Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America project will feature its latest series, “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to speak to the issues of what waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability exist throughout the federal government and what still needs to be done. To learn more about the series, click here.

The central pillar of the “Green New scam” is the claim, no qualifications allowed, that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful. But, of course, a few hundredths of a percent of extra CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t harmful to humans at the individual level. So, activists insist it hurts people indirectly, saying it will create an unlivable world decades or centuries from now, despite having no factual proof to back up their claims.

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They’ve cemented this idea not because the science is damning (it isn’t) but by capturing a chain of intermediaries, from major media to well-funded nonprofit organizations, that stand between the research and the public, translating unalarming findings into sweeping political decrees.

The Department of Energy is trying to restore context to decades of one-way alarmism. Many people don’t know, for example, that multiple large studies found cold kills 5-15 times more people than heat, and climate disaster deaths have declined by roughly 98% over the last century as societies became more resilient. And almost no climate debate acknowledges that CO2-emitting machines power the life-saving infrastructure of modernity: storm warnings, refrigeration, hospitals, and vehicles.

Whether readers agree with the conclusions of the Energy Department’s report or not, the department has taken a step that should earn public trust: it posted the draft, identified the authors, and opened a formal Federal Register docket for comments from any critic willing to engage on the record. That’s what scientific due process looks like in a republic. 

The National Academy of Sciences chose the opposite model. It launched a self-initiated “fast-track” review of CO2’s effects, timed to collide with major Environmental Protection Agency rulemaking. It did so in ways that have raised many serious questions about its status as an unbiased actor in the debate.

THE LEFT’S REAL POWER IS CONTROLLING THE BUREAUCRACY

The NAS was chartered under former President Abraham Lincoln as a neutral, expert body asked by accountable officials to evaluate a question and report back. Defenders will say NAS simply summarizes the literature. But the academy has eroded its credibility by dabbling in DEI-focused or politics-first initiatives and blurring the line between scholarship and fundraising around the climate questions they claim to neutrally assess. Indeed, this hurried study is not the first instance in which NAS has been criticized for inviting bias and conflicts of interest in its climate work. 

This is the line between science and politicized science. Real science earns confidence by welcoming replication, transparency, and open data; politicized science races toward a predetermined headline. In the wake of science’s long-running reproducibility crisis across too many fields to count, reformers have embraced better methodologies and transparency to curb these ill effects. That’s the spirit the Energy Department followed with its open docket.  

This is also the standard the Trump administration set in its “Restoring Gold Standard Science” order, which tells agencies to show their work, acknowledge uncertainties, and invite scrutiny.

But some now complain that transparency and reproducibility are being “weaponized.” That flips the logic of science and self-government on its head. Privacy is for people, and transparency is for government and the scientific method. Real scientists don’t fear transparency; those who weaponize and twist the findings of scientists do.

And here’s a telling double standard. When the EPA under former President Joe Biden finalized its 2024 power-plant rule that depended on large-scale carbon capture for compliance, which was technologically unfeasible on a commercial scale, the NAS didn’t launch a study to warn about workability, reliability, or cost. There was no crash committee and no hurried deadline. But when the Energy Department and today’s EPA move to revisit the legal and scientific foundations of those rules, including the 2009 “Endangerment Finding,” which is the foundation for heavy-handed climate regulation under former President Barack Obama and Biden, the academy suddenly springs into action. 

The timing speaks louder than any press release.

Americans deserve better than politicized science. On climate, especially, we should welcome red-team/blue-team scrutiny because the stakes are so high: affordability, reliability, and national security. Before we make society-wide changes to the power systems we depend on, let’s insist the science guiding us has survived robust, transparent cross-examination, not misrepresentation by an unaccountable intermediary. 

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE ‘REFORMING THE DEEP STATE’ SERIES

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. The NAS completed the study, which misses the mark widely. It is as one-sided as the authoring committee’s lopsided composition would suggest, failing to consider the benefits of fossil fuel consumption, e.g., the reason we consume them in the first place. The 98% reduction in climate deaths cited previously is conspicuously not mentioned. It also failed, by its own admission, to consider the effect of calls to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels, which the report is intended to bolster. The effects of a rushed and unneeded energy transition are real, happening now, especially in places such as Europe and California, and dire, threatening people’s livelihoods and health.

The NAS will pat itself on the back for “standing up for science,” or something like it, but a panel selected for speed, stocked with political advocates, and willfully ignoring the full evidence can deliver only one verdict. The academy’s fast-track report is that verdict. Policymakers and Americans should reject it and insist on real science that serves American and global prosperity, not a prewritten script.

Ted Ellis is the director for Power America at the America First Policy Institute.