How the Energy secretary picked a fight with climate science

Politico

2 days ago

The Department of Energy isn't traditionally the federal government's vanguard for grand debates about climate research. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright is trying to change that — in a bid to shore up President Donald Trump's rollback of climate regulations.
The most striking result to date is a DOE report issued last month that questions the traditional underpinnings of climate science. The report, inked by a tag team of climate contrarians handpicked by the secretary, came out on the same day that the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would overturn the Obama-era legal doctrine that undergirds most federal climate rules.
Wright, a former fracking services executive who also serves as second-in-command of the White House's National Energy Dominance Council, personally gathered the researchers for his climate-questioning squad just weeks into the job, writes my colleague Benjamin Storrow.
They included Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist; Judith Curry, a climatologist and retired professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville; Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP who also served as an undersecretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration; and Canadian environmental economist Ross McKitrick.
Each researcher has publicly questioned some of the broader findings accepted by the world's climate scientists, including numerous previously published federal reports. And several have worked to downplay the risks of fossil-fuel-driven climate change.
Those proved strong credentials for Wright, who has long preached that fossil fuels can solve global energy poverty. He's accused mainstream scientists, and the media, of overhyping the risks of a planet rapidly heating up.
Carbon dioxide is a 'life-giving plant food,' Wright said in a podcast earlier this month with Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel.
'It does absorb infrared radiation so we can have a real dialogue about too much of it or too little of it … but calling it a pollutant is just nuts,' he said. (Note: Other kinds of 'plant food' — for example, nitrogen and phosphorus — are also pollutants when found in excessive quantities.)
By May, Wright's team had compiled a 141-page report questioning the veracity of climate models, the threat of sea-level rise and the connection between burning fossil fuels and extreme weather, Ben writes.
It withheld the report's release until last month to coincide with EPA's proposal to reverse the 'endangerment finding,' its 2009 legal conclusion that greenhouse gases are a harmful pollutant that the agency must regulate.
The administration hasn't yet spelled out how widely it will deploy the DOE report in its coming legal and regulatory battles over Trump's efforts to smooth the path for fossil fuels — although the EPA proposal cited the report 16 times, Ben notes.
But if the study was meant to disrupt mainstream science — or spawn what Strassel has hailed as a 'healthy, vigorous debate' over the research — it doesn't seem to have done that. Instead, other academics and scientists in the field have accused the team of cherry-picking or misrepresenting past research to support its favored conclusion.
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, panned the study on the social media site X as 'a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide.'
It's Monday — thank you for tuning in to POLITICO's Power Switch. I'm your host, Heather Richards. Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy. Send your tips, comments, questions to [e-mail].
Today in POLITICO Energy's podcast: Kelsey Tamborrino and Alex Guillén break down the Trump administration's latest attacks on wind and solar power.
Power Centers
Interior gets 'hostile' on windTrump's escalating moves against wind energy have alarmed advocates of renewable energy and free markets, Ian M. Stevenson writes.
Since mid-July, the Interior Department has halted spending on projects and required high-level signoff for any action on renewables. Administration officials have said renewable power is an unreliable source of electricity, and Trump has often targeted 'windmills' during attacks on former President Joe Biden's energy policy.
'It's a hostile way to kill and bottleneck these projects,' Ashna Aggarwal, director of analysis at the research firm Greenline Insights, told Ian. 'Targeting wind specifically seems to be an agenda of this administration.'
Trump 2.0's first FERC chair exitsMark Christie came in as chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in lockstep with Trump's vision of energy dominance, even if he was at odds with the White House on executive power in his tenure that ended Friday, Francisco 'A.J.' Camacho writes.
He stepped in, for example, to write letters on behalf of FERC staff when the Trump administration asked federal workers to justify their jobs. 'He's no shrinking violet,' Albert Pollard, a former state lawmaker in Virginia, said of Christie.
The exit of Republican Christie leaves FERC with a 2-1 Democratic majority. POLITICO on Friday reported that Trump plans to elevate Democratic Commissioner David Rosner to chair. If Rosner gets the nod, he could be temporary. The White House is waiting for Senate confirmation of two Republican commissioners. Either one could be named chair by Trump.
The AI race gets politicalThe push by companies like OpenAI and Google to win the artificial intelligence race has led to a proliferation of energy-hungry data centers across the country.
The rise of these server farms has sparked fierce battles from Virginia to Arizona and beyond. City and county governments are grappling with how to balance new jobs and new revenue streams against the strain data centers put on water and energy resources, Jordan Wolman and Lisa Kashinsky report.
The surge is proving polarizing, particularly in northern Virginia — considered the tip of the spear on this issue with the world's largest and fastest-growing data center market. And across the U.S., the debate is inching up the ballot as state lawmakers race to regulate and governors rush to embrace a new economic boon.
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That's it for today, folks! Thanks for reading.