In comments submitted to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, AmFree Chamber urges the administration to comprehensively update the Fifth National Climate Assessment and replace debunked reports with facts grounded in reality
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce (AmFree Chamber) submitted comments urging the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to further strengthen its proposed revisions to the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), including by requiring greater scrutiny of the assumptions underlying climate-emissions scenarios.
The full comments are available here.
In taking the long-overdue step of updating its approach to climate science, the Trump Administration is highlighting where the Biden Administration’s climate report relied on discredited “high-emissions scenarios,” including the scenario known as “RCP 8.5,” which was first published in 2011 by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and retired earlier this year because of fundamental flaws in the scenario’s assumptions and modeling.
“Despite being the lynchpin in countless government reports, the doomsday climate scenarios forecast by RCP 8.5 have been wrong from the beginning, and the Trump Administration deserves tremendous credit for restoring common sense and sound scientific analysis to a public policy debate where it is too often lacking,” said Gentry Collins, CEO of AmFree Chamber. “Subsequent research and modeling have shown that RCP 8.5 and related scenarios are not merely unlikely, but completely implausible. In our comments, AmFree Chamber outlines further action to ensure policymakers are not misled in the future and that the climate debate follows the robust science rather than hyperbole.”
Specifically, AmFree Chamber’s comments call for:
- Expanding the proposal to repeal NCA5 in its entirety, which is the only way to cure the problems created by the Biden Administration’s extensive misuse of RCP 8.5 and other similar scenarios throughout the assessment;
- Finalizing the proposal to add clear warning labels to all NCA5 claims based on RCP 8.5 or similarly implausible scenarios;
- Strengthening the proposal’s guidance, directing federal agencies not to use these scenarios as if they were expected, likely, baseline, business-as-usual, central, or policy-relevant planning futures; and
- Requiring future report authors to evaluate all emission scenarios according to their plausibility and empirical grounding, rather than reflexively assuming that any newly developed scenarios are inherently plausible.
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The American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce (AmFree Chamber) is a trade organization representing American businesses of all sizes. It is dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise, free markets, limited government, and American leadership globally. AmFree Chamber is chaired by former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.
AmFree Chamber has members representing dozens of industries and from across the United States. Since its founding in 2022, AmFree Chamber has aggressively represented its members’ interests through legislative outreach, regulatory comments, and judicial briefing.