Trump Administration Dropped Controversial Climate Report From Its Decision to Rescind EPA Endangerment Finding

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rescinded its bedrock endangerment finding Thursday, it explicitly excluded a controversial report issued last year by the U.S. Department of Energy that argued the dangers of human-induced climate change were being overstated.

The EPA cited the report in announcing its intention to rescind the endangerment finding last year, but those citations were not part of the final rule.

Instead, the EPA argued that the Clean Air Act “does not authorize the Agency to prescribe emission standards in response to global climate change concerns,” despite the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that the agency does have that authority. 

In its rule issued Thursday, EPA stated that the “legal interpretation finalized in this action means that we cannot resolve remaining scientific controversies in this regulatory context.”

In a footnote, the final rule states that “in light of concerns raised by some commenters,” the EPA “is not relying” on the report “for any aspect of this final action.” 

The EPA told Inside Climate News that it “did not engage at all” with the DOE’s Climate Working Group, a now-disbanded group of five prominent climate-skeptic scientists hand-picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to write the report. 

“In finalizing this rule, EPA carefully considered and reevaluated the legal foundation of the 2009 Endangerment Finding and the text of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in light of subsequent legal developments and court decisions,” the agency said in an email. “The agency concludes that Section 202(a) of the CAA does not provide statutory authority for EPA to prescribe motor vehicle and engine emission standards in the manner previously utilized, including for the purpose of addressing global climate change, and therefore has no legal basis for the Endangerment Finding and resulting regulations. 

“EPA firmly believes the 2009 Endangerment Finding made by the Obama Administration exceeded the agency’s authority to combat ‘air pollution’ that harms public health and welfare, and that a policy decision of this magnitude, which carries sweeping economic and policy consequences, lies solely with Congress. Unlike our predecessors, the Trump EPA is committed to following the law exactly as it is written and as Congress intended—not as others might wish it to be.”

The DOE report, titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” which critics have called “antiscience” and a “scientific felony,” was published last July. It has been widely criticized since its publication as misleading and cherry-picked. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Energy Department violated the law when it formed its Climate Working Group. 

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said Friday that the report was likely left out of the final rule because they “couldn’t defend it in court.”

“They didn’t follow any of the normal procedures that you follow to make a scientific assessment,” Dessler told Inside Climate News. “We know how to make scientific assessments, and they didn’t do any of the things you need to do.”

Dessler led a group of 85 climate scientists to produce a report called “Climate Experts’ Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report,” which argued that the DOE report was “not scientifically credible.” Another group of 114 public health researchers crafted a similar rebuttal to the report, which it filed as a comment with the EPA. 

“It’s a real testament to how mad people were about the report,” Dessler said. “I mean, they were mad because the report was so shoddy and violated all of the norms of science. In fact, violating the norms of science is the only way you can produce a report like that.”

John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and former Alabama state climatologist, was one of the five authors of the DOE report. Asked for comment, Christy said inquiries about the report should be directed to DOE or EPA. 

The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment Friday. 

“Violating the norms of science is the only way you can produce a report like that.”

— Andrew Dessler, Texas A&M University

Dessler said one major issue in the report was the lack of peer review or even acknowledgment of research that contradicted the authors’ assertions. 

“These people are the gold standard of climate skepticism,” Dessler said. “The Climate Working Group, they’re the very few sort of credible scientists making the claim. And if this is the best they can do, they really demonstrated that there is no legitimate case against the mainstream science.”

Other scientists cited in the DOE report said it misrepresented or cherry-picked their work. 

Kristie Ebi, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington whose work focuses on the health risks of climate change, said the report misleadingly cited her work on the impact of higher concentrations of carbon dioxide on agriculture. 

Ebi said the DOE authors correctly cited her research showing that some crops grow faster in high-CO2 environments, but ignored results showing that wheat, rice and other crops grown in high-CO2 conditions contained more carbohydrates, less protein and fewer micronutrients.  

“When those experiments were done at two times CO2, the protein content of wheat and rice decreased about 10 percent. The B-vitamin content decreased about 30 percent and the micronutrients decreased about 5 percent,” Ebi said. “This has, of course, profound implications, because wheat and rice together are almost 50 percent of all the calories consumed around the world.”

Environmental groups have already pledged to combat the EPA action rescinding the endangerment finding in court, and legal experts have noted that the agency is making a legal argument and not a scientific one. 

Manuel Salgado, federal research manager for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, said the lack of citations in the EPA’s final rule were striking compared to previous regulations enacted by the agency. 

“It’s shocking to me how it just jumps all over the place and there’s no real structure to it at all,” Salgado said in an interview. 

In particular, Salgado pointed to the rule’s Regulatory Impact Analysis, a document that often includes hundreds of pages of scientific research on potential impacts of the action. The RIA from Thursday’s final rule was 35 pages, compared to 884 pages for the 2024 rule on multi-pollutant emissions standards, or 267 pages for the latest mercury and air toxics standards, published last year. 

“In an EPA that’s actually operating in good faith, you’re going to find the modeling information, you’re going to find EPA data on the impacts on various communities, on public health. You’re going to find all of the reasoning that goes into why this was the rule that was ultimately decided upon,” Salgado said. “It’s just really hard to give it any credibility, because it’s just not the way that a scientist would ever approach this, and it’s not the way that the EPA has ever operated in the past.”