Trump Sidelines Climate Contrarians In Science Rollback

When Energy Secretary Chris Wright empowered five researchers to produce a government report critical of mainstream climate science last summer, it was a watershed moment for a once-fringe corner of the scientific community that was now suddenly elevated by President Donald Trump.

But the intervening months have been difficult for the group. Though the team succeeded in publishing a 141-page report that downplayed the threat of a warmer planet, their analysis has taken fire from nearly every corner. Internal Department of Energy scientists criticized it. Outside climate scientists skewered it. And the group itself was the subject of a lawsuit from public interest groups.

And on Thursday, when the Trump administration announced its decision to eliminate a bedrock of U.S. climate policy — the so-called endangerment finding — it didn't employ the group's arguments that the science underpinning current climate policy is wrong.

For all of the administration’s public mockery of climate change, which Trump calls a “hoax,” it appears EPA and White House are unwilling to risk a court battle over climate science and instead will make a regulatory argument. A final version of the rule, released late Thursday, confirmed EPA would not rely on the DOE report "for any aspect of this final action."

It's an important subplot in the Trump administration's efforts to roll back climate regulations, and it provides a silver lining perhaps for climate activists and scientists who are angry over EPA’s decision to abandon a principle that has stood since 2009.

“They would have been obliterated in court,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University who helped organize a 450-page rebuttal to the climate contrarian report. “This is the gold standard of climate skepticism and if this is the best they can do, then they've proven how robust climate science actually is.”

None of the five researchers who wrote the DOE report agreed to an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News.

But one of them, Judith Curry, a former climate scientist at Georgia Tech, defended the group’s work in a statement and disputed the notion there was a consensus in climate science.

“Politicized science and a manufactured consensus on complex and deeply uncertain science will invariably mislead policy makers and lead to poor policy making,” Curry told E&E News on Thursday. “‘Establishment’ climate change science and its promotion by activist climate scientists in an effort to eliminate the use of fossil fuels is a case in point.”

In announcing their rollback of the endangerment finding, Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Thursday at the White House that they were doing it to reduce costs for American consumers and tame harmful regulations.

This is the "single largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America,” said Zeldin, who claimed it would eliminate more than $1 trillion in regulatory costs.

Notably, neither Zeldin nor Trump waded much into a debate about mainstream climate science — which says humanity’s use of fossil fuels is driving the Earth to dangerous tipping points.

The change in tune is especially striking for Zeldin, whose agency cited the group’s report at least 16 times in its Federal Register notice last year announcing EPA’s intent to unwind the endangerment finding.

“The endangerment finding and the regulations that were based on it didn't just regulate emissions,” Zeldin said Thursday. “It regulated and targeted the American dream.”

How it began

Wright didn’t join Trump and Zeldin at the White House event on Thursday — the Energy secretary has been in Venezuela this week — but he was critical in launching the DOE report.

Starting in March of last year, Wright began making calls to scientists who were known to dispute mainstream climate science. It's an area where Wright had some experience.

As the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy — a fracking services company based in Denver — Wright had developed a view of global warming that contrasts sharply with climate activists and much of the scientific community.

Though Wright acknowledges the presence of climate change, he has long argued the risk is overblown and isn’t the most pressing threat facing humanity. In a 2024 report called "Bettering Human Lives" that Wright published as head of Liberty Energy, he warned of “climate change exaggerations” and made the case that providing more energy to more people should be a bigger priority for world leaders.

He also argued that fossil fuels were best suited to fill that need.

“Politicians, policymakers, pundits, and the press talk endlessly about how solar, wind, and batteries can transform our whole energy system and address the climate crisis,” he wrote. “The reality is that these politically favored technologies have not, will not, and cannot replace most of the energy services and raw materials provided by hydrocarbons.”

Wright’s advocacy goes back years. About a decade ago, he participated in a televised debate about the morality of fossil fuel use in which he proclaimed energy has been an “enormous force for good in the world.” Joining him in that debate was fossil fuel booster Alex Epstein; Wright also would appear as a guest on Epstein’s podcast, "Power Hour."

With the DOE report, Wright wanted a document that would “encourage a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy,” according to the forward written by Wright. Its findings would sharply differ from the consensus reached by mainstream climate scientists years ago showing that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is rapidly heating the planet.

One of his first steps in putting it together was to reach out to scientists who represent the relatively small number of researchers who believe the mainstream scientific community is composed of “climate alarmists.” Five agreed to write the report. All of them are longtime critics of the endangerment finding.

