The Trump administration has reduced funding for climate research, dismissed federal scientists who worked on the National Climate Assessment, and removed past editions of the report from government websites. Now, critics say, it is taking the next step: rewriting the science itself, according to a lawsuit filed this week by environmental groups.

As the Environmental Protection Agency moves to revoke the Endangerment Finding, the 2009 scientific determination that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and can be regulated under the Clean Air Act, the Department of Energy published a new review of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on U.S. climate that aims to support the EPA’s efforts.

The report was developed this spring by the 2025 Climate Working Group, which is composed of five independent climate scientists selected by Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

But environmental groups and independent scientists have criticized the report and how it was written, claiming it was assembled in secret by the five scientists who are recognized by the larger scientific community as climate skeptics.

“The secret report was produced by a set of known climate contrarians who were commissioned to write this report that’s full of inaccuracies,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director of climate and energy programs at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s clearly geared towards trying to give the EPA a way to evade its legal responsibility to address the health harms of heat trapping emissions and climate change.”

A “secret report”

The DOE report, entitled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” was commissioned in March when Wright assembled the group to undertake a massive review of scientific findings in a very short period of time, with no public announcement of this effort.

The five authors delivered their final draft by May 28. In the report’s preface, the authors wrote, “The short timeline and the technical nature of the material meant that we could not comprehensively review all topics.”

Their report argues that carbon-driven warming may be less economically damaging than commonly believed, and that aggressive U.S. climate policies would have little measurable impact on the global climate. It attributes some warming to natural climate cycles or changes in the sun, instead of the burning of fossil fuels, and also claims sea level rise has not been accelerating, contrary to widely accepted scientific evidence. Finally, it highlights the potential benefits of rising carbon dioxide levels for plant growth.

“I would say that it presents an incomplete and misleading picture of how climate change is affecting the United States,” said Phil Duffy, a climate scientist who previously worked in the Biden and Obama administrations as a science policy expert.

Duffy and other scientists say the DOE report cherry-picks evidence, misrepresents peer-reviewed research, and ignores the overwhelming consensus that human activity is driving dangerous warming. Numerous climate-based groups and researchers have published their own fact-checks on the report, with one listing more than 100 false or misleading claims made by the authors.

CBS News reached out to the Department of Energy about the criticisms of the report, but it did not respond to our repeated requests for comment.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, center, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, right, outside the White House on March 19, 2025. / Credit: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“This DOE report is in service of a political goal, it’s not credible science,” said Ben Santer, a climate researcher and board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Santer says his own published work was misrepresented in the DOE report and said the authors “fundamentally twist” the work of many researchers to reach conclusions that “will be used for a political purpose.”

Critics in the scientific community have pointed out that the panel’s five authors are known for their contrarian views on climate science, which are often at odds with the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change.

“The people that were handpicked by the Trump administration’s energy secretary are this very small group of people who are known to disagree with that mountain of [scientific] evidence,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Some of them have connections to the fossil fuel industry.”

Accusations of rewriting science

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas executive, has been vocal about his views on climate change, which align with the report’s findings. In an op-ed earlier this year, he called climate change “a by-product of progress,” and wrote, “I am willing to take the modest negative trade-off for this legacy of human advancement.” He argues that while climate change is real, it is not the greatest threat, and that expanding access to affordable, reliable energy should remain the priority.

Wright has been transparent about how he views U.S. climate research, telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that the administration is reviewing past federal climate reports, including the National Climate Assessment, and may provide “updates” later this year, leading many in the scientific community to fear the administration is aiming to edit or censor critical research.

“It’s important that science be allowed to speak for itself and I do have concerns that that’s not happening,” Duffy told CBS News.

National Climate Assessments typically take years to write and are authored by hundreds of scientists.

Duffy says that Wright didn’t oversee the previous reports and therefore has no authority to review or revise them. “He can’t rewrite the National Climate Assessment any more than I can rewrite ‘The Great Gatsby,'” Duffy says.

The Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court against the EPA and the Department of Energy, arguing that their actions violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires transparency and balanced membership for government advisory panels. The suit alleges that the Climate Working Group was created in secret, its work withheld from the public, and then its report was used extensively by the EPA, cited 22 times, to justify repealing the Endangerment Finding. The organizations are asking a judge to block the government’s use of the report to comply with transparency laws.

When asked about the lawsuit, the EPA responded in an email saying, “As a matter of longstanding practice, EPA does not comment on current or pending litigation,” and referred CBS News to the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy did not respond to any of our requests for comment.

Passenger arrested after allegedly causing disturbance midair and forcing flight to divert

When could Tropical Storm Erin become a hurricane?

Trump will be joined by Rubio and Witkoff in meeting with Putin

Environmental advocates are suing the Trump administration over what they described as a secretive plan to undermine climate science.

