EPA Rationale for Ending Climate Regs Under the Clean Air Act Based on Discredited Science
Authors of the study EPA used to justify its decision are climate science deniers
On Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin made good on his threat to drive “a dagger through the heart” of what he called “climate-change religion.” He announced that the EPA has formally proposed to revoke its 2009 “endangerment finding,” the scientific conclusion that enabled the agency to regulate planet-warming gases under the Clean Air Act by determining that they pose a threat to public health and welfare. The move would end EPA regulations on vehicle and power plant carbon emissions.
“With this proposal, the Trump EPA is proposing to end 16 years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers,” Zeldin said in a July 29 EPA press release. “In our work so far, many stakeholders have told me that the Obama and Biden EPAs twisted the law, ignored precedent, and warped science to achieve their preferred ends and stick American families with hundreds of billions of dollars in hidden taxes every single year.”
Who are those “many stakeholders” Zeldin referenced? The release does not say. Perhaps he was alluding to the fossil fuel interests who, according to a March Money Trail investigation, paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees after he lost the 2022 New York gubernatorial race. Or perhaps Zeldin was talking about the contrarian scientists who coauthored the Department of Energy’s (DOE) 2025 Climate Work Group study the EPA is using to justify its proposal.
The DOE study’s conclusions, the EPA press release asserted, rest on “updated scientific data that challenge the assumptions behind the 2009 endangerment finding.” But that’s not what veteran climate scientists say. Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, says the study is nothing more than a rehash of debunked antiscientific assertions.
“It’s the usual mix of untruths, half-truths, and discredited if seemingly plausible claims we’ve come to expect from professional climate deniers,” Mann, the coauthor of the 2025 book “Science Under Siege,” told Money Trail. “This is of course exactly what we anticipated we would see if Republicans took hold of the federal government.”
Bucking the Scientific Consensus
Despite the prevailing view of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, who received 85 percent of the oil and gas industry’s campaign contributions since 2013, there is a worldwide scientific consensus on the causes of climate change and the threat it poses.
According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is no question that human activity has warmed the planet at a rate unprecedented in at least 2,000 years. Burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—accounts for more than 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide and water vapor) and nearly 90 percent of CO2 emissions.
Even with the seemingly small global temperature increase of 1.2 °C (2.2°F) warming (as of 2023) since the preindustrial times of the mid-1800s, the IPPC says climate change “is causing more frequent and intense extreme weather events resulting in widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.” Further warming would rapidly magnify those risks and trigger more fossil fuel-powered disasters such as the recent Texas floods and the Los Angeles fires.
More than 14,000 scientists worldwide have contributed to IPCC reports since its founding in 1988. The IPCC’s most recent study, its Sixth Assessment Report, was written by more than 1,000 lead and contributing authors and reviewed by more than 46,000 experts and government officials.
Relying on Fringe Scientists
Instead of taking the word of thousands of IPCC scientists, the Trump administration turned to five outliers to make its case. Mann was not surprised.
“Tasking a handful of deniers-for-hire to write an anti-science-ridden screed that purports to somehow overturn the consensus of the world’s scientists is a shopworn tactic of climate denialists,” he said. “Since the actual scientific consensus behind human-caused climate change is both irrefutable and problematic to its fossil fuel agenda, the administration has chosen to simply reject the scientific consensus, defund the actual science, and literally stop [climate] measurements from taking place.”
In their DOE report, which was not peer-reviewed, the five authors made a number of dubious claims. For example, they criticized computer models used to predict climate change, claiming they overestimate warming. In fact, computer models have been making accurate predictions for 50 years.
They also contended that carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, helps plants grow and increases agricultural productivity. According to a peer-reviewed 2024 Columbia University study, however, climate change is harming agriculture by “increasing water use and scarcity, nitrous oxide and methane emissions, soil degradation, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, pest pressure, pesticide pollution, and biodiversity loss.”
Further, they alleged that government climate regulations have a limited effect on global temperature rise. According to the EPA itself, the Biden-era clean car standards alone would “avoid more than 7 billion tons of carbon emissions.” The agency also calculated the standards would “provide nearly $100 billion of annual net benefits to society, including $13 billion of annual public health benefits due to improved air quality, and $62 billion in reduced annual fuel costs, and maintenance and repair costs for drivers.”
Introducing the Fraudulent Five
Who are the coauthors of the DOE study that the EPA is citing to justify killing the endangerment finding? Three of them—John Christy, Roy Spencer and Steven Koonin—are now working for DOE, The New York Times reported earlier this month, but it is not clear if any of them are being paid. The other two authors are Judith Curry and Ross McKitrick.
