Trump admin removes climate reports, vows "revisions"

Three days ago, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fossil fuel executive, announced in a CNN interview that the National Climate Assessments (NCAs)—the government’s crown‑jewels of climate truth—have been taken offline "because we’re reviewing them."

He added, with all the grace of an arsonist offering to supervise the clean‑up, “We will come out with updated reports…with comments on those.”

These reports, demanded by law, crafted by hundreds of working scientists, peer‑reviewed, published every four years—gone. Not because they were flawed, but because they stood like mirrors to a burning world.

The administration also pulled all previous NCAs from public view, and fired over 400 scientists who were working on the upcoming sixth installment—an assessment scheduled for 2027 or 2028.

What once guided governors, planners, farmers, might now guide us toward existential disaster.

Scientists are rightly outraged. One researcher likened this bureaucratic erasure to Stalinist practices. These reports don’t deserve “comments”—they deserve protection.

There is a peculiar kind of violence in erasing knowledge.

These aren’t dusty volumes gathering metaphorical cobwebs. They’re the workhorse of climate policy—the best tool we have to grasp how fast our planet is shifting, where it hurts the worst, and what we might do in response.

By wiping them from federal platforms, the administration isn’t requesting a reevaluation. It’s staging a disappearing act.

Removing these reports isn’t a bureaucratic reshuffle. It’s an act of willful amnesia, a refusal to see what's happening in the world.

We must resurrect this knowledge, in the public square, in libraries, on blogs, on farmhouses. We must insist that every citizen, every mayor, every small-town engineer, has the right to know what the Earth is telling us.

Because when the government tries to cull the facts, all that's left is the story we choose to tell—and it’s our responsibility to make sure it’s the truth.

I worked on the 2014 National Climate Assessment while I was a graduate student at LSU. I do not consent to my work being changed.

And We the People do not consent to revisionist history that attacks science and the scientists who tell the truth.