This month, Taylor Swift, who has no songs about fossil fuels but many a song about being gaslit, announced her newest album. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is singing the same old song—denying the reality of human-caused climate change—that the fossil fuel industry has been singing for over half a century.
On July 29, the administration proposed canceling a watershed 2009 scientific finding—that heat-trapping pollution from fossil fuels endangers human health—based on a “hastily produced report” for the Department of Energy (DOE) by five notorious deniers of basic climate science. “Most [of them] have worked with conservative activists and fossil fuel interests to cast doubt over the dangers of a warming planet,” reported Politico. One of them even served for five years as Chief Scientist for the oil giant BP.
No surprise, then, that a comprehensive fact-check by climate scientists, including those cited in the report, found “more than 100 false or misleading claims.”
Tell the Department of Energy: Stop Giving Climate Deniers a Platform
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather explained that using his work to argue against the Endangerment Finding “is completely backwards,” since his paper actually supported it. He said the authors “exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not” actually “suit their narratives.”
The climate economist Richard Tol wrote of the report, “I am cited 3 times, incorrectly all three times.” He labels it “twisting the literature” and concludes, “This attempt by the DOE to undermine the economic case for climate policy fails—and thus inadvertently strengthens said case.”
The five deniers are world-class gaslighters, trying to persuade the public that the very science that concludes burning fossil fuels endangers humanity says the exact opposite.
The term “gaslight” comes from a 1938 play of the same name (made into a movie in 1944), where an evil husband in the Victorian era manipulates the indoor methane gas lighting while trying to convince his wife she’s imagining it all.
Taylor has whole songs on such gaslighting men, such as “Mad Women” with the chorus, “Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy.” She accuses the man of being “the master of spin.” Yet no one mastered spin more than the oil industry, which has known since the 1970s that its product causes dangerous climate change but funded misinformation that said such talk was alarmist.
So what the Trump administration is doing is really oil and gaslighting. And that’s not surprising since at a Mar-a-Lago dinner in April 2024, Trump told oil executives and lobbyists “they should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign because, if elected, he would roll back environmental rules that he said hampered their businesses.” One analysis found “the oil industry had spent $450 million on a combination of donations, lobbying, and advertising during the 2024 election cycle.”
Trump responded by boosting industry subsidies by billions of dollars while killing tax credits for electric vehicles and other cleaner energy technologies like solar and wind.
But the best way to roll back climate rules, such as stronger fuel economy standards for cars, is to kill the Endangerment Finding, and that can be done only by manipulating and misreporting the science.
“Climate denial is now the official policy of the U.S. government,” as Naomi Oreskes, a leading historian of science at Harvard, told the journal Science.
Yet many in the media actually aid in this gaslighting by refusing to clearly label the report authors as longtime deniers and misrepresenters of the science. Instead, they use indefensibly confusing terms such as “contrarians” (Politico, Wired, and CNN) or “skeptics” (the New York Times and Wall Street Journal). But those words torture the language.
Credible climate scientists are not contrarians. They don’t choose their positions based on believing the opposite of what 97% of “actively publishing climate scientists” believe. They choose their positions based on the overwhelming scientific evidence, which is why credible scientists don’t try to represent the conclusion of other scientists “completely backward.”
An AP article explained in 2014, “Top scientists from a variety of fields say they are about as certain that global warming is a real, man-made threat as they are that cigarettes kill.” And that certainty has only grown in the past decade as global warming has accelerated, and many of the worst fears of scientists have been realized.
Would the media use the phrase “smoking health contrarians” or “tobacco science contrarians.” Of course not. The same is true for the term “skeptics.”
So a decade ago, four dozen leading scientists and science journalists/communicators — Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI)—issued an open letter headlined “Deniers Are Not Skeptics,” which urged the media to “Please stop using the word ‘skeptic’ to describe deniers” of climate science.
“Proper skepticism promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims,” the letter explains. “It is foundational to the scientific method. Denial, on the other hand, is the a priori rejection of ideas without objective consideration.”
The authors of the DOE report aren’t skeptical. Their minds were made up long ago. They are so resistant to the facts that they repeatedly misrepresent those facts and ignore the overwhelming evidence—which grows stronger every year—that unrestricted emissions from fossil fuel combustion is a clear and present danger to the nation and the world.
It’s as if the authors and the Trump administration were actually living the sardonic lyrics from “Anti-Hero,” Swift’s 2022 record-breaking chart topper: “I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser… It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me… I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.”
Tell the Department of Energy: Stop Giving Climate Deniers a Platform
Joseph Romm is a former Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy and now senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. He cohosts the podcast Decoding Taylor Swift: A Storytelling Revolution with his daughter.