President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy (DOE), headed by climate-denier Rick Perry, released a report on Wednesday that green groups and environmentalists are denouncing as an attempt to “justify bailing out dirty” coal and nuclear plants.

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“There’s no reason in the world to keep coal plants open.”
—David Roberts, Vox

Perry commissioned the study in April, and just three months later a draft of the findings, which contradicted Perry’s claim that wind and solar energy are harming the U.S. energy grid, was leaked. At the time, many expressed concern that Trump administration officials would suppress or alter any results that contradicted their adamantly pro-coal, pro-nuclear stance.

The release of the official report shows that the DOE chose not to fully suppress unwelcome findings. Rather, as Vox‘s David Roberts notes, “Perry and his staff took a perfectly solid report on the grid and added a (surprisingly light, to my eye) coating of political propaganda.”

The final outcome is a report “just muddy enough for the coal lobby and the energy storage lobby to see what they want in it,” Roberts writes. “But the bones of the analysis remain the same and still indicate the same conclusion: There’s no reason in the world to keep coal plants open and only one reason to keep nuclear plants open—climate change, which the report never mentions.”

Mary Anne Hitt, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, argued that “Perry took a well-crafted, insightful draft report from nonpartisan Department of Energy professionals and tried to make it into a talking points memo for coal and nuclear subsidies.”

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to dismantle the regulatory achievements of his predecessor, and reports have indicated that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking policy direction straight from polluters’ “wish list.”

Though the DOE report will not have immediate policy consequences, it is an indication that the Trump administration is still refusing to “face the facts—thanks to growth in renewable energy and efficiency, America’s demand for electricity is flatlining, and clean energy options like solar and wind power are outperforming dirty energy like coal,” said Oil Change International’s U.S. policy director Janet Redman in response to the report’s official release.

Because of Perry’s willingness to evade the findings of his department’s researchers, the study ultimately shows “that science is not safe from manipulation under this administration,” concluded Kim Smaczniak, an attorney for Earthjustice.