They Didn't Change the Law. They Changed the Editor.
No vote, no hearing. Just different numbers in a government report, and everything downstream inherits them.
I grew up with one rule that didn’t have exceptions: leave a place cleaner than you found it. Not because anyone explained watershed nitrogen cycles to a ten-year-old. Because someone was coming behind us, and my parents would’ve been embarrassed to leave them our mess. That was the whole lesson. Took about four seconds to teach.
I’ve been thinking about that rule all week. Here’s why.
Every few years, the federal government publishes a big report called the National Climate Assessment. Congress requires it. Think of it as the government’s official answer to one question. What is a changing climate actually doing to America, region by region, to our water, our forests, our farms, our coasts? Hundreds of scientists usually write it, and it’s considered the gold standard.
On July 10, news broke that the White House put a man named Matthew Wielicki in charge of the office that produces it. Wielicki calls himself a “professor-in-exile.” He’s never published a peer-reviewed climate paper. His research was on meteorite craters and Himalayan geology. Fine work, I’m sure. But it’s a bit like handing the elk survey to a guy who studies squid.
And this wasn’t one odd hire. There’s a two-year trail behind it. In April 2025, the administration dismissed hundreds of scientists who were mid-draft on the next assessment. That summer, Energy Secretary Chris Wright hand-picked five researchers, all well-known for arguing that mainstream climate science overstates the danger, to write a separate report saying warming maybe isn’t so bad. Environmental groups sued over how the group was formed. The government disbanded it rather than fight. A judge later ruled they’d broken the law anyway. Then, by December, that same circle was quietly invited back, this time to help write the National Climate Assessment itself.
Two years of work to change whose hand holds the pen.
Now, why am I writing about this in a newsletter about public lands and energy instead of leaving it to the climate desks?
Because this report isn’t a coffee-table book. It’s plumbing. When the Forest Service plans out a national forest and has to reckon with wildfire over the next twenty years, the fire science traces back to this report. When the government decides whether to lease public land to an oil company in a basin that’s been dry since I was in high school, same thing. Grazing decisions in Nevada. The math on the Colorado River. Even judges lean on it when deciding whether an agency did its homework before approving a project. It’s the factual floor under thousands of decisions on 640 million acres that belong to all of us. The same acres where you and I hunt, fish, and fill our freezers.
And the people taking it over understand that perfectly. Documents from the lawsuit, first reported by POLITICO, show Wright’s researchers describing the report as powerful precisely because courts cite it. Internal emails, dug up by DeSmog, show them saying the whole system needs a purge. Publicly, their complaint is rigor. Privately, it reads like lawsuits. Follow the chain. Soften the wildfire numbers, and the forest plan built on them gets easier to weaken. Downplay the drought, and the lease sale sails through. Nobody passes a law. Nobody votes. The numbers just... change. And everything downstream inherits it, including the sage flat where you chase birds in October.
Here’s what I genuinely don’t get, though. And I mean this as a real question.
Nobody ever makes the case for dirty. In fifty years of this fight, no one has stood up and argued for haze over the canyon or a mining waste pile where the elk winter. There’s only an argument about who pays and when. “The science is uncertain” has mostly meant “I’d rather not get the bill.”
But hunters figured this out a century ago. In 1937 we taxed our own rifles and ammunition, a law called Pittman-Robertson that still funds state wildlife agencies today. We buy duck stamps that have protected millions of acres of wetland. Nobody demanded proof of atmospheric physics first. Ducks were disappearing, we liked ducks, we paid. The most successful conservation model in American history, built by people who kill animals for meat and love the ground they do it on. The leave-it-cleaner rule doesn’t wait on a model. You made the mess. Someone’s coming behind you. Probably your own kids, carrying your old rifle.
And zoom out, because this report is one tile in a pattern. Two days ago, the president cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90 percent each. Nearly three million acres, sacred to five tribal nations, reopening to mining claims within 60 days. Add the rest of the record since January 2025: the Roadless Rule repealed across almost 40 million acres of forest. Drilling leases back in the Arctic Refuge. The Boundary Waters mining ban overturned. A quarter of the Park Service gone in six months. One tally puts it at 86 million acres stripped of protection in eighteen months. That’s 38 Yellowstones.
I try hard not to assign motives here. But the record speaks. You don’t gut the referee’s report, shrink the monuments, fire the rangers, and open the refuge all at once by accident. Whatever this administration says about energy independence, it does not value public lands the way generations of hunters, hikers, campers, climbers, birdwatchers, and anglers, from both parties, did for a century.
Some of this reverses. There will be a new plan in a few years. The 2017 monument cuts were restored in 2021, and lawsuits are already filed. But some of it doesn’t snap back. A lease sold is held for a decade. A forest plan locks in for twenty years. A road cut into roadless country stays cut. The report is temporary. The mess made under it isn’t.
Before the new report becomes final, the government has to open a public comment period. That’s the one moment people outside the building get a say. I’ll flag it here the day it opens.
When it does, are you filing one, or leaving it for the next guy at the campsite?
Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in clean energy and progress but it must be done ethically.
I write this, build this, and fund this myself. If you find any value in this, a coffee goes a long way.
Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.
Sources:
“A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” - the July 2025 DOE report itself, authored by Christy, Curry, Koonin, McKitrick, and Spencer. Hosted as a PDF on energy.gov.
White House / USGCRP unsigned statement on Wielicki’s appointment (”restoring the USGCRP and ensuring it fulfills its legal mandate”) - issued to reporters, not posted publicly as a release as far as I can find; POLITICO and the Washington Post both quote it in full.
Wright’s September 3, 2025 letter dissolving the DOE Climate Working Group - sent to the five researchers; CNN and Wikipedia both reproduce it, but I haven’t located a standalone agency-hosted copy.
NCA5 (2023), the last published National Climate Assessment — archived text, since the administration removed the live version from federal servers. The Wayback Machine holds snapshots of the original nca2023.globalchange.gov.
Court records — EDF v. Wright, No. 1:25-cv-12249 (D. Mass.)
The complaint and the plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction, filed by Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists
Plaintiffs’ Reply in Support of Motion for Preliminary Injunction (Sept. 10, 2025) — this is the filing that contains internal Climate Working Group emails
The January 30, 2026 ruling, which found DOE violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act
Federal Register
“Climate Experts’ Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report” — the 85-scientist, 434-page rebuttal, led by Andrew Dessler and Robert Kopp, submitted as a public comment on the DOE report docket