It started with a call from Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
In late March, a little over a month into his job leading the Department of Energy, Wright phoned a research scientist named Roy Spencer at his home. Wright wanted to know if Spencer, a former NASA scientist, would be interested in contributing to a climate study.
Spencer said yes.
Other scientists received similar calls from Wright. They included Judith Curry, a climatologist and professor emerita at the Georgia Institute of Technology; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville; and Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP who also served as an undersecretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.
All the researchers had one thing in common: Each had spent years questioning the mainstream consensus around climate science. Most have worked with conservative activists and fossil fuel interests to cast doubt over the dangers of a warming planet.
“He had been following my research for many years,” Spencer said, recalling his conversation with Wright in a recent blog post.
The end result of Wright’s hand-picked team was a 141-page DOE report released last month that questioned the basic tenets of climate science, including the accuracy of climate models, the threats posed by sea-level rise and the links between extreme weather events and humanity’s use of fossil fuels.
The document could serve as a legal battering ram for President Donald Trump’s efforts to eliminate climate regulations; EPA cited the study 16 times when it released a proposal last month to rescind the legal designation underpinning climate regulations.
The study also represents a personal triumph for Wright, a former executive at fracking services company who has spent years arguing that the benefits of burning fossil fuels outweigh the costs. In an interview on CNN, Wright said the study was intended to promote “a real debate and discussion about climate change, and get away from the cancel culture.”
He told a Wall Street Journal podcast that “these claims of disaster and impending meltdowns, they’re just at odds with the actual facts.”
Such assertions have attracted fierce criticism from many climate scientists, with some going as far to label the study “fossil fuel propaganda” and accusing its authors of cherry-picking scientific evidence to suit their narrative.
John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, struck a less strident tone.
Advocates and opponents of climate policy are both prone to making exaggerated claims about the science. But climate science itself is sound while the dangers posed by a warming planet are real, he said.
“There’s a risk that has real consequences in lives and property if society as a whole ignores the changes that are taking place,” Nielsen-Gammon said.
A priority for Wright
Just how much Wright personally invested in DOE’s study has become clear in his media appearances over the last week and in public comments by the report’s authors.
“Only one of the executive-level appointees in the Administration had the background knowledge and interest to invest in making this science report happen: Energy Secretary Chris Wright,” Spencer wrote on his blog.
In an email, Curry said she spoke with Wright three times, once when he invited her to participate, once regarding the White House vetting process and a third time with the wider group.
“He invited me because he regarded me as objective, and willing to listen to and consider a broad range of perspectives,” she wrote.
Wright also tapped Travis Fisher, an energy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, to coordinate the study.
“The secretary’s plan was simple,” Fisher wrote in a blog post on Cato’s website. “We would reorient the debate about climate science and climate policy by confronting the gatekeepers head-on.”
Fisher and Spencer did not respond to requests for comment.
DOE’s study comes at a time when the Trump administration has launched an attack on climate science, pulling down the National Climate Assessment from its government webpage, proposing deep cuts in scientific research and exploring a plan to end the mission of a pair of satellite’s used to measure carbon dioxide levels around the world.
DOE did not respond to a request to interview Wright or a list of written questions. But Wright told the Wall Street Journal he was seeking “honest, true scientists” who were “really driven by the data” to lead the study. In a forward to the study, Wright wrote that he had sought “a diverse team of independent experts” to review climate science.
“I exerted no control over their conclusions,” he wrote.
Yet all the researchers he selected were well known as outliers in the field of climate science with a reputation for questioning the dangers of a warming planet.
In 2017, when then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt proposed the idea of pitting climate contrarians against their mainstream counterparts in a “red team, blue team” exercise, the conservative Heartland Institute sent EPA a list of skeptics who could fill out the red team.
Four of the DOE study’s authors — Christy, Curry, Koonin and Spencer — were on it. The work of the fifth DOE researcher, the Canadian environmental economist Ross McKitrick, is cited on that list, but his name wasn’t put forth by Heartland for a red team position.
The decision to select a handful of scientists known for their skepticism of climate science fit a pattern for Wright, who over the years has pressed the idea that fossil fuels are key to human prosperity and that efforts to curtail their use is harmful.
