As part of the Trump administration’s attempts to take the Climate Crisis off the agenda, the US Department of Energy has released a report downplaying the impact of fossil fuels on global warming.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the Trump administration is in the process of ending any pretence of trying to fight the accelerating Climate Crisis with a plan to gut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by nixing its key legal basis to reduce emissions - repealing the 2009 “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare.

The controversial new DoE report disputes the scientific consensus on global warming, arguing that the threats posed by rising greenhouse gas emissions are “overstated” and claims that there are “potential benefits of carbon dioxide,” such as increased agricultural productivity, have been neglected.

That claim is based on a myth, as scientific research conclusively shows that higher concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere does not lead to more plant growth or higher agricultural yields. Any benefits from increasing CO₂ concentrations quickly plateau and CO₂ alone doesn't guarantee increased yields as nutrient availability, water supply, temperature, and extreme weather all play critical roles. Temperatures have already reached a point at around 1.5°C above the pre-industrial benchmark where agricultural yields have begun to fall in moderate climates like Europe, and temperatures in hot countries have reached life-threatening levels during this summer’s heatwave.

However, the impact varies by crop type and growing region. For instance, some tropical and C4 crops (like maize and sugarcane) show less response to CO₂ increases. Additionally, increased heat, drought, flooding, and pest pressures — all exacerbated by climate change — can offset or even reverse CO₂ gains.

Critics say the report forms part of a broader strategy to revoke the EPA endangerment finding and unleash higher production of oil and gas as part of US President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” policy of rapidly expanding oil and gas production. The removal of the EPA’s authority will “end $1 trillion or more in hidden taxes on American businesses and families,” claims the EPA’s administrator Lee Zeldin, a known Climate Crisis sceptic.

The authors of the report are also well-known climate sceptics. Among them are Steven Koonin, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who has previously written that climate science is “unsettled”; Roy Spencer, a scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a senior fellow at the Cornwall Alliance, a group that disputes mainstream climate science; and Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech climatologist who has argued that climate change is not an existential crisis, Bloomberg reports.

“This is a wholesale assault on climate science and previous policy,” Ann Carlson, professor of environmental law at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Bloomberg.

The EPA has already cited the DoE report more than two dozen times as part of its proposal to repeal the endangerment finding. Legal experts say if the rule is nixed, that decision will immediately face judicial challenges and could end up in the US Supreme Court, which ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007 that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently ruled that a healthy environment is a human right, creating a legal president that could be used to sue oil and gas companies and hold them liable for the economic damage that the accelerating Climate Crisis is causing.