By Vijay Jayaraj

For 20 years, an alliance of partisan ideologues hungry for power and the profits of lobbying and grifting, along with crisis-obsessed media and certain academic elites, dictated what many politicians would back, what faculty would publish and what journalists dared to report about climate change.

Activists leveraged the narrative of a false planetary emergency to demand energy restrictions, carbon taxes and international treaties. Economies were slowed, industries driven offshore, and energy prices forced upward.

Energy policy has been distorted by appeasing the climate agenda. Reliable coal plants retired prematurely. Natural gas projects stalled. Nuclear power stymied. All in favor of intermittent wind and solar. The result was higher costs for families and businesses and an increasingly fragile power grid that promises inconvenient – even dangerous – blackouts.

Now, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has initiated a science-based review of the regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant, challenging the foundation of fearmongering over weather and global temperatures and marking the beginning of the end of climate authoritarianism.

Driving expected changes is the U.S. Department of Energy’s new report, titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” It systematically dismantles the pillars of climate catastrophism with a meticulous review of the best available data and scientific assessments.

Science, properly pursued, is a process of relentless questioning and rigorous testing of hypotheses against empirical data. It is never “settled.” Yet in the climate field, a powerful establishment – eager to shower billions on second-rate technologies and the politically connected and to impose on society its view of a “green” nirvana – long ago decreed that the debate was over.

Scientists who pointed out discrepancies in data, flaws in computer models, or the irrefutable reality of natural climatic variability were often ostracized, denied funding and publicly smeared. The result was a chilling effect that produced an illusion of unanimity, where models were tuned to produce predetermined conclusions and inconvenient data were disregarded or downplayed. This corruption infected the peer-review process, creating echo chambers where foregone conclusions masqueraded as scientific discovery.

But the DOE report returns the discussion to first principles: data collection, hypothesis testing and empirical analysis. It has opened a crack in a monolith of jejune pseudoscience, insidiously banal rhetoric and vicious intimidation, exposing methodological failings throughout climate research.

The report includes examination of CO₂’s role in climate change, the extent of atmospheric warming and claims of increasing extreme weather.

For years, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted exaggerated temperature increases. These projections were used to frighten the public and justify sweeping interventions in energy policy. The DOE’s review, on the other hand, presents evidence that the climate is less sensitive to the “greenhouse” effect of CO₂ than the manipulators of computer models assume.

The report clarifies how natural variability plays a far larger role in climate shifts than is admitted in political debates. Oceans, solar cycles and volcanic activity are dominant forces. Yet these were pushed aside by climate alarmists to cast CO₂ as a villain.

Temperature datasets have been corrupted by a well-established urban heat island effect that inflates thermometer readings with heat radiating from the concrete and asphalt of buildings, streets and other infrastructure. Biases having little to do with real-world observations infect computer models that predict unrealistic warming. So-called weather attribution studies make specious connections between extreme events and climate change while ignoring long-term trends in storms and droughts that show no cause for alarm.

Through the DOE report, for the first time in decades, the American public is rightly being told that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. CO₂ is a naturally occurring gas that is necessary for all life.

With the rise of atmospheric CO₂ from 280 to 430 parts per million (ppm) following the Industrial Revolution, global vegetation has flourished because of it – as confirmed by satellite measurements. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration considers 5,000 ppm – more than ten times the current atmospheric level – to be acceptable over an eight-hour workday.

The DOE report and EPA’s new direction mark a liberation of climate science from ideological captivity. As more researchers examine evidence without fear of job loss, the full extent of the errors – and fraudulence – will become apparent.The world will not change overnight. Entrenched interests will fight to preserve the status quo. But the leaders of EPA and DOE have shown rare courage in taking their stand.