September 04, 2025 01:35 PM UTC

Colorado's Chris Wright Takes Withering Scientific Fire

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• by: Colorado Pols

As NPR’s Julia Simon reports, while President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. faces brutal bipartisan questioning in the U.S. Senate after plunging his department into chaos leading to mass calls for his resignation, another of Trump’s Cabinet Secretaries is similarly being called out for breaking with the science that is supposed to govern their decisionmaking:

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 argument that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for agriculture, which fails to account for all the other effects of climate change like droughts and floods, has been a go-to for Colorado Republicans since melon slayer farmer Greg Brophy served in the state legislature almost two decades ago.

Now it’s the official position of the federal Department of Energy:

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.

Before his confirmation, Energy Secretary Chris Wright was a Denver-based fossil fuel executive known for high-profile publicity stunts ridiculing to any attempt to regulate the industry or combat human-caused climate change. Wright’s approach to the issue is not so much denial that human-caused climate change is taking place, but Wright argues that the benefits of cheap dirty energy today outweigh the damage climate change will cause down the road.

Needless to say, this conclusion flies in the face of the global scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real, and that the consequences are far worse in the long run than the possibly temporarily reduced economic growth that might accompany a determined switch to clean energy. If you’re a 60-year-old fossil fuel executive, what the world looks like when you’re gone in a few decades perhaps doesn’t matter.

For everyone else, Chris Wright represents the knowing, deliberate looting of the climate at the expense of future generations. In terms of culpability, it’s much worse than guileless denial.

We said previously that Chris Wright is not just a bad choice for Energy Secretary but very likely the worst possible choice. This “report” is proof positive.