If the Trump administration wants better climate science, it should support climate science

Looking at the broader context surrounding the DOE climate report, the Trump administration is not fostering "open, respectful, and informed debate" about climate change. There's a better way.

Last week, I shared some preliminary thoughts on the Department of Energy (DOE) climate change report, focused narrowly on areas that cited my work (on scenarios) or overlapped with my expertise (in economics). My conclusion was that these sections cited my work accurately and made some worthwhile points, despite some areas where I disagree with the report’s conclusions. I stand by these comments.

However, today I want to share some thoughts on the broader process and policy context of the report, which I find frustrating.

First, I share some of the frustrations that have been aired by many others in the climate change research community. For example, the report has the appearance of replacing the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment (NCA) (flawed and politicized as the NCA may have been) with something rushed, non-comprehensive, and also politicized. It seems to have been released as a pretext for a policy change at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in a manner not fully communicated to the authors (more on this below). It comes on the heels of the Trump administration trying to gut climate science funding (along with other science funding) and even shut down key carbon dioxide monitoring stations and satellites.

In Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s foreword to the report, he laments that “the public conversation has drifted from the science”, and he wants to foster more “open, respectful, and informed debate” about climate change and climate policy. I agree with these sentiments. Who knows, maybe the report and its public comment period will contribute to these goals in a narrow sense.

But, in the bigger picture, gutting science funding, destroying data-collecting satellites, canceling the NCA, and deleting old NCAs off of government websites (see below) are not exactly moves that inspire confidence in the broader administration’s willingness to foster debate or move the public conversation closer to the science. They’re also not moves of people who think they can win the arguments on their merits.

Where you end up if you try to click on the 2023 U.S. National Climate Assessment.

I am also frustrated on behalf of more conservative environmentalists, and anyone else who agrees with the DOE report’s high-level qualitative thesis that the mainstream climate change narrative misses some important facts and angles. For the above reasons and others, I don’t think this report will change many minds among those not already converted. I also don’t think it will help to boost the credibility to right-of-center perspectives within climate science and policy debates—debates that will live on once the current administration’s term is over.

There’s a better way.

Cover of the DOE climate report.

A self-defeating process

It seems like the report was commissioned for two purposes: (1) to provide pretextual scientific support for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s planned repeal of the Obama-era “Endangerment Finding” (EF) that classifies carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants and has been used to justify climate-related EPA regulations under Presidents Obama and Biden; and (2) to combat ideological bias in previous climate assessments (including but not limited to past editions of the NCA) by summarizing—and thereby bringing to the fore—under-appreciated facts, evidence, and policy conclusions.

Based on what the authors have said publicly (I will update this if I am wrong), it seems like the authors were informed about the second objective but largely kept in the dark about the first (though they likely were aware that the administration was considering eliminating the EF, since that was reported in the press before they wrote their report).

Let’s examine how the report serves each of these objectives.

Agree or not with the EPA’s decision to repeal the Endangerment Finding (EF) and roll back related regulations, I don’t see how this report helps that cause much. As EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin himself has been arguing on TV recently (e.g., see below), the key questions regarding the EF—and more importantly its use in regulations—are legal, not scientific.

Do the “Chevron decision” and the major questions doctrine imply that the EPA shouldn’t be unilaterally passing regulations with major economic implications (e.g., on vehicle emissions), under expansive interpretations of statute (e.g., the Clean Air Act) without Congressional action? If so, should the EPA roll back such regulations it has enacted in the past? Indeed, the EPA’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (for its EF decision) devoted much of its attention to these legal issues.

Even if the key questions were scientific (e.g., does carbon dioxide fit the Clean Air Act’s technical definition of a pollutant?), courts litigating these questions would surely be asked to consider all published scientific evidence on the matter, not just one report produced in a hurry by the current administration. Again, the EPA implicitly acknowledges this in its notice, by noting that it reviewed the past NCAs and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports (see page 36308) and noting where disagreements exist.

So, how much does this DOE report really help support the EF rollback? Not that much, it seems.

However, now that there is a perception that the DOE report was pretext for the EF decision, it undermines the credibility of the report in the eyes of anyone not already in agreement with the report or the administration. (And yes, I recognize that one could apply the same argument to the Obama administration’s report that motivated the original EF.)

