Misleading. Unjustified. Hypocritical.
Those are just some of the words that Department of Energy scientists used to describe a 141-page report on climate change that was commissioned by DOE Secretary Chris Wright.
The feedback appears in newly revealed emails that were made public as part of a court fight between DOE and public interest groups. And they show that criticism of the report — which calls into question the basic tenets of climate science — isn’t limited to scientists outside the Trump administration.
The department’s own internal reviewers took issue with the document, which was written by five climate contrarians from outside DOE who were handpicked by Wright.
The latest revelations could further undermine the credibility of the DOE report, which is at the center of efforts by the Trump administration to roll back federal climate regulations. A team of outside climate scientists has dismissed its findings as “misleading or fundamentally incorrect” — in part because the report touts the “supposed broad benefits of carbon dioxide,” a main driver of global warming.
One DOE reviewer echoed that opinion and said it was “misleading” for the report to talk about how climate change could boost plant growth without mentioning its other drawbacks. Another comment described the report’s criticism of climate modeling as an “unjustified (and at worst a biased) judgement.” A third noted it is “misleading to state that the aggregate sea-level rise trend in U.S. tide gauges is not accelerating.”
Yet the DOE reviewers reserved some of their most pointed criticism for Wright himself, who wrote a one-page introduction to the report. In it, he criticized the news media for distorting climate science and declared that global warming “is not the greatest threat facing humanity.”
That last line drew an especially sharp rebuke from one of the reviewers.
“Since the Secretary criticizes others for blurring the line between scientific conclusions and policy recommendations … it is hypocritical to offer a value judgement without clearly labeling it as such,” the commenter wrote.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Energy responded to requests for comment from POLITICO’s E&E News.
DOE has not made public the identities of the reviewers, and their names were not revealed in court documents. But DOE has confirmed there were eight of them, and at least some of the reviewers work in the agency’s Office of Science.
Less clear is how much of their input was folded into the final report, which was released in July after less than five months of work.
Travis Fisher, a DOE adviser who helped organize the report, wrote in an email to the group of contrarian researchers that “it’s my hunch that most comments will be rejected.”
Fisher did not respond to requests for comment about that email.
But in an interview last month, he defended the report and the way the authors went about their work.
“It was by design an apolitical process, so I felt pretty good about it,” said Fisher, who is no longer with DOE and works at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank that has opposed climate regulations.
In a separate email exchange with E&E News, one of the report’s five authors pushed back on the suggestion they did not incorporate feedback from the eight DOE reviewers.
“We received expert comments from DOE scientists on the first draft, went through them all carefully and revised the draft accordingly before its release,” Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist, wrote in response to questions.
“While the timeline was a bit tight,” he added, “we had enough time to deal with all the review comments.”
Bid to undermine climate regulations
The battle over the credibility of the DOE climate report is about more than just science. The real fight is over a federal policy known as the endangerment finding.
Put forward in 2009 during the Obama administration, the endangerment finding declares that six planet-warming gases threaten public health and, because of that, EPA has the authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act.
Trump officials, including EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, are trying to get rid of the endangerment finding because it serves as a foundation for a host of federal climate rules, including those that regulate emissions from cars and trucks. They say the finding has resulted in unnecessary and costly burdens for U.S. companies and consumers.
EPA in July 2025 released its proposal to rescind the endangerment finding, and a final version of the rule rollback could come any day. Overhanging the decision is whether the move would survive an inevitable court challenge.
This is where the DOE report comes in.
To help justify its plan to rescind the endangerment finding, EPA cited the DOE report at least 16 times in its notice published in the Federal Register.
“The Administrator has serious concerns that many of the scientific underpinnings of the Endangerment Finding are materially weaker than previously believed and contradicted by empirical data, peer-reviewed studies, and scientific developments since 2009,” EPA officials wrote in the Federal Register, referring to the report.
The importance of the DOE report to the repeal effort was underscored in internal emails made public in a recent court case.
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists sued DOE for allegedly violating public disclosure laws when it created the group that wrote the report. A federal judge ruled Friday that the department violated the law by allowing the group to meet in secret.
The public interest groups also accused the five climate contrarians who wrote the report — known officially as the Climate Working Group, or CWG — of intentionally tailoring their document to support a repeal of the endangerment finding.
The newly revealed emails prove that point, said the Environmental Defense Fund.
“The records show that CWG members recognized their objective was to ‘call into question’ the basis for EPA’s long-standing determination that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health and welfare,” the group wrote in a recent press release.
On Friday, Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts agreed with that assessment.
The Climate Working Group was “not merely ‘assembled to exchange facts or information,’ but rather provided substantive policy ‘advice and recommendations’ to the Department of Energy,” Young wrote.
The motivation matters because the value of the report — scientifically and legally — decreases significantly if the Environmental Defense Fund and other critics can prove it was designed to influence policy, rather than just review climate science.
Report author Steve Koonin claimed in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the “peer-reviewed report is entirely our work, free from political influence — a departure from previous assessments.”
But the emails paint a different picture. They show the process was deeply shaped by Trump administration political appointees to ensure it would touch on relevant passages of the Clean Air Act.
Political appointees from both EPA and DOE were involved with the report from the outset, the emails show.
Fisher — the DOE adviser and Cato Institute employee — noted in April that the group would “increase our coordination with EPA, particularly the legal team drafting the rulemaking.”
He assured the authors that they “have renewed buy-in that EPA will wait for this work and include it in its rulemaking.”
“The goal would be to make sure policymakers get your input on all the scientific questions they feel are relevant,” he wrote.
That kind of interplay isn’t unusual, said Roy Spencer, one of the report’s five authors and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
He compared the group’s work to the efforts by hundreds of scientists who spend years compiling sprawling assessments for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In an email to E&E News, he wrote that it “would be hypocritical for anyone to criticize our report for being a tool used by the government when that is exactly how the IPCC assessment reports are used.”
“From the beginning we were told to address the science, not policy,” Spencer said. “There were no restrictions on what we could address or pressure regarding our conclusions. … We were kept in the dark about how our report would be used.”
But the newly disclosed emails show that Spencer himself directed the group to show “reasonable scientific doubt” about the scientific backing of the endangerment finding.
In April, Spencer sent an email to the group noting their target was the scientific evidence summarized in the 2009 technical supporting document (TSD) that backed the finding that greenhouse gases were a pollutant that harms humanity.
“All I can hope is that what we write will provide sufficient ‘reasonable scientific doubt’ regarding the science claims in the 2009 TSD, based upon almost 2 decades of new science, to call into question the original reasoning for the EPA Administrator’s decision that CO2 presents a threat to human health and welfare,” Spencer wrote.
Soon after, Fisher, the DOE adviser, said in an email to the group that he could help with “targeting your work” to ensure it would focus on the “areas of inquiry that are most relevant to the policymaking process.”
Fisher sent the group relevant provisions of the Clean Air Act to ensure their efforts were focused on shaping policy, the emails show.
Spencer also flagged the relevance of the endangerment finding to their work.
In another April email, he cautioned the group to not “get mired in the technical details without getting around to saying what each section might mean in eventual policy decisions related to the Endangerment Finding.”
