Trump’s EPA chief Zeldin gives keynote speech at climate-denying group’s event
Dharna Noor
Wed, April 8, 2026
The EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, in Washington DC last month.
Dharna Noor
Wed, April 8, 2026
THE GUARDIAN
The EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, in Washington DC last month.
(Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Reuters)
Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave the keynote speech at a conference on Wednesday morning, one which was hosted by a prominent climate-denying thinktank that previously compared those concerned about the climate crisis to the Unabomber on billboard posters in 2012.
“No longer are we going to rely on bad, flawed assumptions instead of accurate, present-day facts, without apology or regret,” Zeldin said at the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change in Washington DC, referring to well-established climate science.
Zeldin has been widely criticized by climate experts. Last month, more than 160 environmental and public health organizations called for him to resign or be fired, saying no EPA administrator in history “has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission”.
In his speech, Zeldin poked fun at the media for calling him “controversial” for not “following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom and gloom position of the day is from John Kerry or Al Gore or AOC” – referring to the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” he said.
He derided previous administrations’ heeding of climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, and for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet”.
“What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”
Ahead of Zeldin’s Wednesday-morning speech at the Heartland conference, Environmental Defense Fund Action put up posters around Hotel Washington critiquing the EPA administrator’s participation and saying climate denial does not improve Americans’ lives. “Lee Zeldin is executing on the playbook of denial written by the Heartland Institute,” Joanna Slaney, a vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said.
The Heartland Institute has accepted money from big oil companies including Shell and ExxonMobil, and from the Mercers, a family of Republican mega-donors. The thinktank was a contributor to Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration.
The Heartland Institute rejects the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is real, human-caused and urgent. Since the early 2000s, it has been a leading promoter of climate doubt, even branding climate science as “fake news”.
Experts agree that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet, resulting in dangerous increases in temperatures and in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Scientists have long warned that the world must quickly phase out fossil fuels in order to preserve a livable climate.
Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed the climate crisis as a “hoax” and dismissed environmental policies as a “scam”. And under Zeldin, the EPA has exempted polluting facilities from regulations, shuttered climate and environmental research offices, and shrunk its workforce. It has also rolled back dozens of environmental and climate protections.
“What we are doing in the last 14 months is no surprise,” Zeldin said in his speech. “It is what I pledged during my confirmation hearing, and it is what the American public voted for when they put Donald J Trump back in office. And thank God they did.”
The EPA administrator also spoke about his most controversial environmental rollback: the shredding of the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations, known as the “endangerment finding”. Scientists and other experts widely condemned the repeal, but the Heartland Institute has celebrated it.
“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth and happens to result from every single bit of human and animal activity on the planet, is not a pollutant and never was,” Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the thinktank, said in a February statement praising the repeal.
References to the rollback were met with cheers at the conference in Washington DC on Wednesday morning, and Zeldin expressed “admiration” for the Heartland Institute’s advocacy against the endangerment finding in his speech.
Craig Rucker, the president of CFACT – a rightwing group which complains about “climate exaggeration”, introduced Zeldin at the conference as a “friend of sound science [and] climate realism, a real rock star”.
Another panel at Wednesday’s conference convened the authors of a contentious Department of Energy report that was written to back up the repeal of the endangerment finding. The publication was derided by climate scientists as making a “mockery of science”, and was not used in the justification for the final repeal of the finding.
“While the world warned, a lot of things improved and got better, and continues to do so,” said Ross McKitrick, an author of the report, at the conference.
Another report author, Judith Curry – a climatologist who rails against climate “alarmism” – criticized the “monolithic consensus” on climate science that is “presented to the world”. Though the US government disbanded the group which produced the controversial report on the endangerment finding, Curry said the authors were currently reviewing comments on the report and preparing a new version to release this year.
Earlier on Wednesday morning, the Heartland Institute’s president, James Taylor, kicked off the conference with a rousing speech in which he invoked the debunked climate myth that increased carbon emissions are good for plants: “Restoring CO2 and restoring warmth to our world is … a restoration to more ideal conditions,” he said.
Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave the keynote speech at a conference on Wednesday morning, one which was hosted by a prominent climate-denying thinktank that previously compared those concerned about the climate crisis to the Unabomber on billboard posters in 2012.
