A system that protects fossil-fuel profits while accepting preventable deaths deserves to be challenged at its foundations. We cannot build a climate strategy around governments deciding, eventually, to do enough.
Our position: organized, nonviolent pressure for a rapid fossil-fuel phaseout, with food, water, healthcare and energy access protected throughout the transition. Survival should come before profit.
Read these as conditional mortality comparisons. A crossing cannot establish that a tactic is justified. The model does not estimate the consequences of an attack on infrastructure.
Hover or tap to inspect a cell. Click a row to use that start year in the main charts. With keyboard focus on the map, use arrow keys to inspect and Enter to select.
Every row holds the reduction, initial toll, recovery and mortality response assumptions fixed. The disruption toll is not recalculated for future population or vulnerability. Cumulative accounting always begins in 2026. Only deaths through the column’s year are counted; for late starts, part of the disruption toll falls beyond the horizon.Each cell gives the first year-end when the intervention catches up and remains at or below reference mortality through the selected horizon. These are conditional sensitivity tests, with no probabilities assigned. Delay, ramp, persistent shortages and other effects follow your settings.
— = no sustained crossing by the horizon. “Never higher” = intervention never accumulates more deaths. “Equal” = both remain equal.
A crossing occurs when an initially positive difference reaches zero or below. The headline reports the crossing that persists to the horizon; it does not promise equality beyond it. These are end-of-year counts, without financial discounting. Ordinary background mortality common to both scenarios cancels.
Global fossil CO₂ emissions fell 5.4% in 2020, then rebounded. The pulse preset applies that percentage for one year starting in your selected year; it is not a reconstruction of the pandemic. The CO₂ shortfall persists after annual emissions rebound, but is small relative to the accumulated stock. Global Carbon Budget 2021.
A separate multi-pollutant study modeled about 0.01 ± 0.005°C less warming by 2030 from the pandemic response. That was a projection, not a measured temperature drop. It includes effects this CO₂-only pulse omits, so it is not a calibration target for this simplified model. Cleaner air can improve health sooner; removing cooling aerosols can also add warming. Forster et al. (2020).
IPCC AR6 WGI, SPM D.1.1: likely 0.27–0.63°C per 1,000 GtCO₂, best estimate 0.45°C. This supports the carbon-to-warming step; it does not establish the mortality scaling or disruption toll.
Bressler and Carleton share some underlying evidence. Do not add their estimates together or interpret their spread as independent statistical samples. The README documents data extraction, original coverage, interpolation and all formulas.
Millions of cumulative excess deaths. Full annual values are included in the CSV export.
Our anti-capitalist starting point is that an economy should secure the conditions of life. Fossil-fuel profits cannot take precedence over that obligation. The question of who bears foreseeable harm belongs at the center of climate politics.
In 1845, Friedrich Engels described how social arrangements could knowingly condemn workers to early death. Here, the term asks who is responsible when preventable harm is accepted as a cost of maintaining an economic order.
This is a moral and political argument. The mortality curves cannot establish criminal liability.
Read Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England, “Results”
The IPCC’s 2023 synthesis finds that vulnerable communities with the smallest historical contributions to climate change experience a disproportionate share of its impacts, with high confidence.
Our model does not calculate deaths by class, race, occupation or disability. An aggregate total cannot tell us how fairly the burdens are shared.
A rapid phaseout must include income and transition support for workers, reliable essential services, and a public say in the decisions. People should receive protection regardless of their ability to pay or their usefulness to an employer.
These are demands about how society should be organized. They are not benefits that this calculator has already quantified.
Organize nonviolent pressure with affected workers and communities. Demand a timetable for emissions cuts, secure livelihoods, accessible essential services and public accountability. Publish the assumptions alongside every chart, including results that challenge the argument.