Department of Energy Report Includes False Claims about Climate Change

On July 29, 2025, the Department of Energy released a report falsely claiming that human-caused climate change “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and “aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial.” The 150-page report, titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” also claims that the threats from sea level rise and extreme weather events have been overstated by climate model projections and that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would have little effect.

The report was prepared by the Department of Energy’s new Climate Working Group, which includes five well-known climate skeptics. Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, described the authors as “widely recognized contrarians who don’t represent the mainstream scientific consensus.”

Climate scientists have also called the report “deceptive,” “cherry-picked,” and “antiscientific.” Michael Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, described it as “a deeply misleading antiscientific narrative, built on deceptive arguments, misrepresented datasets, and distortion of actual scientific understanding.”

Ben Sanderson, research director at the CICERO Centre for International Climate Research in Oslo, said the report selected certain studies and data to support the false claim that more CO2 in the atmosphere leads to “global greening” and increased crop yields, while omitting other factors like heat stress and increased drought.