https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/climate/trump-climate-energy-department.html
Excerpt: The three scientists joined the administration after it dismissed hundreds of experts who were assessing how global warming is affecting the country.
WASHINGTON – The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.
The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show.
They are Professor Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a bestselling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; Professor John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Dr Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.
Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country.
The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.
In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding”, which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to comment publicly.
It was not immediately clear what the three scientists were working on or whether they were being paid. Representatives for Prof Koonin, Dr Spencer and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.
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Prof Koonin also serves as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning research organisation on Stanford University’s campus.
He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, a scientist for oil and gas company BP and an undersecretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.
In his 2021 book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” Prof Koonin argued that while the planet was warming and human activities had played a role, the scientific consensus was not as certain or as dire as it was frequently portrayed.
In a phone interview in November 2024, Prof Koonin said that the book had made an impression on Mr Wright, who ran oil and gas company Liberty Energy before he was confirmed as energy secretary in February.
“He reached out when I wrote the book and said, ‘This is great,’” Prof Koonin recalled. “He asked me to come talk to his company at one point – it was a couple years ago – and we got to know each other.”
He added, “Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple years, and I think he is well aligned with what I wrote in the book”.
Dr Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, also has a connection to Mr Wright.
In a report published in 2024 by Liberty Energy, Mr Wright cited atmospheric temperature records that Dr Spencer had collected. The overall report, titled “Bettering Human Lives”, made the case that fossil fuels were “essential” to solving global poverty, a claim that some experts have called misleading.
In addition to his role at the University of Alabama, Dr Spencer is a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that rejects mainstream climate science.
He previously served as a scientist at Nasa and as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group responsible for creating Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the new administration.
Dr Spencer has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been smaller than that of natural variations in global cloud cover.
While some of Dr Spencer’s past work has been funded by the government, he has accused federal climate researchers of being biased because they receive taxpayer money.
“The popular opinion that government-funded research is unbiased must be considered quite naïve,” he wrote in his 2010 book, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists.
Prof Christy has worked closely with Dr Spencer to maintain atmospheric temperature records at the University of Alabama.
“Scientists are worried…”
The correct headline would be, “Activists are worried that their house of cards is about to collapse.”
Actual scientists wouldn’t be worried about dissenting voices having a seat at the table.
https://t.co/yJrh1KuoGn pic.twitter.com/KxNryUjbBd
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) July 10, 2025
