Judge Rules Department Of Energy's Climate Working G…
Text settings
Story text
SmallStandardLargeStandardWideStandardOrange
* Subscribers only
Learn more
On Friday, a judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the law in forming its Climate Working Group, which released a report that was intended to undercut the rationale behind greenhouse gas regulations. The judge overseeing the case determined that the government tried to treat the Climate Working Group as a formal advisory body, while not having it obey many of the statutory requirements that govern such bodies.
While the Department of Energy (DOE) later disbanded the Climate Working Group in the hopes of avoiding legal scrutiny, documents obtained during the proceedings have now revealed the group’s electronic communications. As such, the judge ruled that the trial itself had essentially overcome the government’s illegal attempts to hide those communications.
Legal and scientific flaws
The whole saga derives from a Supreme Court Ruling that compelled the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the risks posed to the US public by greenhouse gases. During the Obama administration, this resulted in an endangerment finding that created the foundation for the EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The science underlying the endangerment finding was so solid that it was left unchallenged during the first Trump administration.
But the second Trump administration is forging ahead with an attempt to undo it regardless. To give that attempt a veneer of scientific credibility ahead of its inevitable challenge in the court system, the DOE gathered a group of prominent climate contrarians, secure in the knowledge that this group would produce a report that raised lots of spurious issues with the scientific understanding of climate change. And that’s exactly what happened, prompting the scientific community to organize a review that highlighted the report’s extensive flaws.
But the flaws weren’t limited to scientific deficiencies. Two advocacy organizations, the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists, sued, alleging that the Climate Working Group violated various provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. This requires that any groups formed to provide the government with advice must be fairly balanced and keep records that are open to the public. The Climate Working Group, by contrast, operated in secret; in fact, emails obtained during the trial showed that its members were advised to use private emails to limit public scrutiny of their communications.
In response, the DOE dissolved the Climate Working Group in order to claim that the legal issues were moot, as the advisory committee at issue in the suit no longer existed.
No defense
In court, the government initially argued that the Federal Advisory Committee Act didn’t apply, claiming that the Climate Working Group was simply organized to provide information to the government. Based on Friday’s ruling, however, once the court tried to consider that issue, the government shifted to simply arguing that the Climate Working Group no longer existed, so none of this mattered. “The Defendants, in their Opposition and subsequent filings, ignore the allegations relating to the [Federal Advisory Committee Act] violations themselves,” the judge states. “Rather, the Defendants argue only that these claims are moot because the Climate Working Group has been dissolved.”
So, the court was left with little more than the accusations that the Climate Working Group had a membership with biased opinions, failed to hold open meetings, and did not keep public records. Given the lack of opposing arguments, “These violations are now established as a matter of law.”
But the ruling also determined that the lawsuit itself has provided a solution to some of the government’s violations. As part of court proceedings, the government was compelled to hand over all of the Climate Working Group’s emails, including the ones sent to private accounts. Those have now been placed online by the Environmental Defense Fund. As a result, the Climate Working Group’s deliberations are now public, as the law had required.
What do the emails reveal? The Climate Working Group was organized by a political appointee at the DOE (one who was previously at the libertarian Cato Institute) and done with the intention of producing material that would aid the EPA with overturning the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. The group recognized that its members’ opinions were outside of the mainstream, but they viewed most mainstream scientists as hopelessly biased and generally ascribed that to their political views.
There was some talk of having the group’s report peer-reviewed, motivated by an executive order naming that a necessary component of “gold standard science.” That discussion largely focused on thinking about scientists who d their views and would give it a favorable review. That said, some DOE staff members reviewed the document and highlighted some of the same flaws identified by the scientific community; the Climate Working Group largely ignored these criticisms.
Overall, none of what the suit revealed is a surprise to anyone who paid attention to the Climate Working Group. But the issues highlighted in the suit and the emails it revealed may ultimately be significant. There has been reporting that the attempt to reverse the endangerment finding is on hold because of concerns that the scientific case for doing so is too weak, as the DOE reviewers noted in the comments. And if it ever ends up in court, the legal invalidation of the Climate Working Group may play a significant role.
John Timmer Senior Science Editor
John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.