by Rich Marcello ·
Friday, January 9, 2026
As many of you probably know, the equation 2 + 2 = 5 was first popularized by George Orwell in his novel “1984.” The idea is simple. Authoritarian governments don’t just lie. They redefine reality. Say something often enough, with enough authority or fear, and even obvious truths come into question. Eventually, citizens are asked not only to obey, but to believe. When it comes to the climate crisis, that’s where many U.S. citizens find themselves in 2025. Here’s the proof.
The U.S. Department of Energy directed its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy staff to stop using words like climate change, emissions, decarbonization, green, sustainability, clean energy, carbon footprint, and energy transition, even in internal communications. I suppose you could argue this is a policy change, but I argue it’s an erasure. If you forbid the words used to describe a scientific crisis, you can pretend the crisis doesn’t exist. Or, as we have been told before, climate change is “a hoax propagated by the Chinese.”
Next came the DOE’s report, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” You would think with a title like that the report would be objective, but the contents are far from it. The report downplays the harms of greenhouse gas emissions, questions mainstream climate science, and reframes climate change as manageable. Not catastrophic. Not at all urgent. Simply another challenge, which the writers of the report have no plan to address. That reframing is Orwellian. It’s as if the government is declaring the house is not on fire while it vaporizes the fire department.
The report bypasses decades of peer-reviewed consensus. Critics have correctly called it pseudoscience, full of cherry-picked data, distortions, and half-truths. When 99.7% of climate scientists agree on the severity of the crisis, and the government promotes the views of the remaining 0.3 percent to justify inaction, well, 2 + 2 = 5.
Next came the dismantling of the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program, the body responsible for coordinating the National Climate Assessment. In 2025, the next mandated assessment was canceled. No assessment means no definitive accounting of climate risks, impacts, or resilience needs. As a country, we need evidence to make good decisions. Remove the evidence, as was done in this case, and planning becomes impossible. Decisions become ideology.
To justify rolling all these programs and policies back, the administration claims U.S. climate actions would have “minimal impact” globally. The rest of the world matters more. The administration’s position is basically, why bother? Well, one reason is that its position ignores the fact that the U.S. is the largest historical emitter of carbon dioxide on Earth. It ignores the fact that carbon lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, and for this reason alone, we are more responsible for the crisis than any other country.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has defended scrapping climate protections as restoring “consumer choice” and lowering costs. This is doublespeak. Short-term savings now are allowed to erase long-term later damage to our environment, to our families, to our children and their children. While announcing plans to rescind the EPA’s endangerment finding, Zeldin called it “the largest deregulatory action in the history of America.” That may sound impressive, until you understand what’s being deregulated. The endangerment finding is the legal acknowledgment that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. By removing that finding, the government has decided, ignoring voluminous scientific data, that these gases aren’t dangerous. They’re declaring our children and grandchildren will be just fine in a future world with extreme heat, drought, wildfires, sea level rise, and massive human displacement, which is nonsense. Again, 2 + 2 = 5.
To be clear, with the above actions, our government is not only failing to act on the climate crisis. It’s disabling the infrastructure of climate science itself. Research coordination, oversight, and institutional memory are being stripped away. This is not negligence. It’s an Orwellian strategy.
Why do I believe this is so? Well, it’s because our government is treating science as optional, as political, as something to lie and mislead about rather than deal with honestly, directly, and humanely. And our government is not standing still. It’s aggressively tearing down the climate infrastructure that makes climate truth legible. The administration understands well a truth passed down over hundreds of years by similar governments of the past. When language itself is banned, it becomes harder for people to resist. It’s hard to fight what you’re not allowed to name. It’s hard to remember what you once accepted as truth, and, and when this happens, it’s a dangerous kind of organized forgetting.
Too many scientists to name in this piece have responded with clarity. Here are some of their words.
“The DOE report being used to try to overturn the regulation of climate-destroying gases is not a scientific report,” wrote climatologist Peter Gleick. “It is a pseudoscience political document rife with fake references, hand-picked data, misrepresentations of fact and false claims.”
Michael Mann, the famed climate scientist, compared what our government is doing to something you would get “if you took a chatbot and trained it on the top ten fossil-fuel-funded climate-denier websites.”
A coalition of scientists that includes the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote, “The scientific evidence on human-caused climate change was unequivocal in 2009 and has since become even more dire and compelling.”
Joseph Goffman, who helped write the original endangerment finding, called the government’s actions “a repudiation of scientific reality.”
I could go on. There is some new violation every week. Another rollback. Another euphemism. Another subtraction disguised as progress. But you get the idea. Our government leaders are now dictating that climate science no longer works. They’re saying math no longer works. They’re asking us to accept that 2 + 2 = 5.
Keep the faith. And do what you can, where you are.
Rich Marcello is a member of the Climate Initiative Committee. In writing his latest novel, “The Means of Keeping,” he spent several years researching the climate crisis.