Trump DOE Delivers Win For ‘Small-s’ Science, And America

Revisiting scientific assumptions behind climate policy is long overdue.

July was bad for government Science (AKA “The Science,” AKA The Scientific Consensus®). On the other hand, the modest old science community weathered the month quite nicely, thank you, bolstered by several Trump administration actions. In the latest, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released a report on July 30 asserting that “CO2-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”

The study behind this report was sorely needed. Ever since the 2009 EPA “endangerment finding,” in which that agency determined that CO2 was a pollutant it could regulate under the Clean Air Act, the government has relied on worst-case climate models to justify ever more intrusive regulation of U.S. energy production and industries.

In those heady days before the endangerment research was even complete, Obama’s EPA was essentially picking out drapes for the extra office space its new powers would require. By contrast, Secretary Chris Wright has opened DOE’s latest report for comment before it promulgates or rescinds any regulations regarding climate change. But it’s safe to assume America can expect some energy sector sanity since, as the report says, U.S. policies to counteract climate change “are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.” In the meantime, the government would be needlessly shackling the economy.