Energy Secretary Says Past Climate Reports Will Be ‘Updated.’ Why Researchers Are Alarmed.

Lake Powell, a key Colorado River reservoir, is at low levels as drought conditions in the Southwest worsen. Climate change has been cited as a factor. (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)

The Trump administration plans to release “updated” versions of government climate reports from the past, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said on CNN this week. He indicated he wants the reports toned down.

Wright said he disagrees with the conclusions in past National Climate Assessments, a benchmark review of climate change that the government puts out about every four years. The assessments are compiled by hundreds of scientists and researchers both within and outside government; the latest one was 1,834 pages. The Trump administration has pulled past reports down from the government website where they were previously hosted.

Wright’s statements, along with a new Department of Energy report that questions the long-established scientific consensus on climate, has raised alarms among some climate researchers.

“It’s incredibly deceptive. I think it’s anti-scientific,” said Rachel Santarsiero, the director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project at George Washington University. “We have started to enter complete climate-erasure territory.”

The changes to climate information come amid a larger debate over government statistics—economists have raised alarms about the integrity of economic data after Trump fired the administrator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics following a weak monthly jobs report.

The National Security Archive has made a list of climate websites that have been taken down or altered by the Trump administration, including at the State Department and Environmental Protection Agency. Scientific consortiums have attempted to archive old government data, but Santarsiero said they invariably can’t retain everything.

Wright said in the interview that he believes past assessments—including one that came out during the first Trump administration—were overly alarmist. “It certainly wasn’t a reasonable representation of broad climate science at that time,” Wright said.

The Department of Energy’s report questioning climate science came out at the same time as an announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that it plans to repeal the legal finding that allows the government to regulate activities that contribute to climate change.

Five editions of the National Climate Assessment have been released since 2000, with the latest coming out in 2023. The Trump administration ended the contract for the team that was coordinating the next assessment, causing work to stop on it. The White House did not respond to a question about whether it still intends to release another assessment when the next one is due around 2027.

Wright’s interview opened up the possibility that past assessments could be altered. After being asked why the reports had been taken off the website, he said “we’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports.” The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment on what sorts of updates it is considering.

Wright said that he doesn’t know why the climate assessments have been taken down from the government website, but that people can find other copies of them by searching the internet. North Carolina State University, for instance, keeps copies here.

Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com