Saying CO2 is good because it fertilizes plants is like saying high blood pressure is good because it makes you lose weight. Both can kill you. That’s how misguided a recent Department of Energy climate report is.
Yes, some of the report is fine. It talks about uncertainty in models, the need for adaptation, and the value of resilience. But those are just notes in the margins. The headline act is CO2 as a supposed benefit. That’s political, not scientific—a staged performance to cast doubt on climate change and suggest the crisis is overblown.
Here’s the script. The report admits CO2 drives warming, then flips it around and says more CO2 is also good because it makes plants grow. By casting CO2 as both problem and solution, it sets up a false premise: risks are exaggerated, benefits are overlooked. That’s a straw man.
Nobody denies CO2 can help plants in the short term, but that boost is already fading. A major Science study shows the CO2 fertilization effect has been dropping since the 1980s as soils run out of nitrogen and phosphorus and plants struggle with water stress. Climate extremes—heat, drought, floods—wipe out what little is gained.
The rest of the report just builds on this misdirection. It critiques climate models, lowers climate sensitivity, points to natural cycles and past warm periods as proof things won’t be catastrophic. Then it circles back: if warming isn’t catastrophic, the CO2 benefits should weigh more. That’s circular. It starts by downplaying risk and ends by downplaying risk, all while selling adaptation as the only answer.
The DOE report oversells CO2 as a boon to farmers while ignoring the downside. It credits rising crop yields to CO2 instead of better seeds, fertilizer, and machines, and ignores that the fertilization effect is already fading as soils run short on nutrients and crops face more heat and drought stress. Even where plants grow faster, their nutrition drops, and climate extremes wipe out the gains. “Global greening” often means weeds, not food. The promise that farmers can just adapt is a false comfort—water, soil, and costs set hard limits.
What the report never mentions is that U.S. agriculture will inevitably lose major crops and productive regions to areas farther north, like Canada, and that shift will mean a massive economic and national security loss. Our entire food system—from transport to storage to processing—is built around today’s geography and climate. Rebuilding it to match bulk shifts in crops and regions would be staggeringly expensive, if not impossible. And by framing critics as alarmists predicting collapse, the report dodges the real issue: climate change won’t erase U.S. farming overnight, but it will make it more volatile, less nutritious, more costly, and increasingly displaced to other countries. That’s not balance, it’s a national disaster.
The DOE report is a sleight-of-hand act—turning bad into good and making 200 years of climate science disappear in a puff of smoke. Convincing to some maybe, but wrong–dead wrong. The irony is that the group that produced the report was quickly disbanded under threat of a lawsuit, yet the report itself remains in the public record—a lasting piece of political theater dressed up as science.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Berman is Director of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Sugar Land, Texas, and a world-renowned energy consultant with expertise based on over 40 years of experience working as a petroleum geologist. Visit his website, Shattering Energy Myths: One Fact at a Time, and learn more about Art here.
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