In a new lawsuit filed Tuesday, the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists challenge a new federal report that claimed climate models contain “exaggerated projections of future warming” and that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed.”

There is a scientific consensus that climate change is exacerbating extreme weather.

The report, from the Energy Department (DOE) was released alongside an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal to overturn the 2009 Endangerment Finding which said planet-warming gases pose a threat to the public.

In their suit, the groups alleged that the department and agency “have sought to manufacture a basis to reject” the scientific consensus on climate change.

“They have done so through a plan hatched and carried out in secret. In March 2025, shortly after being confirmed to office, Secretary of Energy Christopher Wright quietly arranged for five hand-picked skeptics of the effects of climate change to form a Climate Working Group,” the suit alleged.

“The Climate Working Group worked in secret for months to produce a report for DOE and EPA that would provide justification for their predetermined goal of rescinding the Endangerment Finding. In May, unbeknownst to the public, the group transmitted its report to EPA, and EPA then relied extensively on the report in preparing its proposal to rescind the Endangerment Finding,” it continued.

The groups asked a federal court in Massachusetts to vacate actions taken by the working group, including the controversial report — stating that the group should be considered a formal advisory committee under law and is therefore subject to certain specific requirements.

Reached for comment, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich referred The Hill to the forward of the report.

That forward, authored by Wright, says “I asked a diverse team of independent experts to critically review the current state of climate science, with a focus on how it relates to the United States.”

“I chose them for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate. I exerted no control over their conclusions,” Wright added.

The EPA declined to comment, saying it does not comment on pending litigation.

Washington, D.C., September 24, 2018 – President George H.W. Bush initially sought a leadership role for the United States on the environment, according to declassified documents obtained and posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University.

Contrary to the popular impression that Republican presidents have always downplayed such concerns, the record shows that some of Bush’s advisers – as under Ronald Reagan – early on recommended severing the “link between economic development and deterioration of the environment,” and demonstrating that “wise, active stewardship over the resources of our planet” was a “responsibility we have to ourselves and as our legacy to future generations.”

The new documentation presented here provides a nuanced picture of some of the continuities that characterized U.S. environmental policy from Reagan to Obama, but there is clear evidence that Reagan and both Bush presidents believed that greenhouse emissions and other problems were real and that even senior aides to George W. Bush sought actions “grounded in science” and designed to encourage renewed cooperation with other countries on restricting emissions.

Though these views could not stem the early push for withdrawal from leadership on climate change driven by Vice President Dick Cheney, similar voices pressing for a multilateral, diplomatic solution to existing problems later in Bush 43’s term presaged a pendulum swing back toward engagement, and set the stage for the Obama administration to reclaim a strong leadership role.

——————————————————————————————–

The GOP and Climate Change

By Robert A. Wampler, Ph.D.

Recently declassified documents show how supporters of a climate change treaty in the Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations sought to ground U.S. climate change policy in empirical scientific research even as these administrations gave higher priority to economic growth and energy security. Those supporting efforts to reach an international accord to reduce the greenhouse emissions driving global warming also faced growing criticism that the proposed agreements did not secure participation by developing economies, as well as growing doubts, eventually morphing into outright denial, of the scientific evidence for climate change.

The most extreme manifestation of this opposition and denial is now seen in the Trump administration, which announced in June 2017 that it would withdraw from the 2016 Paris climate change treaty, and has rejected the idea of working with traditional allies in key global institutions such as the G7 economic summits that in the past were seen as essential forums for contributing to climate change negotiations.[1]

The Clinton and Obama stories on climate change, including Vice President Gore’s role, the Kyoto agreement, and negotiation of the Paris accord, are well known, but now the expanding declassified record is revealing interesting support for addressing climate change in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, as well as a pendulum swing in the Bush 43 administration away from an initial Dick Cheney-dominated oil-and-gas-industry tilt, to more international engagement on climate, which the Trump administration has now ended.

The need to understand this prior history is underscored by the recent New York Times Magazine article entitled “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” by Nathaniel Rich.[2] This article provides something of a heroic narrative history relating how scientists, government officials, NGOs and industry initially shared a concern about the long-term impact of climate change, but squandered a supposedly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build upon the Montreal protocol model to reach agreement on the steps necessary to combat global warming as the political and corporate (i.e., oil and gas industry) opposition to an agreement began taking took root by the end of the Bush 41 administration.

