The Cartoon Villain's Guide to Killing Climate Action

Why the DOE Climate Working Group report process is so opaque

Let’s run a thought experiment. Imagine that you’re the Secretary of Energy. But you’re not just any public servant. You're a former fossil fuel executive, and you’re cartoonishly, mustache-twirlingly evil.

Your singular goal is to keep America hooked on fossil fuels — a dirty, expensive product that enriches you personally — by slowing as much as possible the deployment of clean, cheap renewable energy that benefits everyone else.

One of the main obstacles to your plan is the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” the EPA’s judgment that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. To push your agenda, you need to overturn it. And, to do that, you need to attack the very foundations of climate science itself.

How would you do it?

Fortunately for you, the tobacco playbook is sitting right there on your illegally-logged mahogany desk, open to page one. It is the time-tested manual for manufacturing doubt. As you read it, your plan comes into focus:

step 1: commission the lie

First, you need a report that claims climate science is weak, even if the claim is nonsense. Climate science is arguably the most scrutinized and replicated field in history. Over 200 years, the scientific community has built an incredibly robust understanding of our climate system.

So you go out and find five writers — the usual suspects¹ — willing to produce the report you need. They write it, and it’s as good as promised: a document designed to create the illusion of deep, foundational uncertainty.

step 2: arrange a “pal review”

You know that the report is actually indefensible crap, so you can’t possibly have a real, public peer review from actual climate scientists. They would tear your sad report to shreds.

So, you arrange a sham review. You identify a few toadies in the Department of Energy — bureaucrats, not experts — and ask them to give it a look. Unsurprisingly, they come back with glowing praise: Great job! This is fantastic! I’ve never read something this good!

Crucially, you keep this entire process secret. You don't release the names of the “reviewers” or their “comments”. Doing so would expose the process for what it is: an intellectual scam.

step 3: rush the public

Now it’s time to release your report. You’ll talk a big game about transparency and wanting a robust public debate. But those are actually the last thing you want.

So you give the public a short window to respond — say, 30 days. This ensures that actual experts and organizations are unable to provide a comprehensive rebuttal. You create the appearance of public comment without the substance.

step 4: declare victory and run

When the comment period closes and the critiques flood in, you simply ignore them. You declare victory. “These comments,” you crow, “have not made a dent in our case.” You don't engage with the arguments, there’s no need.

Of course you’ll publicly promise to respond to every single comment submitted. You have no intention of doing so.

is this reality?

This is obviously a fictional account. After all, Secretary Chris Wright does not have a mustache. Is the rest true? I don’t know Sec. Wright personally and have no idea what went on at DOE in producing this report, but I do know this: the actions the DOE has taken in producing this report are indistinguishable from those in my thought experiment.

Let’s examine the facts:

• This DOE report was written in secret by a hand-picked group selected explicitly for their positions on climate change. As CNN reported, Wright said “he hand-picked the four researchers and one economist who authored the Trump administration report”.

• They claim there was an internal peer review, but they won’t release the names of the reviewers or the reviews. I doubt they're lying about the existence of a review, but I question its legitimacy. The DOE report is so bad that any legitimate peer review would have prevented the report from ever being released. If they want to prove me wrong, they can simply release the reviews.

• The review period (30 days) was too short for any comprehensive peer review. Yes, we did put a 400+ page comment together, but there were many many more errors that we would have identified if we had more time. With 90 days, I’m pretty convinced we could have gotten hundreds of scientists writing thousands of pages of comments.

• There is no plan for how the authors of the report will respond to the comments. Reports like this need to clearly lay out the details of how the review will proceed. They need to commit to providing a point-by-point response to every comment, as well as appointing a review editor who will oversee the process. If they won’t do that, then they’re not interested in engaging the scientific community.

• They are already declaring victory, among other strategies to avoid actually responding to the comments. Here’s Steve Koonin’s Wall Street Journal op-ed from a few days ago:

Note how Koonin is already claiming that the 60,000 comments they received don’t “negate the report’s central points.”

I very seriously doubt Koonin has even read all of those comments — that would take months. In fact, the DOE hasn’t even processed and posted my comment, so how many other comments are sitting in the queue yet to be read by the authors.

But this claim makes 100% sense if this report is not about science or about legitimate scientific debate. It’s about pushing a fictitious alternative reality that benefits only fossil fuel interests.

next steps

The DOE’s next actions will reveal whether this was a good-faith effort or simply a political exercise in deception². Genuine scientific debate is defined by its rules: peer review, transparency, and detailed engagement with criticism. Therefore, if the DOE wants to be taken seriously by the scientific community, they must follow the rules of science:

• produce a point-by-point response to all serious comments

• appoint unbiased and expert review editors for each chapter, who will evaluate their responses in order to ensure that all comments have been addressed

• release the internal DOE peer reviews

They won’t do that. Instead, here’s my prediction of what the DOE authors will do. The authors will put out another version of their report, which they will claim addresses all of the comments, but which in reality ignores or avoids the many many many fatal errors that are pointed out in the comments.

To defend this feeble, non-scientific response, they’ll trot out a Wall Street Journal op-ed about “Even more clarity on climate change.” That’s it, that will be their response.

If, as I predict, there’s no credible engagement with the substantive critiques, the charade will be fully exposed. We will then see this report not as a legitimate scientific effort, but as the intentional political deception it always was.

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1. I mean this literally. If you’d asked me six months ago to name the people who DOE could get to write this, I would have named at least 4 out of the 5.

2. I understand that the DOE Climate Working Group has been disbanded but that DOE has not withdrawn the report. Several of the authors of the DOE report have said they’re continuing to work on it. In addition, I think the EPA must respond to the comments about the DOE report that are submitted to the EPA because the EPA cites the DOE report in their efforts to rescind the endangerment finding. If the authors of the original report do not continue working on it, I’m not sure who else they would get.