By Rachel Gass – 9/12/25
How the EPA Eliminated Its Own Ability to Fight Climate Change
On July 29, 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released a highly controversial report challenging the well-established scientific consensus on the severity and impacts of global warming. The 151-page document, titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” was authored by five known climate-science deniers. Its release marks a significant escalation in President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda aimed at accelerating fossil fuel deployment while restricting climate science and undermining climate change mitigation efforts.
The report signals a significant departure from the first Trump administration, which downplayed the threat of global warming and rolled back environmental policies but stopped short of openly denying the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change. This new report, however, embraces climate change denial outright.
Strikingly, the DOE published the review just hours after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to revoke the Endangerment Finding on greenhouse gases, the legal cornerstone of federal emissions regulations. The EPA’s proposal relies heavily on the DOE report to justify dismantling these protections, advancing a dubious yet dangerous argument that threatens to undermine the federal government’s ability to address climate change.
Taken together, these actions effectively formalize climate change denial as official U.S. policy and eliminate federal authority to confront the escalating harms of global warming.
The DOE Report
Scientific reports typically involve the collaboration of hundreds of experts over several years and undergo multiple rounds of rigorous peer review before publication. In stark contrast, the DOE report assembled only five authors under a highly accelerated timeline: according to its Preface, work began in early April and concluded by May 28.
The report presents claims that would not withstand the level of scrutiny and peer review customary for government-sponsored scientific publications, resulting in “a deeply misleading antiscientific narrative” says Michael Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and Media.
Instead of directly disputing the role of CO2 in global warming or rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change, the report adopts a more deceptive strategy: it minimizes the severity of the climate crisis while promoting debunked claims about the supposed benefits of a warming planet. In doing so, the report directly contradicts decades of established science, including findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the European Climate Risk Assessment, and the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA).
This blog post examines and fact-checks the report’s misleading claims and situates the report within the broader context of the administration’s calculated effort to undermine climate policy, the effects of which, if left unchecked, will reverberate in the environmental and political sphere for decades to come.
Fact-checking the Report
1. Claim: Historical climate models are inaccurate, and present-day models overstate levels of warming.
A meta-analysis of climate models shows that historical climate models predicted warming with incredible accuracy. Further, the current rate of global heating is in line with central estimates of the latest climate models.
While it is true that leading climate scientists have warned against treating the IPCC’s extreme “worst-case” scenario (SSP5-8.5) as the most likely outcome, experts widely view more moderate scenarios like SSP2-4.5 to be consistent with current policy trends. Yet even under these moderate emissions pathways, climate change remains a significant threat. Crucially, such scenarios assume continued mitigation efforts; weakening or repealing climate policies would increase the likelihood of higher levels of warming.
As climate scientist Zeke Hausfather warns, using current policy scenarios to justify rolling back existing climate policies is “a fundamentally flawed premise”: “If the world actively repeals climate policies,” Hausfather cautions, “it would potentially push us to a higher emissions scenario … the fact that the world has made some progress in bending down the curve of future emissions should not be used as a justification that climate change is not a problem.”
Emissions reduction progress does not negate the urgency of the climate crisis but rather underscores the need to sustain and double down on climate action.
2. Claim: Climate change mitigation strategies do more harm than good.
Time and time again, research has shown that climate policies do make a difference. Commitments under the Paris Agreement have already slowed projected warming by 1.3 to 2.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
3. Claim: The growing amount of atmospheric CO2 promotes plant growth and improves agricultural yields in a process called global greening.
This claim extracts one uncontroversial part of the science (i.e. that plants consume CO2) while excluding the wider context. Numerous studies have shown that rising global temperatures actually harm staple crop yields due to heat stress, increased drought, and nutrient limitations. The IPCC has also determined that global warming has a negative impact on food security.
4. Claim: Global warming benefits oceans by “neutralizing ocean alkalinity.”
Besides being a misleading and inaccurate way to describe ocean acidification, this claim directly contradicts established research that seawater’s declining pH inhibits critical shell building and maintenance among clams, oysters, corals, and plankton and contributes to coral bleaching and cornerstone species die-off.
