DOE reframes climate consensus as a debate - E&E News by POLITICO
By Scott Waldman, Benjamin Storrow | 07/31/2025 06:30 AM EDT
Energy Secretary Chris Wright handpicked five researchers to write a report that assaults what he called the “cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science.”
The Trump administration has given a government stamp of approval to the contrarian claims of a group of conservative researchers who for years have positioned themselves as being part of a Galileo-like quest to question mainstream climate science.
On Tuesday, those researchers appeared to reach the apex of that journey.
Less than two months after joining the Department of Energy, they produced a 141-page report that often conflicts with and distorts the consensus view of climate scientists to support President Donald Trump’s effort to repeal the endangerment finding, the scientific underpinning for greenhouse gas rules on carmakers, energy companies and other industries.
The group that helped with the DOE report includes: John Christy and Roy Spencer, climate scientists at the University of Alabama, Huntsville: Steve Koonin, a former DOE official in the Obama administration and former top scientist at the oil giant BP; Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech climate scientist; and Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph in Canada.
In a prologue to the report, Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote that he intentionally assembled a “diverse team of independent experts” who were chosen for “their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate.” That team did not include any of the hundreds of government climate scientists from NOAA or NASA, two of the world’s leading science agencies.
Scientists say the DOE Climate Working Group’s findings sound a lot like the misleading climate claims Wright has made over the years and the fringe views he has elevated. Much of the report is based on the authors’ own disputed claims, research funded by the fossil fuel industry or assertions made by groups opposed to climate regulation. Some of its primary assertions were debunked years ago.
And while the report frequently draws on mainstream climate research as well, multiple scientists said their work was misrepresented.
That includes Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University, who said the report’s reliance on his sea-level rise research was misrepresented by “cherry-picking” a single tide gauge. It’s a common technique used by the report’s authors, he said.
Kopp emphasized that few scientists in the field agree with the authors’ sweeping assertions even after years of claims.
“They found like five people who’ve made their careers over multiple decades in climate skepticism,” he said of the DOE author selection. “They haven’t managed to bring anybody else along to think of, there’s still the same set of five people, most of whom are rather late in their careers at this point.”
The DOE report comes as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate federal climate jobs en masse through the deletion of billions of dollars of climate research, entire science divisions at multiple agencies, government climate information and climate data-gathering instruments, including satellites now in orbit.
The Trump administration has also ended work on the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated, yearslong report produced by hundreds of scientists, and removed earlier versions of the report from government websites.
The assessment, which the DOE team repeatedly contradicts, involves scores of scientists, public comment and peer review from the National Academy of Sciences, said Phil Duffy, a physicist who studies climate change and served at the Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration.
“If the administration wanted to have a good review of climate science and the impact of climate change on the United States, then they shouldn’t have pulled the plug on that assessment,” Duffy said.
‘Red team’ ideasWright’s team began work in early April and finished before the end of May, with the explicit mission of producing a report that would “challenge the mainstream consensus.”
It is just the beginning of a more expansive process that will solicit public feedback, respond to that feedback and then produce a longer report that stands to serve as the final record, according to report co-author Curry, who wrote about it on her blog. The ultimate goal, she wrote, is “breaking the link between energy policy and human-caused climate change, whereby anthropogenic climate change currently ‘mandates’ emissions targets, preferred energy production methods, etc.”
At first glance, the report appears to be the “red team” review of climate science that Koonin began working on in the first Trump term, before it was shut down.
Earlier this year, Koonin told POLITICO’s E&E News that he wanted to challenge the science behind the endangerment finding, while highlighting uncertainties in established bodies of science including the National Climate Assessment and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“I think that the science has for a long time not been well represented to nonexperts,” Koonin said. “The people who have been misrepresenting should be embarrassed by it, but they’re not.”
But the DOE report Koonin helped write omits the mainstream science part of the original “red team, blue team” idea.
“It’s a red team report without the blue team, and it’s explicit about that,” said Matt Burgess, an economist who studies environmental policy at the University of Wyoming.
Burgess is sympathetic to some of DOE’s claims. His research on the overcitation of worst-case climate scenarios is referenced in the report, and Burgess said he was cited accurately. He thinks assessments like the National Climate Assessment could do a better job of incorporating feedback from researchers outside of the mainstream.
In his view, the report raises legitimate concerns about the uncertainty in some climate research, like the economic costs of climate damage.
“There’s way more uncertainty in the social cost of carbon and in climate economic damages than sometimes the mainstream narrative gives it credit for,” Burgess said. “Where I would disagree a little bit with the report is uncertainty cuts both ways. You can’t say this is uncertain, and therefore we know there’s no problem.”
Burgess said he hopes the Trump administration will ultimately conduct a National Climate Assessment, including climate critics like the authors of the DOE report and people the president’s allies “don’t like.”
“The only way they’re going to change the narrative, the discourse scientifically, is to have some kind of an adversarial collaboration,” he said.
Scientific discourse?The decision to attack the science underpinning the endangerment finding is part of a wider escalation in Trump’s attempts to rollback climate policies. EPA announced a plan to rescind the endangerment finding earlier this week, arguing it was based on faulty science.
Mark Menezes, who served as deputy Energy secretary during Trump’s first term, said he recalled the endangerment finding coming up in internal deliberations about “things you aim to accomplish.”
“The endangerment finding was probably on the list, but it was a ways down the list,” he said. A pair of subsequent Supreme Court decisions, one knocking back an Obama-era proposal to curb greenhouse gases from power plants and another concerning the legal deference afforded to federal agencies, have changed the political calculus, he said. Those decisions have collectively narrowed federal agencies’ ability to act without the express intent of Congress, Menezes said.
The report also fulfills Wright’s goal of reframing long-established climate science as a debate.
The Energy secretary rose to prominence in conservative political circles in 2021, when he posted a YouTube video criticizing North Face for refusing to make jackets for an oil and gas company. Wright, who was the CEO of the oil field service company Liberty Energy at the time, argued that North Face wouldn’t have been able to make any of its products without the oil and gas industry, and that people would not even have time for outdoor recreational pursuits without fossil fuels.
Now Wright’s five-person climate team is taking aim at the consensus of thousands of climate scientists scattered across the world’s top science agencies and universities. The DOE report attacks the extensive scientific record, conducted through thousands of studies around the world over decades, that shows fossil fuel use is pushing the planet toward dangerous climate tipping points, including more intense weather extremes.
“Attribution of climate change or extreme weather events to human CO2 emissions is challenged by natural climate variability, data limitations, and inherent model deficiencies,” the group concluded. “Moreover, solar activity’s contribution to the late 20th century warming might be underestimated.”
Such factors have been considered, studied, measured and addressed for more than two decades, and they don’t disprove clear evidence linking a warming planet to more extreme weather events.
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, saw his own research on how climate change affects mortality rates included in the report. But the report, he said, omits context and some key facts to create a misleading impression.
The report focused on Dessler’s finding that climate change could cut down on cold weather deaths, as could adaptation, but downplayed the forecast spike in heat deaths in some cities.
“As a general rule, what they say is correct, but it’s carefully filtered to give an impression that’s counter to a full reading of the analysis,” he said.
The DOE team “have shown no interest whatsoever in intellectually honest scientific discourse,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and director of its Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.
“Instead, they have served as loyal soldiers in the ongoing war on science being waged by polluters, petrostates, and plutocrats, and the politicians — which includes the current administration and its enablers in Congress — who do their bidding.” |