Administrator Zeldin has also been making strange comments in TV interviews about the EF decision (e.g., see the interview above), where he avoids explicitly acknowledging human-caused climate change when asked, and he instead deflects to tangential talking points (e.g., “the climate has always been changing”, “carbon dioxide is essential to plant life”), which are technically accurate but misleading in context, and have been historically associated with denial of human-caused climate change (especially when used as deflections).

In contrast, the DOE report acknowledges human-caused climate change and largely agrees with the conclusions of the IPCC’s Working Group I (The Physical Science Basis) (see comparison by Roger Pielke Jr. here). Adm. Zeldin, too, has a long public record of acknowledging the basic facts of human-caused climate change, including during his confirmation hearing (e.g., see the exchange with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in the clip below).

So, what’s going on in these newer TV interviews? Is Adm. Zeldin trying to avoid saying something that a court could later interpret as him saying “GHG emissions are pollutants”? That’s my best guess, but I don’t know. Either way, this all seems likely to undermine Adm. Zeldin’s, the administration’s, and the DOE report’s credibility in the eyes of the public.

The administration should remember that large majorities of the public care about climate change, want something done about it, and like renewable energy, even though they also prioritize low cost of living, oppose climate policies that would raise it, and support all-of-the above energy policy. So, emphasizing legal and cost of living issues—while also acknowledging that climate change is a real problem—would seem like a smarter political approach for supporting regulatory reform at EPA. This approach would also lead to smarter public discourse on climate change

Before I move on from the EF change, I’ll note, for what it’s worth:

• I think that greenhouse gases (GHGs) are pollutants, all things considered, even though many activities that emit GHGs are net beneficial to society. The same could be said for many other pollutants too. That’s why you typically do cost-benefit analyses when designing regulations.

• I do not have enough legal expertise to have an informed opinion on the legal questions regarding the EF. (See here and here for discussions of these questions.)

• Some Biden-era regulations, such as the 2024 EPA vehicle-emissions rule that was enacted with the expressed intention to phase out most gasoline-powered vehicles by the 2030s, seem intuitively to be “major questions”. Regardless of the legal technicalities, it seems reasonable to me for the administration to question the economic merits of this rule and for Congress to have a say in it. In fact, my read of the EPA’s notice and Adm. Zeldin’s public comments is that vehicle emission rules are the main target of their action, with the broader EF finding being a secondary target. (I will correct if this turns out to be wrong.)

• Agree with it or not, I suspect that the decision to repeal the EF will not have much of an impact on U.S. GHG emissions, nor on the industries the decision intends to benefit.

The simple reason for this last hypothesis is that markets for cars and fuels are global, and markets tend to reward the cleanliness (including low GHG emissions) and efficiency of these goods. State-level policies also still apply. So, if the EPA rolls back its climate regulations, don’t necessarily expect companies to rush to produce higher-emission products, or for markets to be able to save such products from competition. (See here, for example, for a discussion of how this dynamic is playing out for the coal industry in my home state of Wyoming. See here for an analysis of utility sustainability plans, compared to state policies, finding utility plans to often have more ambitious GHG-reduction targets. Alex Trembath also lays out a more detailed argument for why the EF decision won’t change U.S. emissions much here.)

In general, U.S. presidential administrations have much less impact on the trajectory of U.S. GHG emissions than most people think, and I expect this trend to continue (see below).

U.S. progress on climate change will continue under the second Trump administration, despite the vibe shift

Even if unintentional, the report’s process and context seem likely to reduce trust in science and increase animosity on both sides of climate policy debates, and get people not already convinced of the report’s view to dismiss it. Consider the following points, some already mentioned above:

• The report was written by a small “red team” of five scientists known for criticizing some mainstream scientific narratives, but included no blue team. Not surprisingly then, the report seems to represent only one side of some active debates, as its critics have pointed out.

• It was rushed out on a super short timeline (~2 months for the first draft), which unavoidably leads to mistakes and oversights.

• It was commissioned around the same time that the administration canceled the 700+ scientist, multi-year, Congressionally mandated NCA. Even if it were true that the current report represented its key facts better than the NCA, people will undoubtedly draw unfavorable (to the administration) inferences about the relative amounts of care and rigor that went into the two reports.

• Its release coincided with—and was seemingly pretext for—the EPA’s new EF decision, discussed above. It also coincides with Adm. Zeldin’s awkward press tour, discussed above. These coincidences both feed the (possibly accurate) narrative that the administration did not intend for this report to be an unbiased scientific fact-finding mission, and the (certainly inaccurate) narrative that this report amounts to climate denial.

