When the Trump administration released a report in July questioning the tenets of climate science, it was part of a far-reaching effort by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to rescind the agency’s underlying authority for rules governing climate pollution from power plants, cars and industry.
But a detailed examination by POLITICO’s E&E News found that the report obscures key facts about climate change. It relies on outdated studies and cites analyses that were not peer reviewed. It cherry-picks mainstream research and omits context. It revives debunked arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on long-term warming trends.
You can delve into E&E News’ findings here.
The DOE report was written by five contrarian researchers whose work has long been perceived as being outside the vast body of climate science, which has shown for years that the burning of fossil fuels is driving global temperatures higher.
Since the report’s release, there has been push back from the science community about how the report’s assertions conflict with decades of research and hundreds of studies. Among the critics are dozens of researchers whose work was cited by the DOE authors, and a new assessment by the National Academies that directly contradicts the government’s assertions by showing how greenhouse gases are endangering human health.
On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright argued that the report’s findings were taken straight from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other comprehensive climate reports written by hundreds of scientists, but “just in a format that’s easier or accessible, easier for people to read.”
“There’s nothing different in the science in our report and the science in the IPCC reports or even in the National Academy report,” Wright said at an event hosted by The New York Times during Climate Week in New York. “If you’re honest and sober about climate change, to politicians, to the media, that’s a bit of a threat. It kind of gets in the way of a political movement.”
In fact, there is a major delta between the DOE report and mainstream climate scientists.
The result is a report that promotes ideas starkly at odds with the vast majority of scientific evidence.
This story also appears in Energywire.
