EPA lies about climate research in new report

I do this work because it’s important and too many writers are afraid to speak with moral clarity. To support me and my work, please subscribe.

---

The U.S. Department of Energy released a report last week that, in theory, should help us better understand our rapidly changing world.

But instead of offering clarity, the report throws another wrench into the already grinding machinery of climate denial—at the very moment the planet needs the truth the most.

Billed as “a critical assessment of the conventional narrative on climate change,” the document was introduced with fanfare on the same day the EPA announced it would seek to undo the 2009 endangerment finding—the legal backbone that gives the agency authority to regulate greenhouse gases. That ruling, which once provided a bridge between science and public policy, now finds itself under siege by ideologues bent on severing that connection.

The new DOE report, cited as part of the EPA’s justification for this rollback, leans heavily on a familiar playbook: cast doubt, inflate uncertainties, reframe fringe ideas as reasoned dissent. And while science demands questions, it does not abide misrepresentation. Nine researchers across a range of disciplines have already spoken out about how the DOE report distorted their findings, cherry-picked data, and omitted essential context.

“I’m a bit surprised the government put out something like this as an official publication,” said¹ Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth and Stripe. “It reads like a blog post—a somewhat scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims, studies taken out of context, or cherry-picked examples that are not representative of broader climate science research findings.”

The authors behind the DOE report—four scientists and one economist—are well-known to the climate disinformation ecosystem. Three were hired by the Department in recent months, their arrival prompting alarm in the scientific community. Their résumés are dotted with contrarian takes that have long failed to survive scientific scrutiny, yet find eager audiences among political actors looking to delay or dismantle climate action.

The summary of the report confidently states that CO₂-driven warming “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and that efforts to curb emissions may “be more harmful than beneficial.” These are not new ideas—they are well-worn arguments that have been refuted, refined, and rendered irrelevant by decades of rigorous research. Still, here they are again, now with the imprimatur of the federal government.

DOE Secretary Chris Wright, flanked by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Fox News, celebrated the report as part of “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” Wright lamented that science had been reduced to “Orwellian squelching,” and insisted that “we need to restore some common sense around climate change and energy.”

But this version of “common sense” resembles something closer to political theater than scientific deliberation.

The report’s authors cite a 2019 paper by Hausfather, using a chart from its supplementary materials to suggest that climate models have overestimated CO₂ concentrations. But Hausfather says the main finding of that paper was precisely the opposite: that historic climate models have been “remarkably accurate in predicting warming.”

“They appear to have discarded the whole paper as not fitting their narrative,” he said, “and instead picked a single figure… to cast doubt on models.”

And he’s not alone in this frustration. Joy Ward, provost at Case Western Reserve University, said the DOE misused her research to support the idea that more CO₂ is a boon for plant growth. Her studies, she said, were conducted in “highly controlled growth conditions” and cannot be extrapolated to the chaotic, drought-prone, and heat-stricken ecosystems facing us now.

“With rising CO₂ in natural ecosystems,” Ward explained, “plants may experience higher heat loads, extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, and reduced pollinators—which can have severe net negative effects on plant growth and crop yields.”

Meanwhile, ocean scientist Josh Krissansen-Totton of the University of Washington found his research—on ancient ocean acidification over billions of years—cited to downplay modern ocean chemistry changes. The DOE report claims that today’s ocean pH decline is within “natural variability,” ignoring the rapid shift in calcium carbonate saturation that is devastating to coral reefs and shell-building marine life.

“The much more gradual changes in ocean pH we observe on geologic timescales,” he wrote, “were typically not accompanied by the rapid changes in carbonate saturation that human CO₂ emissions are causing.”

Even researchers whose work was accurately cited, such as Canadian marine ecologist Jeff Clements, expressed concern over how the report selectively framed the science. Clements, whose review questioned earlier studies on fish behavior, emphasized that his results “should not be interpreted to mean ocean acidification (or climate change more generally) is not a problem.”

The problem, of course, is not that science doesn’t evolve. It does. And scientists continue to ask hard questions and refine their understanding. But weaponizing ambiguity, as this report does, is not science—it’s sabotage.

Ben Santer, one of the world’s most respected climate researchers, saw his own work misrepresented in the DOE document. “These guys have a history of being wrong on important scientific issues,” he said. “The notion that their views have been given short shrift by the scientific community is just plain wrong.”

Santer clashed with some of the authors back in 2014, during a red-team/blue-team exercise convened by the American Physical Society. It was led by Steve Koonin, now a DOE report author and a former energy undersecretary, who later resigned from APS after it rejected his attempts to rewrite the society’s climate stance. His efforts to replicate the debate format in the Trump White House also failed.

Richard Seager, a Columbia University climate researcher, echoed concerns over misrepresentation. A paper he coauthored on sea-surface temperature discrepancies was used to imply fundamental flaws in climate models. Seager noted that while model errors in the tropical Pacific are acknowledged, “what this means for the future… is very much an area of intense research.”

That nuance, like so many others, is absent from the DOE’s glossy report.

The Department of Energy is now seeking public comment. A spokesperson, Andrea Woods, said the agency could not respond thoroughly to WIRED’s specific questions on short notice. She encouraged scientists to submit comments to the Federal Register instead.

“This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry,” Woods added, “that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence—not by the scientists themselves but by political bodies.”

And yet, the true politicization of science is on full display in this report: five authors, four months, no peer review. Meanwhile, the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment—assembled painstakingly by hundreds of experts—remains hidden from public view under the current administration.

“This has been released,” said Hausfather, “at the same time that the government has hidden the actual… assessments that accurately reflect the science. It shows how much of a farce this is.”

There is little comfort left in calling this sort of thing “disingenuous.” It’s worse than that. In a world fast approaching climate thresholds with real and irreversible consequences, turning away from hard-won scientific understanding is a choice—one with consequences measured in lives, lost ecosystems, and time we can’t get back.

1. Quotes come from reporting by WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-say-new-government-climate-report-twists-their-work/