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In 2025, with John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, and Roy Spencer, McKitrick was a member of the United States Department of Energy's Climate Working Group and a co-author of its A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate (23 July 2025)[7]

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DOE Climate | Department of Energy

On July 29, 2025, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a report entitled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate, evaluating existing peer-reviewed literature and government data on climate impacts of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions and providing a critical assessment of the conventional narrative on climate change.

Among the key findings, the report concludes that carbon dioxide (CO2) -induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial. Additionally, the report finds that U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.

The report was developed by the 2025 Climate Working Group, a group of five independent scientists assembled by Energy Secretary Chris Wright with diverse expertise in physical science, economics, climate science and academic research.

Summary

This report:

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Climate scientists find errors in a new DOE climate report : NPR

Dozens of scientists find errors in a new Energy Department climate report

September 2, 2025

Heard on All Things Considered

A group of more than 85 scientists have issued a joint rebuttal to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report about climate change, finding it full of errors and misrepresenting climate science.

This comes weeks after the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration that alleges that Energy Secretary Chris Wright "quietly arranged for five hand-picked skeptics of the effects of climate change" to compile the government's climate report and violated the law by creating the report in secret with authors "of only one point of view."

The DOE's Climate Working Group consisted of four scientists and one economist who have all questioned the scientific consensus that climate change is a large threat to the world and sometimes frame global warming as beneficial.

The group of climate scientists found several examples where the DOE authors cherry-picked or misrepresented climate science in the agency's report. For instance, in the DOE report the authors claim that rising carbon dioxide can be a "net benefit" to U.S. agriculture, neglecting to mention the negative impacts of more heat and climate-change fueled extreme weather events on crops.

The DOE report also states that there is no evidence of more intense "meteorological" drought in the U.S. or globally, referring to droughts that involve low rainfall. But the dozens of climate scientists point out that this is misleading, because higher temperatures and more evaporation — not just low rainfall — can lead to and exacerbate droughts. They say that there are, in fact, many studies showing how climate change has exacerbated droughts.

"This report was reviewed internally by a group of DOE scientific researchers and policy experts from the Office of Science and National Labs," writes Ben Dietderich, chief spokesperson for the DOE in an email to NPR.

Dietderich adds that "the Trump administration is committed to engaging in a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy."

The Trump administration wants the government to stop regulating climate pollution. The DOE report was cited multiple times by the Environmental Protection Agency in its recent proposal to roll back what's known as the endangerment finding, which is the basis for rules regulating climate pollution, including from coal and gas-fired power plants, cars and trucks, and methane from the oil and gas industry.

The DOE report "is about providing fodder for further actions down the track, which will roll back progress on climate action," says John Cook, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne who studies climate science misinformation. " The DOE report is basically arguing climate change is no big deal, therefore we shouldn't act. Always it's about trying to delay action and maintain the status quo."

The group of more than 85 scientists recently submitted their review of the Climate Working Group report to the Federal Register as part of the DOE's 30-day open-comment period, which closes on Tuesday.

Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, coordinated the response from dozens of climate experts. He says unlike the DOE report, climate reports from groups such as the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change feature the work of hundreds of global scientists and require multiple rounds of peer review.

Dessler argues that this DOE report, released in late July, is important to pay attention to, because of what he and other scientists identify as problems with the science, and because of how the report is being used by the Trump administration to roll back the endangerment finding. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has said the goal of the administration is "driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion."

Travis Fisher is the director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. He coordinated the work of the DOE's Climate Working Group. He says the DOE would look at what comes in during the open-comment period.

"If there are errors, they'll correct them, of course," Fisher says. "And I don't know if any group like this could produce a 150-page document without any errors. So we'll see what comes up."

Fisher adds,  "It's just a matter of good government and good science to address all comments that come in."

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UP FOR AG? OMFG AT HEARTLAND CONF 4 26

MOJO GUK

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave the keynote speech at a conference on Wednesday morning, one which was hosted by a prominent climate-denying think tank that previously compared those concerned about the climate crisis to the Unabomber on billboard posters in 2012.

“No longer are we going to rely on bad, flawed assumptions instead of accurate, present-day facts, without apology or regret,” Zeldin said at the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change in Washington, DC, referring to well-established climate science.

Zeldin has been widely criticized by climate experts. Last month, more than 160 environmental and public health organizations called for him to resign or be fired, saying no EPA administrator in history “has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission.”

In his speech, Zeldin poked fun at the media for calling him “controversial” for not “following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom and gloom position of the day is from John Kerry or Al Gore or AOC”—referring to the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” he said.

He derided previous administrations’ heeding of climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, and for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet.”

“What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”

“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth…is not a pollutant and never was.”

Ahead of Zeldin’s Wednesday-morning speech at the Heartland conference, Environmental Defense Fund Action put up posters around Hotel Washington critiquing the EPA administrator’s participation and saying climate denial does not improve Americans’ lives. “Lee Zeldin is executing on the playbook of denial written by the Heartland Institute,” Joanna Slaney, a vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said.

The Heartland Institute has accepted money from big oil companies including Shell and ExxonMobil, and from the Mercers, a family of Republican mega-donors. The thinktank was a contributor to Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration.

The Heartland Institute rejects the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is real, human-caused and urgent. Since the early 2000s, it has been a leading promoter of climate doubt, even branding climate science as “fake news.”

Experts agree that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet, resulting in dangerous increases in temperatures and in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Scientists have long warned that the world must quickly phase out fossil fuels in order to preserve a livable climate.

Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed the climate crisis as a “hoax” and dismissed environmental policies as a “scam.” And under Zeldin, the EPA has exempted polluting facilities from regulations, shuttered climate and environmental research offices, and shrunk its workforce. It has also rolled back dozens of environmental and climate protections.

“What we are doing in the last 14 months is no surprise,” Zeldin said in his speech. “It is what I pledged during my confirmation hearing, and it is what the American public voted for when they put Donald J Trump back in office. And thank God they did.”

The EPA administrator also spoke about his most controversial environmental rollback: the shredding of the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations, known as the “endangerment finding.” Scientists and other experts widely condemned the repeal, but the Heartland Institute has celebrated it.}:}:

“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth and happens to result from every single bit of human and animal activity on the planet, is not a pollutant and never was,” Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the thinktank, said in a February statement praising the repeal.

References to the rollback were met with cheers at the conference in Washington on Wednesday morning, and Zeldin expressed “admiration” for the Heartland Institute’s advocacy against the endangerment finding in his speech.

Craig Rucker, the president of CFACT—a right-wing group which complains about“climate exaggeration,” introduced Zeldin at the conference as a “friend of sound science [and] climate realism, a real rock star.”

Another panel at Wednesday’s conference convened the authors of a contentious Department of Energy report that was written to back up the repeal of the endangerment finding. The publication was derided by climate scientists as making a “mockery of science,” and was not used in the justification for the final repeal of the finding. “While the world warned, a lot of things improved and got better, and continues to do so,” said Ross McKitrick, an author of the report, at the conference.

Another report author, Judith Curry—a climatologist who rails against climate “alarmism”—criticized the “monolithic consensus” on climate science that is “presented to the world.” Though the US government disbanded the group which produced the controversial report on the endangerment finding, Curry said the authors were currently reviewing comments on the report and preparing a new version to release this year.

Earlier on Wednesday morning, the Heartland Institute’s president, James Taylor, kicked off the conference with a rousing speech in which he invoked the debunked climate myth that increased carbon emissions are good for plants: “Restoring CO2 and restoring warmth to our world is…a restoration to more ideal conditions,” he said.

“The truth is clear: there is no climate crisis,” said Taylor. “The science is very clear.”

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