John Christy is a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He also serves as Alabama’s state climatologist, a position he’s held since 2000. An outspoken critic of climate computer models, he argued in 2020 that the climate isn’t that sensitive to changes in CO2, but five years earlier he insisted that more CO2 in the atmosphere would be a boon to farmers. “Carbon dioxide makes things grow,” he said in a 2015 interview with The Guardian. “The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food. CO2 is not the problem.” Despite the fact that he was one of the five coauthors of the DOE study, Christy told the Times just a few weeks ago that he was not working on the endangerment finding.
Roy Spencer is a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the quasi-libertarian organization that published the Project 2025 blueprint for the Trump administration. Last October Spencer posted an essay on Heritage’s website, “Climate Change: The Science Doesn’t Support the Heated Rhetoric.” “Stop believing everything you read about climate change,” he concluded at the end of the piece. “You’ve been misled. There is no climate crisis.” Spencer also is a policy adviser for the Heartland Institute, a libertarian group that rejects climate science, and a fellow with the Cornwall Alliance, a Christian group that claims environmentalism is “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.”
Steven Koonin is a physicist, a professor at New York University’s business school, director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, a former chief scientist at BP oil company, and a former undersecretary of science during the Obama administration. In his 2021 best-selling book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters,” he argued that concerns about climate change are overblown and that society will be able to adapt to it. That same year, he appeared in a PragerU video, “Is There Really a Climate Emergency?,” asserting that the presumption that the planet is facing a catastrophe, computer models can predict the future, and eliminating fossil fuels can prevent climate change is “either untrue or so off the mark as to be useless.”
Judith Curry is a climatologist and former professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she chaired the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from 2002 to 2014. She doesn’t deny that climate change is occurring, but she says there’s no way to determine how much human activity is causing it. She is currently the president of Climate Forecast Applications Network, a consulting company whose clients include oil companies, electric utilities and fossil gas energy traders. In a March 2023 column for The Australian newspaper, “UN’s climate panic is more politics than science,” she derided IPCC reports as “‘bumper sticker’ climate science—making a political statement while using the overall reputation of science to give authority to a politically manufactured consensus.” Two days ago, she posted a celebratory blog on her website, Climate Etc., about the DOE study, exclaiming “Climate science is baaaack.”
Ross McKitrick is an associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has endorsed the Cornwall Alliance’s manifesto, “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming,” which states: “We deny that carbon dioxide—essential to all plant growth—is a pollutant. Reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures, and the costs of the policies would far exceed the benefits.” In February 2020, he wrote a column for Troy Media, a Canadian news syndicate, titled “Fight climate extremists before they upend society.”
Questionable Expertise
The EPA proposal to kill the endangerment finding is just that—a proposal. It’s not a done deal. It now enters a 45-day public comment period, after which the agency has to respond before submitting its final version. Even then, the controversy will continue. Environmental organizations will no doubt challenge the final decision in court.
In any case, the EPA’s rationale for repealing its endangerment finding is on shaky ground. Polluting industries have challenged the endangerment finding in dozens of courts and failed each time, so how much credence should the courts give the Fraudulent Five’s DOE study?
None says Mann. “All they’ve done is recycle discredited climate science denier arguments. They constructed a deeply misleading antiscientific narrative built on deceptive arguments, misrepresented datasets, and distortion of actual scientific understanding. Then they dressed it up with dubious graphics composed of selective, cherry-picked data.
“There is nothing scientific about this report whatsoever,” he continued. “In fact, it looks exactly like what you would get if you asked an AI chatbot to write a fake climate report trained on climate denial propaganda websites in an effort to justify that political agenda. Not since Stalin and Soviet Lysenkoism have we seen such a brazen effort to misrepresent science in service of an ideological agenda.”
Scott Denning, a climate scientist and professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, was equally critical.
“The authors of this report didn’t do any research,” he told Money Trail. ”The document falsely asserts without any evidence that centuries of direct measurements, laboratory experiments, and data collected from towers, aircraft, and satellites are all wrong.
“The ‘report’ is nothing but propaganda,” he added. “It’s like the EPA is being run by Tony Soprano. Just because he says gravity doesn’t exist, it is still not safe for his thugs to push you off a building.”
Rocky Kistner, Money Trail’s associate editor, previously worked as a reporter and producer at ABC News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, HuffPost, Marketplace and PBS Frontline.
Elliott Negin, Money Trail’s executive editor, was previously the managing editor of American Journalism Review, the editor of Public Citizen and Nuclear Times magazines, a news editor at NPR, and a regular contributor at HuffPost.
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