Liberty Energy, the fracking services company Wright ran until becoming Energy secretary, released a report last year that argued climate policy threatened to slow human progress unleashed by fossil fuels. It listed 10 key takeaways.
No. 9 read, “Climate change is a global challenge but is far from the world’s greatest threat to human life.”
No. 10 said, “Zero Energy Poverty by 2050 is a superior goal compared to Net Zero 2050.”
The forward Wright penned to DOE’s study hits on those same points.
“Climate change is real, and it deserves attention. But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity,” it reads. “That distinction belongs to global energy poverty.”
Critics: It’s about advancing an agenda
Scott Denning, a climate scientist who recently retired from Colorado State University and who debated Wright on a Denver television show in 2015, said he recognized many of Wright’s talking points.
It is telling that the secretary had personally phoned the report’s authors and asked them to conduct a study, he said.
“He has this shtick about how fossil fuels have made the world much better,” said Denning, who then paraphrased what he sees as Wright’s viewpoint: “Everything uses fossil fuels. If we don’t have fossil fuels, we’re going back to pre-modern times.”
But Denning said, “I think that’s just such a false choice.”
Nielsen-Gammon said there is “sensitivity” within the community of climate scientists about publishing results that might be viewed negatively.
But he said that feeling is counteracted by the sheer amount of scrutiny climate science receives and the “extraordinary process” used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “where international communities of scientists get together regularly and hash through the evidence and figure out what’s well supported and what isn’t.”
Nielsen-Gammon said he disagreed with the DOE report’s finding that extreme rainfall events were not increasing in frequency and intensity — his area of expertise — noting that the report did not cite a number of studies on the subject, including one he published last year.
Others have been even more strident in their criticism.
In a recent Substack post, the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the DOE study incorrectly cited his 2019 paper on the performance of climate models. That study compared climate models’ past emissions projections to observed emissions. DOE used it to bolster a claim that climate models had tended to overestimate emissions.
The only problem: the paper concluded just the opposite, Hausfather wrote.
“They scoured my paper on the performance of climate models to find the one figure (deep in the supplementary materials) to reinforce the point they were trying to make, and never actually referred to the broader conclusion of the paper that old models had by-and-large performed quite well,” he said.
The study’s authors largely have dismissed such criticisms. In an interview on the Heartland Institute’s ”The Climate Realism Show,” Curry called such critiques ”petty.”
“If we’re going to reference their paper, they would have liked us to make a different point,” she said, referring specifically to Hausfather. “Well, no, that’s not the point we’re making, but we do think that your graph is particularly informative, and we’re going to use that as part of our narrative.”
In her email, Curry called the cherry-picking claim “rather bizarre.”
“All of the issues that we supposedly ‘cherry picked’ were somehow not included in previous assessment reports (which were also arguably cherry picked),” she wrote.
Several prominent climate researchers argue the goal of DOE’s climate study is not to advance a scientific debate. Rather, it’s about advancing the Trump administration’s political agenda.
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, wrote on X that the study “should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide.”
The study figures prominently in EPA’s recent proposal to revoke the endangerment finding, the legal designation obligating the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
DOE sent the study to EPA on May 27, after which it was reviewed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as part of his deliberations over whether to repeal the endangerment finding, according to a copy of the proposal posted in the Federal Register.
EPA’s proposal cites DOE’s study 16 times, according to a review by POLITICO’s E&E News, using its conclusion to bolster the agency’s case that the endangerment finding should be repealed.
They include claims that “recent data and analyses suggest that aggregate sea level rise has been minimal,” that climate models “may be based on inaccurate assumptions, and that attributing anthropogenic emissions to extreme weather events “is more difficult than previously believed and demand additional analysis.”
In the Heartland interview, Curry said the DOE researchers were aware EPA was interested in their study. She said the report was completed in May, but its publication was delayed to coincide with the release of EPA’s proposal.
But she added: “We were not, you know, instructed in any way to deal with endangerment finding related issues. We figured these were on the table, but we didn’t focus on that at all.”
This story also appears in Energywire.
