Revisiting scientific assumptions behind climate policy is long overdue.
July was bad for government Science™ (AKA “The Science,” AKA The Scientific Consensus®). On the other hand, the modest old science community weathered the month quite nicely, thank you, bolstered by several Trump administration actions. In the latest, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released a report on July 30 asserting that “CO2-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”
The study behind this report was sorely needed. Ever since the 2009 EPA “endangerment finding,” in which that agency determined that CO2 was a pollutant it could regulate under the Clean Air Act, the government has relied on worst-case climate models to justify ever more intrusive regulation of U.S. energy production and industries.
In those heady days before the endangerment research was even complete, Obama’s EPA was essentially picking out drapes for the extra office space its new powers would require. By contrast, Secretary Chris Wright has opened DOE’s latest report for comment before it promulgates or rescinds any regulations regarding climate change. But it’s safe to assume America can expect some energy sector sanity since, as the report says, U.S. policies to counteract climate change “are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.” In the meantime, the government would be needlessly shackling the economy.
The DOE report is the work of a panel of independent scientists, undertaken “on the condition that there would be no editorial oversight” by the government. The group surveyed “topics that are treated by a serious, established academic literature; that are relevant to our charge; that are downplayed in, or absent from, recent assessment reports; and that are within our competence.” Further, “We have focused as much as possible on literature published since 2020 and referenced previous IPCC and NCA assessment reports.”
This is of a piece with President Trump’s May executive order addressing the politicization of science during COVID-19, but encompassing all government scientific activity. The administration moved to restore scientific integrity to CO2 regulation, an effort Protect the Public’s Trust has been urging for years. Last month, the EPA reversed that 2009 endangerment finding, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) ceased work on the upcoming National Climate Assessment (NCA), and NASA began removing previously published NCAs from its website and revising them. The NCA had been the most influential climate document in government for decades, reputedly the “crown jewel” of climate research. Yet the assessments had been plagued with errors, omissions, and misrepresentations. Criticism of the NCA process and conclusions is longstanding and bipartisan.
One glaring example: the NCA’s use of Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 as a model. RCP 8.5 projects that by 2100, global coal consumption per capita will be six times higher than it is now. That comports with no plausible scenario; coal consumption has already peaked or will soon. There are many other instances of the NCA cherry picking data, selecting the direst interpretation of findings, and ignoring historical evidence that would mediate its conclusions. Despite public criticism from respected sources, the flaws persisted across editions.
Climate activists who rely on the twisting of science are howling and arguing the Obama and Biden administrations were true respecters of science. Two words should suffice in answer to them: “indigenous knowledge.” In 2021, President Biden said many noble things about scientific integrity and issued his own Scientific Integrity Memorandum, which required “the highest level of integrity in all aspects of executive branch involvement with scientific and technological processes.”
But in 2022, the White House released new government-wide guidance on indigenous knowledge in federal research, policy, and decision-making. The Biden Administration “formally recognized” indigenous knowledge as “one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States, and to our collective understanding of the natural world.” It then elevated indigenous knowledge above empirical science, stating agencies did “not need to judge, validate, or evaluate” indigenous knowledge to use it in “policy, research, or decision making.”
This cynical sop to Biden’s Native American constituents was sour enough as a gesture. Still, the Department of the Interior took it a step further and used it as part of the justification to cancel oil and gas leases in Alaska. Interior didn’t mention the tribes that favored the leases or why it judged or evaluated their knowledge as less necessary in our understanding of the natural world. But who needs consistency or intellectual honesty when Science™ is on your side?
Whatever Big Climate says about it, Americans should welcome analyses done by independent scientists staying within their competence. The DOE panel members don’t conclude that global warming, or even man-made global warming, isn’t real. They take an honest look at the implications and the trade-offs of how we address it.
So score a few for small-s science. And America.
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