“No longer are we going to rely on bad, flawed assumptions instead of accurate, present-day facts, without apology or regret,” Zeldin said at the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change in Washington DC, referring to well-established climate science.
Zeldin has been widely criticized by climate experts. Last month, more than 160 environmental and public health organizations called for him to resign or be fired, saying no EPA administrator in history “has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission”.
In his speech, Zeldin poked fun at the media for calling him “controversial” for not “following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom and gloom position of the day is from John Kerry or Al Gore or AOC” – referring to the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” he said.
He derided previous administrations’ heeding of climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, and for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet”.
“What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”
Ahead of Zeldin’s Wednesday-morning speech at the Heartland conference, Environmental Defense Fund Action put up posters around Hotel Washington critiquing the EPA administrator’s participation and saying climate denial does not improve Americans’ lives. “Lee Zeldin is executing on the playbook of denial written by the Heartland Institute,” Joanna Slaney, a vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said.
The Heartland Institute has accepted money from big oil companies including Shell and ExxonMobil, and from the Mercers, a family of Republican mega-donors. The thinktank was a contributor to Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration.
The Heartland Institute rejects the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is real, human-caused and urgent. Since the early 2000s, it has been a leading promoter of climate doubt, even branding climate science as “fake news”.
Experts agree that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet, resulting in dangerous increases in temperatures and in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Scientists have long warned that the world must quickly phase out fossil fuels in order to preserve a livable climate.
Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed the climate crisis as a “hoax” and dismissed environmental policies as a “scam”. And under Zeldin, the EPA has exempted polluting facilities from regulations, shuttered climate and environmental research offices, and shrunk its workforce. It has also rolled back dozens of environmental and climate protections.
“What we are doing in the last 14 months is no surprise,” Zeldin said in his speech. “It is what I pledged during my confirmation hearing, and it is what the American public voted for when they put Donald J Trump back in office. And thank God they did.”
The EPA administrator also spoke about his most controversial environmental rollback: the shredding of the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations, known as the “endangerment finding”. Scientists and other experts widely condemned the repeal, but the Heartland Institute has celebrated it.
“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth and happens to result from every single bit of human and animal activity on the planet, is not a pollutant and never was,” Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the thinktank, said in a February statement praising the repeal.
References to the rollback were met with cheers at the conference in Washington DC on Wednesday morning, and Zeldin expressed “admiration” for the Heartland Institute’s advocacy against the endangerment finding in his speech.
Craig Rucker, the president of CFACT – a rightwing group which complains about “climate exaggeration”, introduced Zeldin at the conference as a “friend of sound science [and] climate realism, a real rock star”.
Another panel at Wednesday’s conference convened the authors of a contentious Department of Energy report that was written to back up the repeal of the endangerment finding. The publication was derided by climate scientists as making a “mockery of science”, and was not used in the justification for the final repeal of the finding.
“While the world warned, a lot of things improved and got better, and continues to do so,” said Ross McKitrick, an author of the report, at the conference.
Another report author, Judith Curry – a climatologist who rails against climate “alarmism” – criticized the “monolithic consensus” on climate science that is “presented to the world”. Though the US government disbanded the group which produced the controversial report on the endangerment finding, Curry said the authors were currently reviewing comments on the report and preparing a new version to release this year.
Earlier on Wednesday morning, the Heartland Institute’s president, James Taylor, kicked off the conference with a rousing speech in which he invoked the debunked climate myth that increased carbon emissions are good for plants: “Restoring CO2 and restoring warmth to our world is … a restoration to more ideal conditions,” he said.
Zack Colman and Jean Chemnick
Wed, April 8, 2026
POLITICO
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin embraced a community of climate change contrarians Wednesday in a speech that underscored how scientific outliers have made inroads with the Trump administration.
Zeldin acknowledged in his opening statements to the Heartland Institute’s conference in Washington that he was the first EPA chief to attend the annual gathering, which has long been shunned by Democratic and Republican administrations alike for advancing a fringe view that greenhouse gas emissions are beneficial.
“For those who wanted to criticize my appearance here before this group, it really shows the desperation of just how many walls have collapsed of this last line of defense,” Zeldin said.