One was Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist who was a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2024; he has long argued that climate modeling is faulty. Wright also recruited John Christy, Spencer’s colleague at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who has spent years arguing that estimates of planetary warming are overblown.

Another was Curry, the former climate scientist at Georgia Tech who has questioned humanity’s ability to distort the climate. Then there was Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Canada and a senior fellow at the conservative Fraser Institute, which has sought to roll back climate regulations.

The so-called Climate Working Group was rounded out by Steve Koonin, a senior Energy Department official in the Obama administration and former chief scientist for BP who tried unsuccessfully to conduct a hostile red team review of climate science in Trump’s first term.

Koonin reached out to the EPA on Feb. 13 to “offer technical assistance from me and colleagues in the review of the Endangerment Finding,” according to an internal email made public as part of a court case over the operation of the Climate Working Group.

'Reasonable scientific doubt’

By last April, Koonin’s offer had become a full-blown effort to produce a report questioning basic climate science that would bear the U.S. government’s stamp of approval. Koonin and the four other contrarian authors started their work as a two-pronged attack.

Even though Wright has talked about the report as the start of an important “debate,” internal emails show the DOE climate group was directed to support the administration’s efforts to roll back federal climate policy.

“All I can hope is that what we write will provide sufficient ‘reasonable scientific doubt’ regarding the science claims” in the supporting documents for the endangerment finding, Spencer wrote to the group as their work began in earnest.

The group tailored its work to touch on relevant sections of the Clean Air Act so it could be used in the administration’s endangerment finding repeal, E&E News has previously reported.

Travis Fisher, an official from the conservative Cato Institute who organized the group for the DOE, told the authors he could help “targeting your work” to ensure it focuses on the “areas of inquiry that are most relevant to the policymaking process.”

Reached for comment Thursday, Fisher said the public was on the side of the White House, pointing to a recent Washington Post editorial board’s endorsement of the Trump administration actions as evidence.

“We now realize that the truly existential threat is the deindustrialization and economic destruction that come from crippling the energy sector, as the endangerment finding enabled an activist EPA to do for far too long,” he said.

With the report, senior EPA and DOE officials were involved in shaping it, the emails show. In late May, about six weeks into the process, the climate group submitted a draft report to EPA that would be cited more than a dozen times in the agency’s proposed rulemaking.

Internal emails show they also submitted a hostile review of the fifth version of the National Climate Assessment — a congressionally mandated report that comes out every few years and outlines the threats that global warming poses to the United States. It is considered a crown jewel of U.S. climate research in part because it relies on the work of hundreds of scientists and is based on peer-reviewed studies.

The group’s review has never been made public.

In contrast, the Wright climate report was intended to be a public document. And prior to its release in late July, it began to hit some bumps in the road.

Before it went public, the DOE report underwent an internal peer review process. DOE scientists determined that some of its claims were "misleading or fundamentally incorrect" and an “unjustified (and at worst a biased) judgment.” One reviewer took aim at Wright himself, calling him “hypocritical” for “blurring the line between scientific conclusions and policy recommendations.”

Despite the concerns, the report was released to the public. And when EPA filed its proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register, it used the DOE report as part of its justification.

A groundswell of opposition

Pushback against the DOE climate report was swift.

Dozens of climate scientists wrote a 450-page rebuttal, pointing out errors and false or exaggerated claims. Researchers whose work was cited in the DOE document said their findings had been cherry-picked and taken out of context in order to make misleading claims. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine conducted its own review of the science, establishing that the human health risks from climate change had grown more definitive since the endangerment finding was released.

There was a quick response on the legal side too. DOE was sued by green groups for conducting the group’s work in secret — allegedly violating federal disclosure laws. Wright disbanded the group before it had a chance to respond to the thousands of public comments that poured into the Federal Register.

Eventually, the group’s internal emails were released as part of the lawsuit brought by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Last month, Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts found that the group was assembled as a federal advisory committee and not as a purely scientific exercise.

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.

Other legal fights are expected, too.

Moments after Thursday’s White House press conference ended, a coalition of public health and environmental groups — including the American Lung Association, Environmental Defense Fund and American Public Health Association — announced the first lawsuit against EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding.

That might not stop the Trump administration from trying to produce another body of work that supports their political views on global warming. Members of the Climate Working Group already have been invited to play a role in writing the next National Climate Assessment.