5. Claim: Sea level rise and extreme weather event frequency are overstated.
Satellite measurements for the past 30 years have found that sea level rise is accelerating globally, and numerous studies have demonstrated that weather extremes are becoming more frequent and intense over time. Climate models have even become so sophisticated that they can demonstrate links between greenhouse gas emissions and individual weather events.
The Broader Agenda: Undermining Climate Policy
The release of the DOE report coincides with the administration removing the legally mandated National Climate Assessments (NCAs) from government websites, suggesting a broader plan to bury and replace credible research with contrarian pseudoscience to support a pro-fossil fuel agenda.
Experts consider the NCA the gold standard report on how global warming is transforming the country. Congress requires the federal government to publish the NCA every four years. The fifth and most recent NCA was the result of a rigorous three-year process involving hundreds of scientists, multiple rounds of public and agency review, including by the National Academy of Sciences, and approval from thirteen federal agencies.
The Trump administration has deleted the website hosting the NCAs and halted work on the sixth edition of the report, which was due to come out in 2028. Visitors seeking to access the fifth NCA on government websites now encounter the error message “This site can’t be reached.” The original report has been archived and remains accessible on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website.
In a recent announcement, the U.S. energy secretary shared that the administration intends to “update” all previously published NCAs, raising concerns about revisionist history. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather voiced alarm over the timing, noting that the release of the DOE report at the same time the government hid the congressionally mandated NCAs “shows what this actually is: a politically motivated pretext to overturn the EPA’s endangerment finding that CO2 is a pollutant, not an actual search for the truth.”
Why the Endangerment Finding Matters
Issued in 2009, the Endangerment Finding established the legal basis for the EPA to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. The finding marked the culmination of a decades-long legal battle over whether the federal government has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The decision enabled the Obama administration to implement the first federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and power plants and set a crucial precedent for federal climate action.
In July, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to rescind the Endangerment Finding, using the DOE report as justification. Though the legal basis for this repeal is tenuous, its success would gut the federal government’s ability to regulate emissions from polluting industries and severely undermine states’ abilities to meet their own climate goals. This move marks a sharp reversal for Zeldin, who previously opposed an amendment prohibiting the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.
The repeal of the Endangerment Finding would effectively eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions regulations for motor vehicles and engines, despite transportation being the largest-emitting economic sector in the nation. In fact, if the U.S. motor vehicle sector were a country, it would be the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
The EPA proposal claims that reducing vehicle emissions would have no “scientifically measurable impact” on climate progress, citing their relatively small share of global emissions. However, the now-threatened emissions standards were projected to prevent 7 billion metric tons of emissions from entering the atmosphere and save the average American driver $6,000 in fuel and maintenance costs over the lifetime of vehicles built under the standards—far from insignificant.
Critics argue the EPA is abandoning its core mission of environmental stewardship, instead prioritizing short-term business interests over long-term public health and safety. This anti-regulatory agenda shifts climate risks back to individuals, with the cumulative effect of leaving vulnerable populations the most exposed.
“The concern here isn’t just the attack on regulation. There is this much bigger question of what does it mean to promote the general welfare,” observes Joe Aldy, professor of environmental policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Zeldin has defended the repeal by claiming the Endangerment Finding puts “handcuffs” on consumers and the economy, but, Margaret Levi, professor of political science at Stanford University notes, “part of government’s responsibility is to protect the health and well-being of its citizens to the extent that it can, and that does require some regulation.” At the center of the debate are questions of the government’s role in protecting public health, which the Trump administration seems to reject.
If adopted, the ruling will strip future administrations of the authority to regulate climate pollution from greenhouse gases and further entrench fossil fuel dependence at a time when scientists warn that urgent action is critical to maintaining a reliable energy grid and avoiding catastrophic warming.
On August 1, the proposal was published in the Federal Register, opening a 45-day public comment period that has since been extended to September 22. The Energy Co-op encourages individuals and organizations to provide their feedback on the propsed rule change electronically via Regulations.gov, or by mail or email. Full submission guidelines are available in the Federal Register.
The Energy Co-op supports climate science and strengthening emissions standards to fight climate change. We are committed to advocating for a clean energy future and urge our members to participate in the public comment process to help protect public health and climate policy.