The words on the DOE list are at the heart of EERE’s mission: It is the government’s largest investor in technologies that help reduce heat-trapping emissions that cause climate change as well as the hazardous pollution from fossil fuels. It is the latest in a series of Trump administration efforts to dispute, silence or downplay the realities of climate change.

“Please ensure that every member of your team is aware that this is the latest list of words to avoid — and continue to be conscientious about avoiding any terminology that you know to be misaligned with the Administration’s perspectives and priorities,” the directive from acting director of external affairs Rachel Overbey said.

About 50-70% of Lithuania's agricultural harvest has been harmed or destroyed by heavy rainfall this summer, the government said on Wednesday as it declared a national emergency to help farmers.

"In many places the farmers cannot harvest their crops because the fields are flooded," the government said in a statement, adding that much of the remaining harvest had been reduced in quality.

Lithuania produces wheat and other grains as well as root crops such as potatoes but the government did not give a breakdown of which was worst hit.

The Baltic country's rainfall in June and July was the second heaviest on record, exceeded only by 2007, it said.

Neighbouring Latvia announced a national emergency on similar grounds last week, national broadcaster LSM reported.

"This year's crop has suffered significantly and may not be harvested," said Latvian Agriculture Minister Armands Krauze.

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I strongly oppose the proposed repeal of the Endangerment Finding. The science is clear: greenhouse gases unequivocally harm our health and our environment. Weakening or repealing the Endangerment Finding will make it harder, and costlier to protect our communities from pollution and from the effects of climate change.

Optional: I care about this issue because

The last assessment of the state of climate science from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in its final form 2 years ago, was a monumental effort, with 721 volunteer scientists synthesizing all available published research. Yesterday, the Department of Energy (DOE) released its own climate assessment, as part of a campaign by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to overturn its landmark endangerment finding from 2009, which found that burning fossil fuels endangers public health and established carbon dioxide as a pollutant EPA could regulate. But the DOE report—called A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate—had fewer authors than IPCC’s: just five.

Handpicked by DOE Secretary Chris Wright, a fossil fuel entrepreneur, the authors are well known to climate scientists. Although the members of this Climate Working Group all hold scientific doctorates, they hold contrarian views on climate science that are out of step with the mainstream. The report, assembled in months, argues that some of the warming attributed to fossil fuel burning is instead driven by natural cycles or variability in the Sun, and that sea level rise has not been accelerating. Climate researchers say the authors cherry-picked evidence and highlighted uncertainties to achieve the net effect of downplaying the impacts of climate change. “This shows how far we have sunk,” says Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University. “Climate denial is now the official policy of the U.S. government.”

The report is far from comprehensive. Many of its arguments are common among critics of climate action, previously made online and in obscure journals. It amounts to a “law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, on Bluesky. “Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for (carbon dioxide’s) innocence. This is a fundamental departure from the norms of science.” (...)

The immediate cause of the water crisis was the extreme drought from 2015–2017 that exceeded the planning norms of the Department of Water and Sanitation. Research on long-term weather data done by the Climate System Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town determined that the low rainfall between the years 2015 and 2017 was a very rare and extreme event.^<49> Decreasing rainfall trends are linked to broader changes in the atmospheric and oceanic circulation, including the poleward shift of the Southern Hemisphere moisture corridor between 2015–17, displacement of the jet-stream and an expansion of the semi-permanent South Atlantic High.^<50> 2017 was the driest year since 1933, and possibly earlier, since comparable data before 1933 was not available. It also found that a drought of this severity would statistically occur approximately once every 300 years.^<32>

Rising food prices are the second-largest effect of climate change that people see in their day-to-day lives, only exceeded by extreme heat, said Kotz, who led the report.

“While the 2023-2024 El Nino (weather system) likely played a role in amplifying a number of these extremes, their increased intensity and frequency is in line with the expected and observed effects of climate change,” the report said.

Last year was the hottest year on record, with global temperatures exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial climate conditions for the first time and high temperature records broken across much of the globe. With further warming to between 2.2 degrees and 3.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels likely by the end of the century, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, unprecedented weather conditions and further price shocks are to be expected, the report adds.

The knock-on effects of food-price spikes muddy the outlook for central banks, as increased costs raise headline inflation and make it more challenging to deliver monetary stability. Price shocks could also exacerbate a range of health outcomes as low-income households cut back, from malnutrition to diabetes and many types of cancers.