Trump administration may revise previous National Climate Assessments, says US energy secretary

By Fatma Zehra Solmaz

ISTANBUL (AA) - The Trump administration will review and may revise the country’s climate science reports, according to the US energy secretary.

Speaking to CNN’s The Source, Chris Wright said the National Climate Assessments have been taken down from government websites “because we’re reviewing them.”

“We will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those,” he added.

Mandated by Congress, the National Climate Assessments have been issued five times since 2000. Compiled by hundreds of volunteer scientists and subjected to extensive peer review, the federal reports outline how climate change has impacted each US region to date and present the latest scientific projections.

Wright claimed the earlier reports were politically biased, saying they “are not fair assessments of the data," adding that past climate change assessments, including the 2018 report from President Donald Trump’s first term, were not “a reasonable representation of broad climate science.”

His remarks followed the Trump administration’s April decision to dismiss over 400 experts who had begun work on the sixth National Climate Assessment, scheduled for release in late 2027 or early 2028.

The move is the latest in the Trump administration’s push to downplay climate science, as it has recently promoted fossil fuel production while cutting funding and incentives for renewable energy.

The Energy Department recently posted a coal image on X with the caption: “She’s an icon, she’s a legend, and she is the moment.”

Trump has consistently denied the existence of global warming, calling it a hoax, and has shut down programs to track climate change and scrubbed any mention of it from government documents, including webpages.

Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and one of the authors of the assessment due in 2028, slammed the move in a Thursday statement, saying: “Secretary Wright just confirmed our worst fears – that this administration plans to not just bury the scientific evidence but replace it with outright lies to downplay the worsening climate crisis and evade responsibility for addressing it.”