DOE Memo Prohibits Discussing Climate Change and ‘Green’

The Department of Energy’s efficiency and renewables office has banned use of a slate of common energy and environmental terms, including climate change and green, in program goal descriptions regardless of whether the words appear in the programs’ strategic plans, according to an internal directive described by staff and first reported by Politico. The guidance, written by a political appointee at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), directs staff to eliminate such language unless the department has offered caveats on dropping it in certain contracts and publications since becoming convinced last year that humans cause climate change.

What the directive says about restricted terminology use

Workers were instructed to avoid terms like climate change, green and decarbonization of the U.S. The memo also discourages use of the phrases energy transition, sustainability or sustainable, as well as subsidies, tax breaks, tax credits and even carbon footprint and emissions during internal deliberations. The notable aspect about this inclusion of emissions as a pollutant is that the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly held in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases can be regulated as an air pollutant, a linchpin of federal air quality law.

Internally, managers were told to enforce compliance across the board. That would affect everything from funding opportunity announcements to lab reports and public-facing web pages, on which those terms can serve as a foundation for technical standards, emissions baselines or project performance metrics.

How language choices influence U.S. energy policy design

EERE was established after the oil crisis of the 1970s to improve efficiency and help diversify energy supply. It now has programs on buildings, vehicles, advanced manufacturing, and renewable power. The office’s budget has remained in the low billions of dollars in recent years, funding work at national labs and hundreds of competitive grants to cities, utilities and start-ups.

Scrapping accepted language isn’t just a matter of awkward prose. It can dilute eligibility rules for grants, muddle environmental review and hamstring researchers in benchmarking their results against what colleagues find in peer-reviewed literature. In practice, aides often fall back on euphemisms — “air quality,” “security” or “cost savings” — that can obfuscate the real-world impacts of programs meant to reduce heat-trapping pollution.

Scientific integrity and legal friction for federal language

Prescribing the use of plain language in scientific documents and communications would ensure that public understanding remains among agencies’ top priorities, as found in federal agency policies on the use of scientific integrity and directives to comply with the Plain Writing Act. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has instructed agencies to protect technical work from political meddling. The Government Accountability Office has also cautioned that changing or withholding scientific language can undermine public confidence and degrade program effectiveness.

There are also documentary and transparency issues. FOIA officers use exact terms to comb through email and document archives. When ordinary search terms are absent from formal documents, identifying responsive records is more difficult and chances for disputes and litigation increase.

A split screen with market trends in clean energy finance

As language at the federal level is straitjacketed, capital markets are moving in the opposite direction. Global investment in renewable energy soared in the first half of the year, setting a record for spending in that period even as it declined elsewhere, according to a report out Tuesday from BloombergNEF. The strong interest was driven by offshore wind and distributed solar; total global investments tallied about $386 billion. The International Energy Agency forecasts that clean energy sources will dominate new power capacity additions globally over the next decade, thanks to cost declines and policy support in the world’s leading economies.

On the ground, states and utilities are already implementing long-term plans that rely on the very ideas now out of favor within EERE. Texas, for example, is No. 1 in wind generation and adding large-scale solar at a breakneck pace; Midwestern utilities are retiring coal fleets and buying batteries to manage demand peaks. Those judgments rest on models of the trajectory of emissions and their accounting in terms of carbon intensity — a lingo that starts to sound a little awkward when avoided.

Effects on national labs and grantees working with EERE

National laboratories like NREL, Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkeley collaborate directly with EERE on areas categorized explicitly around emissions reduction, building performance standards, hydrogen production paths and integration strategies for renewables into the grid.

Most of their work is published in science journals that employ those terms as technical standards. If internal guidance compels edits to abstracts, reports or press releases, researchers may find themselves subject to rival stipulations from their funders and their publishers.

Grantees could experience the ripple effects in posted project reporting. Performance obligations often include metrics such as avoided emissions, lifecycle carbon intensity, and decarbonization potential that are associated with milestones and payment. Rewriting those measures in new language could create confusion and potentially slow disbursements or add complexity to audits.

What to watch next as the DOE memo is implemented

Watchdog bodies might push for answers as to how the directive aligns with scientific integrity policies, and if it applies across DOE or is limited to EERE. Controversies have previously been investigated by Congressional committees and inspectors general, over efforts to change how science is communicated. Any employee unions and professional societies could also weigh in if they view this as coerced language that undercuts technical accuracy.

More immediately, keep an eye out for changes to DOE solicitations and web guidance: if standard performance metrics quietly disappear—if they’re normalized into nothingness—it will be a sign that the memo is being operationalized. In the long run, the danger is that language policing becomes policy under a different name — reshaping priorities not through regulation as such but by controlling the words staff can use.