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SUNDAY SCIENCE: TRUMP’S DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY GETS SCIENCED  
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Bill McKibben
September 7, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ International climate experts have extensively debunked the
D.O.E.’s recent report, but will science win out? _

Chris Wright testifies at his nomination hearing to become Secretary
of Energy., Ting Shen / AFP / Getty

 

As I watch the Trump White House and its orbiting debris field of
oddballs and charlatans, a single long-ago movie scene keeps returning
to my mind. In “Annie Hall,” waiting in line in a movie theatre,
Woody Allen’s character becomes irritated by a guy behind him, an
academic blowhard pontificating to his date about the culture. When he
mentions the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Allen erupts and
then, in a delightful spectacle of comeuppance, produces McLuhan
himself, who tells the man, “I heard what you were saying. You know
nothing of my work. . . . How you ever got to teach a course in
anything is totally amazing.” Allen then says, to the camera,
“Boy, if life were only like this.”

Every so often, it is. On Tuesday, eighty-six climate scientists
delivered a four-hundred-page response to a Department of
Energy report
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July which had attempted to show that global warming is no big deal.
That report was the scientific equivalent of a bespoke suit. Given
that President Trump had declared climate change to be a “hoax,”
and given that Energy Secretary Christopher Wright had previously
declared it to be a “side effect of building the modern world,” it
stands to reason that Wright’s department picked to conduct its
report exactly five climate researchers, all notable for careers in
which they’ve stood conspicuously outside the overwhelming
scientific consensus that global warming is a grave and immediate
danger. These five duly concluded, among other things, that
“CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than
commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies
could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”

The rest of the Trumpian apparatus then swung into motion. Lee Zeldin,
the former congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate from New
York who somehow ended up as the administrator of the Environmental
Protection Agency and who had declared that his goal is to drive “a
dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion,”
embraced the findings, and quickly moved to use them in his effort to
overturn the “endangerment finding” that the E.P.A. had previously
relied on to regulate greenhouse gases.

The D.O.E report, however, had to be opened up for public comment, and
so a climate scientist at Texas A. & M. University, Andrew Dessler,
used the social-media platform Bluesky (which has largely replaced X
for scientific conversation) to start assembling a global team of
eighty-six researchers from all the relevant disciplines who, in a
matter of a few weeks, subjected the report’s findings to peer
review. Their “comment” is two and a half times as long as the
report, and it is almost painfully hilarious to read. For instance,
the five skeptics contended that “meteorological drought” was not
increasing in the United States; as the researchers point out in their
response, this is cherry-picked nonsense. In the first place,
“meteorological drought” is only a measure of how much rain falls;
the hotter temperatures associated with climate change have been
increasing evaporation, which dries up more of that rain. And, in any
event, the contrarians used the entire continental U.S. as the
statistical basis for their finding, which makes no sense: as global
warming increases evaporation in the arid West, it also increases
rainfall in the moist East, producing the flooding rains that have
caused so much damage in regions like the Appalachians. As the comment
archly points out, “taking an average across the CONUS runs the risk
of averaging out these trends.” Indeed, the authors note, with all
the scientific citations, that “research has indicated that recent
droughts in the WUS were more severe than droughts over the past 1000+
years: while megadroughts have occurred in the paleoclimatic record,
the western US megadrought of 2000-2018 was the worst since the
mid-1500 (Williams et al.2020) and from 2000-2021 was the worst since
800 (Williams et al. 2022) as defined using soil moisture anomalies.
Similarly, climate change made the 2012-2014 period in CA the driest
period in 1200 years (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014; Williams et al.
2015).”

 

The comment has sections like this on every topic raised by the D.O.E.
report; it’s a blitzkrieg of studies, observations, and data which
makes clear that the authors were miles out of their depth, and
further still out of the mainstream. But, of course, that doesn’t
necessarily count for much in the current dispensation, where reality
is becoming a Choose Your Own Adventure story. In the wake of the
resignations of four officials at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention last week, some early-summer remarks from the Health and
Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., started popping up
again on social media. He’d told Tucker Carlson that “trusting the
experts is not a feature of science. It’s not a feature of
democracy. It’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of
totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation—and it’s
one of the burdens of citizenship—to do our own research and make
our own determinations about things.”

That’s clearly not true about vaccines—we’ve trusted the experts
for a century, and it’s worked out pretty well, including during
the _COVID_ pandemic, when vaccines saved millions of lives. And
it’s a clearly absurd thing to say about global warming: Are we
planning to “do our own research” on, to pick a topic covered at
length in Tuesday’s response by the eighty-six researchers, the
“hemispheric symmetry of the planetary albedo”?

The American scientific enterprise, the source of so much wealth and
national prestige, is being unravelled before our eyes—research
grants are being cut off, satellites disconnected, reports cooked up
to meet the needs of particular industries and ideologies. It is as
sad as any of the other dismal effects of the past election. But the
scientific method will not, perhaps, go quietly. With hundreds of
years of patient work behind it, with some educational institutions
willing to protect their scientists, and with researchers hard at work
in less-benighted nations, the human desire to know and to understand
will continue to produce results. Many of those findings will be
contrary to the interests of the blowhards who, at least temporarily,
control our nation, and so they may be suppressed for the moment. But
whether or not they are heeded, in the end, the truth will out. If
it’s not in the form of enlightened policy, it will be in the form
of pandemics and wildfires, of untreated disease and rising sea level.
Because life really is like this. ♦

BILL MCKIBBEN, a contributing writer at _The New Yorker_ focussing
on climate policy, is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people
over the age of sixty for progressive change, and is also the Schumann
Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College.
His books include “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate
and a Fresh Chance for Civilization
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and “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American
Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened
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StarTalk: The AI That Can Read Your Mind
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Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, Gary O’Reilly, Jean Remi King
What would it take to actually read someone’s mind?
August 30, 2025

* Science
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