A new report released yesterday by the Department of Energy purports to provide “a critical assessment of the conventional narrative on climate change.” But nine scientists across several different disciplines told WIRED that the report mishandled citations of their work: by cherrypicking data, misrepresenting findings, drawing erroneous conclusions, or leaving out relevant context.
This report was introduced on the same day that the EPA announced it would seek to roll back the endangerment finding, a crucial 2009 ruling that provides the scientific and legal basis for the agency to regulate greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act. In its draft reconsideration of the finding, the EPA cites the paper from the DOE as part of a review of “the most recently available science” that it undertook to challenge the validity of the 2009 ruling.
“The goal is to restore confidence in science, in data, in rationalism. That’s what enabled the creation of modern science,” DOE Secretary Chris Wright said in an Fox interview Tuesday with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, to celebrate what Zeldin called “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”
“We slid back into sort of a cancel culture, Orwellian squelching of science in talking about ‘the’ science, as opposed to the process that is science,” Wright continued. “We need to restore some common sense around climate change and energy.”
The report was authored by four scientists and one economist who are familiar contrarians in the climate science world. Three of the report’s authors were recently hired at the Energy Department, the New York Times reported earlier this month, prompting alarm among mainstream scientists who have long followed their work. Each author has a long history of producing work that challenges mainstream consensus on climate science. Their work is often promoted by interests seeking to discredit scientific findings or downplay climate action.
The DOE report’s summary states that it finds “[CO 2 ]-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial.” Many of the arguments reflected in the new DOE paper, mainstream scientists told WIRED, have been debunked over and over for years.
“I’m a bit surprised that the government put out something like this as an official publication,” Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead at tech company Stripe and a research scientist at the climate nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told WIRED in an email. “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 DOE says that it is opening the report up to a public comment process. In an email, Department of Energy spokesperson Andrea Woods said that the questions WIRED sent over about the use of research in specific portions of the report were too complex for the agency to answer thoroughly on a short turnaround, and encouraged scientists who spoke with WIRED to submit a public comment to the federal register.