This account is subject to criticism, ranging from overstating the possibility of a comprehensive climate change treaty in the 1980s, to downplaying the critical role played by corporate opposition (which the article does discuss) and ending the story with the Bush 41 White House, which discounts the subsequent complex history of U.S. climate change diplomacy under Clinton, George W. Bush and Barak Obama.[3]

The story of the Republican retreat from its early leadership on climate change must be seen in the context of this long history, which is marked by a pronounced pendulum swing in U.S. policy between leadership and disengagement on the issue since the 1980s. The Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations marked the high water mark of Republican support for efforts to draft international agreements to address climate change, primarily through support for the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer and establishment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its scientific advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).[4]

As discussed below, the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations’ approach to the proposed climate change negotiations sought to integrate and balance scientific research with assessments of the potential economic impacts of both climate change and steps to reduce greenhouse emissions, but was also marked by early signs of doubts about aspects of the scientific consensus on the topic. Under Clinton, the pendulum swung towards strong leadership, spurred by Vice President Al Gore’s personal advocacy, which resulted in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

This success was curtailed by the mounting opposition in Congress, based primarily on non-participation by China and India and the perceived resulting disproportionate economic and financial burden on the U.S. of meeting the target, concerns that were shared by Clinton’s Treasury department. [5] As discussed below, the George W. Bush administration saw the pendulum swing back to disengagement and broad criticism of the Kyoto Protocol, as Bush pulled the U.S, out of the agreement and gave overriding priority to economic interests, primarily energy, a position driven by Vice President Richard Cheney. By the end of the Bush 43 administration, the U.S. began moving back towards working with its allies on climate change.

This shift became a guiding policy under Obama, as the pendulum swung back yet again to renewed leadership in the talks leading to the Paris climate change treaty in 2016, but an even more radical swing back to opposition and climate change denial arrived with Trump’s election to the presidency.

A further discussion of the historical context for the documents posted today is helpful. As noted above, the Reagan administration played a key leadership role in fighting domestic opposition to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and in securing international agreement to the protocol. The documents posted here show the continued efforts by the administration to secure early and wide implementation of the protocol and its role in establishing the UN-based work on a climate change framework convention. The U.S. emphasized the key findings of scientific research as underscoring the urgent need for action to protect the ozone layer (see Documents 1, 2 and 4). Noting a concern that would only grow when work began on a climate change treaty, the administration warned that developing economies such as China and India must participate in the protocol, and not become “pollution havens.” (see Documents 1 and 3) The administration also saw the Montreal agreement as a model for efforts under the aegis of the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) to draft a UN framework convention on climate change that would guide negotiations on a treaty.

A key State Department official under Reagan and Bush 41 in these talks was William A. Nitze (son of Paul Nitze), the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment, Health and Natural Resources. Nitze presented the U.S. position at the initial UNEP special session in March 1988 that began developing plans to coordinate U.N. agencies, governments, NGOs and publics within medium-term plans through 1995 on a wide range of issues including climate change (Document 5). Here Nitze said the U.S. would continue to take a leadership role, but before considering a global convention on climate change, more must be learned about the global and regional impacts of climate change and the full range of possible responses.

To this end, the U.S. strongly supported creation of an intergovernmental panel (what would become the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, created later in 1988) to conduct and assess scientific research into the extent and effects of global climate change, and to begin development of a range of possible response strategies. However, U.S. support came with an important proviso that would only grow more prominent in Republican administrations: “Whatever response strategies are finally adopted will have to take into account other social and economic goals.”

President George H.W. Bush early on in his presidency sought to position himself as a leader on global environmental issues. This is seen in the memorandum laying out the proposed U.S. position at the Paris economic summit in July 1988, when he was still vice president (Document 6). Noting that while British, French and Canadian leaders had staked out strong environmental positions, the U.S. had so far “remained silent.” To remedy this, an interagency group recommended that President Bush present a program at the summit designed to break “the link between economic development and deterioration of the environment,” and informed by the theme of “wise, active stewardship over the resources of our planet. This is a responsibility we have to ourselves and as our legacy to future generations.”

The memorandum outlines a set of initiatives to tackle global warming, as well as to combat environmental pollution. To address global warming, the interagency group recommended three proposals: steps to address deforestation and reforestation; increasing fossil fuel efficiency and expanding renewable energy; and support for nuclear energy (an idea likely to elicit strong opposition from environmentalists) both for energy security and to contribute to solving the greenhouse emissions problem.

The Bush 41 administration also continued to push for its approach in the U.N. discussions surrounding what would become the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was agreed to at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. William Nitze remained closely involved with this diplomacy. A memorandum he prepared in Summer 1989 laid out the general principles that should guide a climate agreement (Document 7). These included securing the widest possible participation, with a focus on the countries that made up a significant majority of the world’s population and those that produced the highest percentage of greenhouse gases; increasing understanding of the scientific aspects of global climate change, and protecting social, environmental and economic well-being from damaging impacts likely to result from climate change.

