EPA chief Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for coal producer Murray Energy, among other clients, echoed the president when he said doesn’t believe the National Climate Assessment's conclusions on climate change’s economic effects. | Win McNamee/Getty Images climate change EPA chief: Trump administration may intervene in next climate study

Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Wednesday accused the Obama administration of tilting last week’s federal climate change report to focus on the worst-case outcomes — and indicated that the Trump administration could seek to shape the next big study of the issue.

“Going forward, I think we need to take a look at the modeling that’s used for the next assessment,” Wheeler said at an event hosted by The Washington Post.


Wheeler’s comments echoed remarks Monday from President Donald Trump, who said he doesn’t believe the National Climate Assessment's conclusions on climate change’s economic impacts.

The report, released on the day after Thanksgiving, was the first major climate assessment produced predominantly during Trump’s presidency. But Wheeler still maintained that Trump’s predecessor was the driving force behind it.

“The drafting of this report was drafted at the direction of the Obama administration,” Wheeler said.

“And I don’t know this for a fact — I wouldn’t be surprised if the Obama administration told the report’s authors to take a look at the worst case scenario for this report,” added Wheeler, who said he had not discussed the report with Trump.

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But the Obama White House official who initiated the assessment flatly denied Wheeler's contention.

"Mr. Wheeler’s insinuation is absolutely false," John Holdren, who served as Obama's science adviser, told POLITICO in an email. Holdren says he called on the U.S. Global Change Research Program to conduct a thorough study, and that he had no role in selecting the report's authors.

"My only instruction was that the USGCRP should continue the distinguished tradition of the first three by drawing on the most current peer-reviewed science to illuminate what climate change is doing and is projected to do across the geographic regions and economic and ecological underpinnings of well-being in the United States," he said.

The climate assessment, which is compiled by hundreds of experts across more than a dozen agencies, is mandated by Congress to be released every four years. The report released on Friday warned that the U.S. would face hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decades, but that steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions could reduce the impacts.

"Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities" the report said. "Climate-related risks will continue to grow without additional action."

While the initial stages of preparing the report were started in the final year of the Obama administration, the majority of the work, including the final three drafts, collection of comments and agency reviews, were conducted under the Trump administration.

Some of the report's authors have disputed the Trump administration criticism that the report focused on worst-case scenarios, pointing out that it included a wide range of projections, including forecasts where greenhouse gas emissions are sharply curtailed from their current trend.

"Assertions by high officials of the Trump administration that these are 'worst case' reports are nothing more than a flimsy attempt to discredit the careful and comprehensive work of some of the best climate scientists in the country, inside and outside of government," Holdren said.

Wheeler also connected the report’s headline-grabbing projection that climate change could shrink the U.S. economy by 10 percent by the end of the century to an outside study that “my staff tell me was funded by Tom Steyer,” the environmentalist and Democratic mega-donor.

Steyer’s organization Next Generation was one source of funding for the 2017 study, published in the journal Science and written by a dozen academic and private sector experts. It was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department and the Skoll Global Threats Fund. The study was also supported by a “nonpartisan” grant awarded jointly by Steyer’s Next Generation, along with Bloomberg Philanthropies and former George W. Bush administration Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Wheeler said there was no political review of the material by the Trump administration and that such oversight would have drawn accusations of political meddling. And he complained that the report ignored “innovation” and assumed technologies would not advance in the future.

“I think we really need to take a hard look at where the markets are going, where technology is going, where innovation is going and what has driven the reduction in CO2. We need to give credit for the CO2 reduction,” Wheeler said, citing the reductions in U.S. emissions.

Wheeler, a former lobbyist for coal producer Murray Energy, among other clients, said that coal must have a future in the U.S.

“Coal has not yet peaked worldwide in its usage,” he said, citing growing coal consumption in Asia.

He also criticized the Obama administration’s landmark climate rule, the Clean Power Plan, which he said “took the U.S. coal industry out of the mix here, which means that we would no longer be developing clean coal technology in the United States.”

The Trump administration’s proposed replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy rule, will “allow coal technology to continue to expand here” and be exported to other nations, he said.