Trump’s Energy Department disbands group that sowed doubt about climate change

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has disbanded the Department of Energy’s controversial Climate Working Group (CWG), which wrote a report that prompted dozens of independent scientists to issue a joint rebuttal saying the report was full of errors and misrepresented climate science.

The disbanding was first reported by CNN and now NPR has confirmed that Wright wrote a letter on September 3rd to the five hand-picked members of the group, thanking them for their service.

The decision to disband the CWG came as a hearing was held this week in a lawsuit that the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists had filed against the Trump administration. As NPR reported previously, the suit alleges that Energy Secretary Chris Wright “quietly arranged for five hand-picked skeptics of the effects of climate change” to compile the government’s climate report and violated the law by creating the report in secret with authors “of only one point of view.”

Wright wrote in the letter that the purpose of the group and its report was “to catalyze scientific and public debate” and that the result “exceeded my expectations.” Wright concluded that with that goal met the CWG could now be dissolved.

The CWG consisted of four scientists and one economist who have all questioned the scientific consensus that climate change poses huge threats to people and ecosystems and who sometimes framed global warming as beneficial.

The report was drafted to support a Trump administration effort to stop regulating climate pollution. The DOE report was cited multiple times by the Environmental Protection Agency in its recent proposal to roll back what’s known as the endangerment finding, which is the basis for federal rules regulating climate pollution, including from coal and gas-fired power plants, cars and trucks, and methane from the oil and gas industry.

“The Climate Working Group was convened in secrecy, and it created a clandestine report – in brazen violation of federal law – that is being used to weaken protections against the climate pollution that makes life less safe and less affordable for all Americans,” Erin Murphy, senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, wrote in a statement.

The environmental groups want a court to throw out the CWG report, but at a conference in Belgium Friday, Wright praised the document for prompting “open, back and forth dialogue.”

“That’s what we want is to bring people that have different perspectives or disagree to dialogue together and argue it out,” Wright told the crowd.

For all but a small segment of scientists, the debate Wright wants to prompt has already been settled.

Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, coordinated the response from climate experts. He says unlike the DOE report, climate reports from groups such as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change feature the work of hundreds of global scientists and require multiple rounds of peer review.

“When well-established scientific conclusions are challenged by arguments that ignore or contradict decades of solid evidence, these debates don’t advance our understanding,” Dessler wrote to NPR in a statement. “Instead, they can muddy the waters and distract from more productive scientific inquiry.”

Dessler says the CWG report mimics the doubt-sowing strategy the tobacco industry used to prevent regulation of its harmful products.

While the Energy Department’s CWG is now disbanded, the case continues over whether its report will be included in EPA’s decision on regulating climate pollution. The judge has scheduled a hearing on September 23rd for the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss part of the case.