While the U.S. continued to emphasize the importance of scientific research and analysis, its positions in the UN discussions continued to reflect the need to balance environmental protection and economic growth. This is seen in a memorandum setting out the policy guidelines for U.S. participants in a UN Response Strategies Working Group in Fall 1989 (Document 8). This memo describes what would become repeated components of U.S. policy preferences, including emphasizing the use of market mechanisms in combination with regulations to reduce greenhouse emissions, and giving countries the widest possible flexibility in meeting any agreed emission cuts.

There were also signs of concern over the conclusions being reached by the IPCC in its initial reports. As an Energy Department memorandum (Document 9) points out, the initial full Working Group I report on the science of climate change was acceptable, but it was felt the summary reports made “too strong a case for global warming and [did] not adequately represent the scientific uncertainties.” Again, this focus on “scientific uncertainties” would come to mark the right-wing criticisms of any attempts to address climate change.

With the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, U.S. climate change diplomacy moved into a new stage. The culmination of this diplomacy was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Though championed by Clinton and especially by Vice President, Al Gore, in the end the administration did not submit the agreement to Congress for ratification, recognizing this would not be forthcoming in the face of political criticism of the accord, most prominently for not imposing greenhouse emission reduction targets on developing economies such as China and India.

The next stage in U.S. climate change diplomacy would take place under the leadership of the George W. Bush White House, which brought a much more skeptical approach to efforts to tackle global climate change, driven both by the developing nations issue and by the overriding emphasis on U.S. energy security pressed by Vice President Richard Cheney’s Energy Task Force.

Several of the documents posted today date from the early months of the Bush 43 presidency, when some high-level advisors, notably Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, believed that President Bush was open to a review of U.S. climate change policy that would seek to improve upon the Kyoto agreement. They had been encouraged in this by Bush’s campaign statements that he would impose controls on CO 2 emissions.[6]

Documents 10-14 shed light on early discussions within the Bush administration about how it would address climate change and the U.S. adherence to the Kyoto Protocol. There is a clear concern displayed in these documents over how to address the question of economic costs associated with any imposition of greenhouse emission reductions, specifically CO 2 , and considerable thought is given to how market mechanisms could provide incentives for such reductions without serious harm to economic growth.

How to secure participation by developing countries was also a major concern, linked to potential costs and the domestic political criticisms that the Kyoto Protocol did not include reduction targets for these nations. Secretary O’Neill’s recommendations to President Bush (Document 12) stress the need to carry out a rigorous empirical assessment of climate change policy options guided by scientific expertise, which would then serve as the basis for engaging other governments “in a re-consideration and replacement of the treaty with a plan that is grounded in science and aimed at reducing concentrations rather than emissions.”

All of these efforts would prove fruitless in the face of Vice President Cheney’s forceful push to give energy security overriding priority over what were portrayed as possible global climate changes based on so-called “bad science.” With its announcement in late March 2001 that the U.S. intended to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration completed a retreat from global leadership on climate change. As Document 15 notes, the U.S. focused on pushing its views on climate change at meetings of the UNFCC Conference of Parties, while withholding funds for any Kyoto Protocol-related costs.

There were signs of reengagement in the last two years of the Bush 43 presidency, as the administration launched a new initiative called the Major Economies Process that worked to bring together the major greenhouse emitters and energy consumers to work in tandem with the UNFCCC on drafting a new post-2012 framework agreement on climate change (see Document 16).

The incoming Obama administration would launch a similar initiative in 2009, called the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate Change, to foster dialogue between developed and developing countries on working within the UN UNFCC on a new climate change treaty, and on promoting adoption of clean energy technologies and other steps to reduce greenhouse emissions. Forum meetings took place through 2015 and arguably played a role in the successful negotiation of the December 2016 Paris Climate Change Treaty.[7]

The period of renewed U.S. leadership on climate change under Obama came to a sudden halt with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 and his subsequent announcement on June 1, 2017, that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate change treaty. The reasons advanced were among the most extreme positions regarding the science of climate change and the potential economic impact of imposing reductions on greenhouse emissions since opposition emerged to the Kyoto Protocol two decades earlier.

In a curious mirroring of the debate within the early Bush 43 White House, it was reported that among Trump’s advisers, there was a division of opinion on the merits of staying in or abandoning the treaty. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, among others, reportedly wanted the U.S. to remain committed to the agreement, while White House adviser Steve Bannon and then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt pushed to abandon it. Under the terms of the treaty the U.S. cannot fully withdraw until 2020, but the impact on U.S. global leadership was immediate, as European leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel openly voiced their disapproval of Trump’s actions. The step also held near-term impacts as the administration further announced it would not implement the carbon reduction targets set by President Obama.[8]

Read the Documents