Energy secretary says Trump administration may alter past National Climate Assessments
In a Tuesday appearance on CNN's The Source, Wright told CNN host Kaitlan Collins the National Climate Assessments have been removed from government websites 'because we're reviewing them.'
'We will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those,' Wright said.
The National Climate Assessments are mandated by Congress and have been released five times since 2000. The federal reports, prepared by hundreds of volunteer scientists, are subject to extensive peer review and provide detail on how climate change is affecting each region of the United States so far, plus the latest scientific forecasts.
Wright accused the previous reports of being politically biased, stating that they 'are not fair assessments of the data.'
'When you get into departments and look at stuff that's there and you find stuff that's objectionable, you want to fix it,' he said.
His statements came after the Trump administration in April dismissed more than 400 experts who had already started work on the sixth National Climate Assessment, due for publication in late 2027 or early 2028. The administration in July also removed the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which housed the reports.
The move marks the latest escalation in the Trump administration's efforts to downplay climate science. The president and Department of Energy in recent months have championed fossil fuel production and slashed funding and incentives for renewable energy projects. This week, the DOE posted an image of coal on the social media site X alongside the words, 'She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment.'
Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed looser regulations for polluting sectors such as power plants and vehicles. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin in March proclaimed the administration was 'driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.'
In his CNN appearance, Wright said the previous climate change assessments — including the 2018 report prepared during Trump's first term — were not 'a reasonable representation of broad climate science.'
'They have been more politically driven to hype up a real issue, but an issue that's just nowhere near the world's greatest challenge,' he said of climate change. 'Nobody's who's a credible economist or scientist believes that it is, except a few activists and alarmists.'
Environmental experts were concerned by Wright's comments.
'Secretary Wright just confirmed our worst fears — that this administration plans to not just bury the scientific evidence but replace it with outright lies to downplay the worsening climate crisis and evade responsibility for addressing it,' said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was among the authors dismissed by the administration.
'This is one more alarming example of the Trump administration's ongoing and highly-politicized effort to obfuscate scientific truth to further its dangerous and deadly pro-fossil fuel agenda,' Cleetus said.
The DOE last week also released its own climate report, commissioned by Wright, that questions the severity of climate change.
'Both models and experience suggest that [carbon dioxide]-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial,' the report says.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, noted in a post on X that the previous National Climate Assessments were authored by hundreds of scientists who were leading domain experts in their fields.
'This would mark an extraordinary, unprecedented, and alarming level of interference in what has historically been a fair and systematic process,' Swain said of the possibility that previous reports could be altered.
The Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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