At least one side is thoroughly wrong
It's not a priori impossible that some different fuels were created using different processes, especially when we have three distinct types - oil, coal and natural gas.
This isn't a politically charged topic like sociology, or even biology, but a physical science where people are supposed to agree on the answers.
A politically charged scientific topic is in many (most?) cases political not because of its implications, but because different political parties are known to endorse different views.
It's not a priori impossible that some different fuels were created using different processes,
No, but it's highly unlikely that both processes create comparable amounts of fuel.
For example, diamond forms from several different processes, but the vast majority of them are formed in the Earth's mantle and then brought to the surface by volcanic processes. It's technically true that there are diamonds that used to be coal, but saying that diamonds came from coal would be highly misleading.
What can we learn about science from the divide during the Cold War?
I have one example in mind: America held that coal and oil were fossil fuels, the stored energy of the sun, while the Soviets held that they were the result of geologic forces applied to primordial methane.
At least one side is thoroughly wrong. This isn't a politically charged topic like sociology, or even biology, but a physical science where people are supposed to agree on the answers. This isn't a matter of research priorities, where one side doesn't care enough to figure things out, but a topic that both sides saw to be of great importance, and where they both claimed to apply their theories. On the other hand, Lysenkoism seems to have resulted from the practical importance of crop breeding.
First of all, this example supports the claim that there really was a divide, that science was disconnected into two poorly communicating camps. It suggests that when the two sides reached the same results on other topics, they did so independently. Even if we cannot learn from this example, it suggests that we may be able to learn from other consequences of dividing the scientific community.
My understanding is that although some Russian language research papers were available in America, they were completely ignored and the scientists failed to even acknowledge that there was a community with divergent opinions. I don't know about the other direction.
Some questions: