the climate emergency will be felt by the Global South, Americans will not be spared. Annual deaths from heat in the US have already increased by 50% since the year 2000, according to a recent Yale University study. A Texas A&M University study from 2023 projected that if global temperatures exceed 3°C above preindustrial levels, an additional 200,000 Americans could die annually due to changes that cause both hot and cold temperatures to become more extreme.
In an interview at COP30 with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Dutch climate envoy Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme likened Trump's denial of the climate emergency to ignoring an illness.
"If I’m sick, and I take my temperature, and I’ve got facts and figures that I’m sick, I can ignore it or not," he said. "So, it’s up to him to listen to the doctor or not. But it’s wise to listen to the facts. The science tells the story. I’m not telling it. It’s not my opinion. It’s just listening to the experts that tell us that climate is a fact."
The Guardian and ProPublica analysis came a day after the Brazilian COP30 Presidency released a draft text that campaigners warned did not go far enough in demanding a roadmap to transitioning away from fossil fuels. More than 80 countries at the conference on Tuesday joined a call for leaders to include tangible metrics and plans for the transition in the summit's final agreement.
“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss—especially for those least responsible,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres on Thursday. “This is moral failure—and deadly negligence.”
As world leaders gathered in Brazil for this year's global summit on the accelerating climate crisis this week, many took note of the absence of US President Donald Trump.
This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) summit comes on the tenth anniversary of the Paris Climate agreement, in which nations committed to adopting policies intended to keep global temperature increases below the threshold of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, considered a tipping point at which many of the worst ravages of climate change will become irreversible.
Ten years later, progress has fallen far short of the mark, with leaders scrambling to keep the deal’s goals intact—an aim that is likely untenable without the cooperation of the US, the globe’s largest historical emitter of carbon.
America’s president has not only once again pulled the US out of the Paris agreement, but also sought to turn climate denial into public policy and spent his term in office thus far grinding American investment in renewable energy to a halt—actions viewed as extraordinary abdications of responsibility at a time when the globe is ever more rapidly approaching the point of no return for warming.
Fresh on climate advocates' minds are Trump’s comments at the UN General Assembly in September, when he described climate change as the world’s “greatest con job.”
On Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization found that greenhouse gas emissions had reached a record high. Meanwhile, 2025 is on track to be the third hottest year on record, behind only 2024 and 2023.
“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss—especially for those least responsible," said UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday. "This is moral failure—and deadly negligence."
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has emerged as one of the world's leading climate defenders from the heart of the Amazon rainforest, began the conference by delivering an indirect but unmistakable shot at Trump. He denounced the "extremist forces that fabricate fake news and are condemning future generations to life on a planet altered forever by global warming."
Other Latin American leaders were more direct. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whom Trump recently hit with sanctions and threatened with military action, denounced the US president as "against humanity," as evidenced by "his absence" at the conference.
"The president of the United States at the latest United Nations General Assembly said the climate crisis does not exist," added Chilean President Gabriel Boric. "That is a lie."
In Trump's stead, over 100 other state and local figures from US politics have traveled to Brazil to take part in the conference: Among them are California Gov. Gavin Newsom, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.
Another attendee is Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, chair of the Climate Mayors network, who recently applauded Tuesday night’s elections in the US. More than 40 candidates associated with the network came out victorious, as well as the self-described ecosocialist New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
“Our climate mayors did very well on the ballot,” Gallego said to applause at a local leaders forum for COP30. “We want to send this message from the US.”
But despite the US delegation, even with officials from the Trump administration absent, climate campaigners fear the White House may still seek to sabotage the conference from afar. Last month, the administration did just that when it used the threat of tariffs to strong-arm countries into killing what would have been a global-first carbon fee on shipping.
Even without Trump present, COP30 is crawling with fossil fuel lobbyists seeking to stymie progress. A report released Friday from the climate advocacy group Kick Big Polluters Out found that over 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN climate negotiations over the past four years. The corporations they represent are responsible for more than 60% of global emissions.
“These companies have defended their fossil interests by watering down climate action for years," said Fiona Hauke of the German environmental group Urgewald. "As we head towards COP30, we demand transparency and accountability: Keep polluters out of climate talks and make them pay for a just energy transition.”
"What's at stake here isn't just who pays for climate disasters—it's whether our democracy allows powerful industries to simply rewrite the rules when justice catches up to them," said the communications director at Make Polluters Pay.
Over 190 groups are urging Democrats in Congress resist any attempts by Big Oil to evade potential legal liability amid the growing number of legal and legislative efforts aimed at holding major polluters accountable for their role in the climate crisis.
In a Thursday letter addressed to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the groups urge Democratic lawmakers "to proactively and affirmatively reject any proposal that would shield fossil fuel companies" from those efforts.
A quarter of U.S. residents live in a state or locality that is "taking ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel companies to court to hold them accountable for this deception and make them pay for the damage their climate lies have caused," according to the letter. Maine, for example, became the eighth U.S. state to sue major oil and gas companies for deceiving the public about their products' role in the climate crisis.
The letter signatories include a long list of green groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity and Extinction Rebellion US, as well as the American Association of Justice and other nonprofits.
The Supreme Court on Monday denied a request by a coalition of Republican state attorneys general aimed at preventing oil and gas companies from facing these types of lawsuits. Trump has also vowed to block climate litigation aimed at Big Oil.
In their letter, the groups also point to a number of efforts, some successful, to pass what are known as "superfund laws," which force privately owned polluters to help cover the costs of protecting public infrastructure from climate-fueled threats. Oil and gas companies have lobbied against the passage of these laws.
"What's at stake here isn't just who pays for climate disasters—it's whether our democracy allows powerful industries to simply rewrite the rules when justice catches up to them," said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Make Polluters Pay—one of the letter's signatories—in a Thursday statement.
"Lawmakers must decisively reject any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to evade accountability and ensure both justice today and the right of future generations to hold polluters responsible for decades of deception," DiPaola continued.
The letter references episodes when "fossil fuel companies and their allies" tried to "secure a blanket waiver of liability for their industry."
In 2017, a carbon tax plan spearheaded by a group of Republican statesmen and economists proposed stopping potential lawsuits against oil companies and other corporations that release greenhouse gases, and in 2020, the fossil fuel industry tried to quietly include a liability waiver for itself in a government Covid-19 relief package, according to the outlet Drilled.
The letter also highlights that 60 Democratic House members urged leadership to categorically oppose efforts to "immunize polluters" in response to the latter effort.
"We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to pass some form of liability waiver and shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception," the letter states. "That effort—no matter what form it takes—must not be allowed to succeed."
The demand from these groups comes amid broader attacks on climate and environmental protections from the Trump administration
On Wednesday, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a series of actions to roll back environmental regulation impacting issues ranging from rules on pollution from power plants to regulations for vehicles.
On his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and initiated plans to open up Alaskan wilderness to drilling and mining.