On July 29, 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released a climate science report that immediately set off a firestorm of controversy. Authored by five long-time climate change skeptics—Steve Koonin, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, Judith Curry, and Roy Spencer—the so-called "Climate Working Group" (CWG) report was intended to undergird the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back regulations on climate-heating pollution from vehicles, power plants, and other major sources. But instead of settling debate, the report ignited a fierce backlash from the scientific community and environmental advocates alike.
According to DeSmog, more than 85 climate experts—including MacArthur “Genius” Fellows, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and fellows from the American Meteorological Society—published a 435-page review on September 13, 2025, that condemned the DOE report as “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.” The expert reviewers found “pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics” throughout the report. Their central allegation: the CWG’s work systematically downplayed the risks of record-breaking heat, intense rainfall, worsening wildfires, rising sea levels, and widespread health harms—each of which has been well-established by decades of peer-reviewed science.
On the very day the DOE report was published, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to rescind the scientific “endangerment finding”—the foundational document affirming that carbon pollution poses a threat to human health and welfare by driving dangerous planetary warming. The EPA’s public comment period on this proposal is open through September 22, 2025, while the DOE’s own comment window was set for just 30 days, notably shorter than the more typical 60 days and, as of mid-September, still not extended.
The controversy over the DOE report quickly escalated into a legal battle. As reported by NPR, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that Energy Secretary Chris Wright “quietly arranged for five hand-picked skeptics of the effects of climate change” to write the report, in violation of federal law, and did so in secret with input from only one point of view. The suit seeks to have the CWG report thrown out, arguing that it was created in brazen violation of the requirement for transparency and scientific balance in federal policymaking.
Energy Secretary Wright, who had convened the group in the first place, responded to the mounting criticism and legal scrutiny by disbanding the CWG. In a letter dated September 3, 2025, Wright thanked the five members for their service and stated that the group’s purpose was “to catalyze scientific and public debate,” a goal he claimed had now been met. The disbanding was first reported by CNN and later confirmed by NPR.
But the fallout from the report’s publication and the group’s dissolution continues to reverberate. The expert review organized by Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler is being formally submitted to the DOE during the public comment period. Dessler, in a statement to NPR, criticized the CWG report for mimicking the doubt-sowing tactics once used by the tobacco industry to delay regulation of harmful products. “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. “Instead, they can muddy the waters and distract from more productive scientific inquiry.”
Reviewers found dozens of factual and structural flaws in the CWG document. They noted the report was riddled with typos, scrambled citations, unsupported claims, and references to research or data that reviewers could not locate—along with at least one manufactured quote. The report’s authors heavily cited their own prior work, with self-citations making up 11% of the references—two to four times higher than in the 2021 climate science overview from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In some chapters, more than a quarter of citations were self-referential, creating what the reviewers called an "echo chamber" that excluded broader peer-reviewed science.
More troubling, the review accused the DOE report of omitting or downplaying entire fields of climate science that would have contradicted its conclusions. For example, the only mention of the oceans was limited to acidification, coral reefs, and sea level rise, while ignoring marine heat waves, changing species distributions, and economic impacts on fisheries. The report also downplayed the scientific research underlying the Paris Agreement’s methods for measuring carbon emissions, instead elevating more marginal approaches. In sections on extreme weather, the CWG team was found to have cherry-picked studies, quoted research out of context, and used outdated data, all to minimize the link between climate change and destructive events like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.
The reviewers also identified the resurrection of “zombie arguments”—claims about climate change that have long since been settled by the scientific community. For instance, the report cited high temperatures from the 1930s to dismiss the role of climate change in recent heat waves, even though, as the review points out, “the most recent few years have had as many record-breaking high temperatures as the 1930s. In fact, the year with the most record-breaking hot days is 2023.”
Judith Curry, one of the CWG report’s authors, responded to the expert review on her blog, calling it “comprehensive” and “a laudable effort,” though she dismissed the idea that it would change any of the report’s conclusions. Curry noted, “It was prepared in 30 days (sort of weakens the argument that the DOE report was written too quickly, ha ha).” After skimming the review, she said, “I didn’t spot anything in this report that would lead to changing any of the conclusions in the DOE Report.” The other four CWG members and the DOE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
As for the broader context, the legal and scientific battles over the endangerment finding stretch back nearly two decades. The EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act was established by the Supreme Court in 2007, and the endangerment finding itself was first released by the Obama administration in 2009. Since then, a coalition of politicians, oil companies, and right-wing groups has sought to overturn it, culminating in the current push to rescind the finding and halt federal climate regulations.
For now, the future of U.S. climate policy hangs in the balance. The CWG is gone, but its report remains at the heart of ongoing legal and regulatory battles—battles that will shape how the country responds to the mounting threats of climate change in the years ahead.
