Last year’s output from Norway’s fossil-fuel giant ‘will kill up to 58,000 people’

Norway’s oil and gas giant Equinor recently posted its strongest quarterly result in years. A Norwegian non-profit has now put a number on what that oil and gas costs in human lives. The briefing, written by Oslo-based climate analyst Ketan Joshi for Klimakultur and published on Tuesday (25 August), estimates that burning the oil and gas Equinor sold in 2025 alone, will cause between 34,000 and 58,000 additional deaths until the end of the century. Joshi bases his estimates on the latest generation of so-called ‘climate-economy-mortality models’ and Equinor’s own sustainability data. Excess mortality The latter puts emissions from customers using its products at 257.8 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent last year, three percent up on 2024. Joshi multiplies that figure by a “mortality cost of carbon”, a term coined by Columbia University economist Daniel Bressler in a 2021 paper. In it, he put the central estimate at 226 temperature-related excess deaths per megatonne of CO2 emitted, before the end of the century. In a similar exercise, Greenpeace, which relied on Bressler's modelling, put the number at 138. Joshi applies these findings to everything Equinor has sold since 2018, which adds up to 2,000 megatonnes. Applying both figures gives 260,000 to 450,000 deaths in the decades to come. Or as Joshi puts it, "two to three times the population of Stavanger" (Norway's fourth-largest city, west of Oslo.) Joshi admits that “there will always be uncertainty behind the precise number of lives lost to fossil fuel impacts." But, he added, “the magnitude of avoidable death occurring due to fossil-fuel use is undeniable.” This summer’s heatwave alone likely left tens of thousands dead. Official figures put the toll to the end of July at 14,000 in Germany and 7,300 in France. "Over just the past four years, heat has claimed more than 200,000 lives across the EU and its associated countries," said Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization's regional director for Europe, in June. Uncertainty Joshi makes clear that assigning exact costs and deaths to emissions is a work in progress. Indeed, some of the numbers he relies on have changed in more recent academic modelling work. The briefing builds primarily on Bressler's 2021 paper, whose central estimate was 226 deaths per megatonne within a wide range of estimates.