Earlier this month, President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s Climate Working Group completed its work, and quietly achieved something few expected: they reset the national conversation on climate policy.
For years, Washington’s climate agenda has been dominated by alarmism, junk science, and a revolving cast of “experts” whose warnings are backed not by empirical evidence but the billions of dollars flowing from dark money climate advocacy groups and left-wing billionaires more focused on concentrating power than global temperatures.
The federal government has relied heavily on so-called “climate attribution” studies, which claim to link every hurricane, wildfire, and heatwave to carbon emissions.
These studies are widely criticized, even within the scientific community, for flawed methodology and confirmation bias. Yet policymakers have treated them as gospel, driving expensive and economically damaging regulations. Craven politicians have used them to attempt to condition the American people to believe every storm is the result of energy producers, and the only answer is multi-trillion-dollar energy transitions.
The Climate Working Group ripped that narrative apart. Its report exposed the flimsy assumptions, the overreliance on discredited models, and the tendency to inflate worst-case scenarios while ignoring economic realities. The group didn’t simply question climate orthodoxy; it demanded that science, logic, and reality guide policy — rather than ideology and grant-driven research agendas.
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Predictably, the backlash was immediate and loud. Dark-money-funded climate groups with questionable credibility, like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund, and self-styled “scientists” who have been discredited within peer-reviewed circles, launched predictable attacks, dismissing the report as reckless or even dangerous. They sued to prevent the report from even seeing the light of day.
The rapid, even frantic mobilization to shut this report down told us everything we need to know.
Because this report poked holes and raised questions about the “climate consensus,” it served as an existential threat to an entire constellation of dark money interests, NGO’s, political candidates and groups, and non-profits that rely on Americans believing that every raindrop and gust of wind they experience is actually the fault of the oil and gas companies.
The truth is simple: the group accomplished exactly what it was supposed to do. It recentered the debate on facts, not fear, and reminded policymakers that exaggerated claims of catastrophe do not replace rigorous analysis. And that those with genuine scientific curiosity should not kowtow to a politically driven “consensus” that shuts down questions and intellectual challenge.
Events at Climate Week in New York highlighted just how important this shift has been. Secretary Wright joined David Gelles of The New York Times for a discussion on Energy in the Trump administration.
Gelles asked questions using the Left’s normal framing about extreme weather and climate change, and Secretary Wright pushed back forcefully, saying, “These crazy convoluted links … making weather more extreme, more hurricanes, more intense hurricanes. That’s not what’s in the IPCC reports, it’s not what’s in the data. It’s what the media says, it’s what activists say, it’s what politicians say. It’s not in the data.”
Gelles pushed back: “There’s a ton of attribution science, though. Are you saying that the studies that are showing attribution science that do the actual scientific work to link global temperature rise to specific weather events are not to be trusted?”
“Attribution science is not science,” Wright responded. “You can’t draw a long-term slow trend to a weather event, tornadoes, hurricanes, extremely complicated phenomena. Attribution science is someone reaching for something.”
Thanks to the Climate Working Group, discussions about climate policy can no longer ignore economic costs, energy realities, or the limits of current science. For the first time in years, the debate has been pulled back from ideological extremes and into the light of scrutiny.
Mission accomplished. And if the critics are howling, that’s just proof the Working Group hit the mark.
The Honorable Jason Isaac is the Founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute, a trade organization that unapologetically champions free markets and American energy. Previously, he served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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