Former President Joe Biden, as well as his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, pledged to “follow the science” when it came to climate policies. Since President Donald Trump assumed office — a man accused of waging a “war on science” — revelations have shown that, when it came to previous administrations, sometimes science was either shaped to serve preferred policies or dismissed when it didn’t support them. 

Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed in March that the Biden-Harris administration had completed a study on liquefied natural gas exports prior to enacting a pause on export permits, the stated intention of which was to complete such a study. Wright stated that the Biden-Harris administration didn’t like what the study said, so they set out to produce one that would support the climate policies they wanted.

Emails exchanged at the Obama-era EPA in 2009 showed that the so-called endangerment finding, which has been the basis for much of the EPA's regulation of carbon dioxide emissions ever since, was a foregone conclusion even before the agency announced the finding. 

It appears that the Biden-Harris administration hid comments that would have undermined its Clean Power Plan 2.0 rule (CPP2), which the Trump administration is currently reviewing. The EPA had sought comments from the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) on the efficacy of carbon capture technology prior to proposing the rule. These comments, which were somehow scrubbed from the administrative record, disputed a key claim the rule is based on. Those missing comments, a legal expert says, could provide a basis for the rule’s repeal.