• Elsewhere, the administration is trying to gut climate science funding (along with other science funding) and even shut down key carbon dioxide monitoring stations and satellites, as I mentioned above.

Given these facts, the outraged and dismissive reactions from across the climate change community were entirely predictable (and were predicted). The report may make some valid points (it definitely does in my expertise areas), but it is obviously not a serious attempt to comprehensively assess the science (as the report itself acknowledges in its preface), nor is it a serious or rigorous substitute for the NCA. It will not engender trust in this administration’s scientific reports.

Of course, some of the online reactions from critics of the report have also been over the top, with one scientist calling for the authors to be “shunned for scientific misconduct”, for example. Those sympathetic to the report will understandably see these comments as the latest evidence of biases, tribalism, and cancel culture in mainstream climate science (which do exist). They will point out examples of apparent bias in the previous NCAs. Some will lose further trust in mainstream climate science.

And around and around it goes, to the disservice of the country and its institutions.

Don’t blame the authors

For what it’s worth, I don't blame the authors for any of this. They accepted an invitation to provide scientific advice to their government (except McKitrick, technically, who is Canadian). I think it is a civic duty to accept such invitations in most cases where one is able, and the authors seem to have done their best to represent their read of the science, whether one agrees with it or not, in the very limited time allotted. They appropriately asked for, and were given, editorial independence; they are inviting feedback; and, as far as I know, they did not set the timeline nor were they fully aware of any pretextual policy intent surrounding the report’s release. They are also not responsible for the administration’s other decisions (on funding, etc.).

I don’t find instances in which the authors have been accused of making errors nefarious per se—they only had two months, and no report produced that fast will be perfect. I also don’t find instances in which they were accused of “cherry picking” evidence any worse than many other very common practices that go uncriticized in the literature when they support more alarmist conclusions (like using the SSP3-8.5 scenario to project climate impacts, which maximizes the projected climate change and minimizes the projected economic growth and resilience, even though these assumptions are incompatible with each other, for example).

Instead, shortcomings in the report seem to be a product of the rushed timeline, the size of the author team compared to the breadth of the topic, and—as with any team—the confirmation biases each author has with regards to their prior beliefs.

A better way

As I outlined above, legal arguments seem like the way to challenge the endangerment finding, and legal and cost-benefit arguments seem like the way to challenge specific regulations.

To get a more accurate view of the science, and to lower the temperature on scientific debates, commissioning a new NCA—with a large author team intentionally assembled for its diversity of views and its members’ willingness to collaborate across difference, and a reasonable amount of time to complete their charge—is clearly the way to go. As I argued in my previous post, the administration and scholars on both sides of the debate should have an incentive to participate:

“If the administration (and the red team) wants to convince people of their view, they should welcome the opportunity. If they think Democratic administrations are incapable of putting together a diverse team that can come up with a balanced report, then this is their chance to prove that Republicans can do this.

If the administration’s critics in the scientific community (the blue team) are serious about the need to decarbonize the whole country over decades, then they, too, should welcome the opportunity to engage with their critics and try to convince the other side. “I don't like Trump” is not a good enough reason to disengage, if you think we're actually in a “climate emergency” that takes the whole country working together for decades to address. The Republicans will be in the White House roughly half the time.”

Regardless of whether or not they commission a new NCA, the administration should fund and support science if they want better science, including climate science. If they think that areas of climate science are neglected, they should launch new funding streams for these areas, rather than just trying to shut down everything else. I will not belabor these points because have written about them before.

It’s not too late.

Appendix: Quick updates on scenarios and economics

• Roger Pielke Jr. has a good and detailed post summarizing the accuracy of the report’s citations to our work on scenarios.

• Richard Tol pointed out problems with some of the details of the report’s economic section that I had missed in my earlier post. The authors should clean these up in their promised revision.

• I don’t think Tol’s points undermine the high-level economic points in the report that I stated earlier that I agreed with, namely: (i) damages from climate change and the social cost of carbon are extremely uncertain and axiomatically challenging—if not impossible—to measure precisely; (ii) costs of climate policies are often not adequately considered; (iii) development and adaptation will be the main determinants of well-being, despite climate change, on the timescale of decades at least; and (iv) cheap reliable energy is very important to societal well-being, development, and adaptation.