"A draft report commissioned by the Trump administration’s Department of Energy, or DOE, misleadingly claims that increasing levels of carbon dioxide could be beneficial for agriculture. In fact, mainstream climate experts have found that rising CO2 levels, by causing climate change, are harmful to agriculture overall – and likely to cause food prices to increase. "The Trump administration’s claim arose from a draft “critical review” report commissioned by DOE and written by fringe experts. The DOE subsequently disbanded that group when faced with a lawsuit alleging that it violated a law requiring that such federal advisory committees must be transparent and unbiased. The Environmental Protection Agency cited the DOE report in a proposal to reverse its Obama-era determination that carbon pollution poses a threat to public health and welfare. The agency argued that higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will increase the amount of food that farmers produce, implying that carbon pollution is a good thing. “Recent data and analysis show that even marginal increases in CO2 concentrations have substantial beneficial impacts on plant growth and agricultural productivity, and that this benefit has been significantly greater than previously believed,” the agency wrote. Mainstream climate experts say that’s incorrect. In response to the DOE report, a group of 85 climate experts and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine each published comprehensive reviews of the scientific literature and arrived at the opposite conclusion. These expert reports found that rather than boosting agricultural productivity, the body of scientific evidence indicates that increased extreme weather resulting from climate change will instead...
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