Greenhouse gases, primarily from burning fossil fuels, have warmed the planet 1.4 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution began, according to the World Meteorological Organization, which has determined that the last 11 years are the hottest in recorded history. Rising temperatures have intensified extreme weather and disasters like floods and wildfires, turbocharged deadly heat waves and imposed costs through death, declining agricultural productivity, health ailments and property damage, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Attendees at the Heartland annual conference disagree with most, if not all, of those conclusions. They instead championed the role carbon dioxide plays in promoting plant growth, which they argue has been ignored by mainstream climate science — and past U.S. administrations. The overwhelming body of science shows that the negative consequences of climate pollution far outweigh the possible benefits, researchers say.
Zeldin, who has been floated as a possible replacement for former Attorney General Pam Bondi after she was fired by Trump last week, was met by loud applause when he spoke of EPA’s recent move to scrap a 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health by contributing to climate change.
The so-called endangerment finding undergirded all Clean Air Act rules aimed at containing planet-warming emissions. Its removal puts them all in legal jeopardy.
The appearance of the U.S. government’s top environmental official reflected a significant change from Republicans' past approaches to climate change, said James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute. He recalled the “uphill battle with people who would be our natural allies,” asserting that former President George W. Bush elevated officials who did not challenge the science showing that greenhouse gases are heating the planet.
He said that changed with Zeldin, who has led the Trump administration’s headlong charge into the long-simmering culture war surrounding climate change.
“We're seeing a deference to science — not what pollsters say will resonate with suburban women or whatever voting bloc they're looking at,” Taylor told the audience. “We even have the top environmental official in the administration — EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin — who is showing support, who is here to talk with us and to speak the truth. How times have changed.”
Zeldin’s remarks Wednesday amounted to an endorsement of the conference’s thesis that increased industrial emissions would benefit humans and the environment, not harm them. He said that the endangerment finding was based on the most pessimistic projections in a broad range of scenarios for human-driven climate disruption. Elites had elevated the worst-case scenarios to maximize their power, he said.
“There would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” Zeldin said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”
The message was a vindication for the longtime attendees of the conference, who for years have sought to influence Washington policy from the fringes.
It was an “important” moment to have the nation’s top environmental official defy critics and address the annual event, said James Carlson, who recently retired from the Institute for Defense Analyses.
“It means that the administration wants to do the best for the country, period. It doesn't want to just follow a political realm,” he said.
EPA’s move to revoke the endangerment finding is at the heart of the tension between climate science and Trump’s vow to slash regulations, which he has said will boost the economy. EPA claimed when it repealed the finding that the move applied only to rules for motor vehicles — which were undone as part of the same regulatory package. But on Wednesday, Zeldin made it clear that the action could be applied to other sources of climate pollution.
He accused the Obama administration of issuing the finding “in order to be able to hoard more power for themselves,” starting with “light, medium and heavy vehicles” and moving “to stationary sources and oil and gas and airplanes.” EPA upended the finding solely on the basis of legal arguments — including that the Clean Air Act did not allow for the regulation of global pollutants like greenhouse gases — rather than assertions that would have tried to discredit climate science.
Zeldin spoke just before a panel took the stage to discuss a controversial Energy Department report on climate science that was initiated last year to support EPA’s endangerment finding repeal. The paper, which was written by five climate contrarians who were hand-picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, was cited heavily in last year’s proposed endangerment repeal before being sidelined in the final rollback. Attorneys warned that citing it could create legal vulnerabilities as the Trump administration defends the action in court.
States and environmental organizations have already filed legal challenges to the repeal. If Zeldin is confirmed to succeed Bondi he could lead the Justice Department as it defends the endangerment finding.
Zeldin was mum Wednesday on reports that he is being considered for attorney general. But he pledged as EPA administrator to stick to the letter of the law and not “fill that void by creatively giving myself powers that don't exist in statute.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin embraced a community of climate change contrarians Wednesday in a speech that underscored how scientific outliers have made inroads with the Trump administration.
Zeldin acknowledged in his opening statements to the Heartland Institute’s conference in Washington that he was the first EPA chief to attend the annual gathering, which has long been shunned by Democratic and Republican administrations alike for advancing a fringe view that greenhouse gas emissions are beneficial.
“For those who wanted to criticize my appearance here before this group, it really shows the desperation of just how many walls have collapsed of this last line of defense,” Zeldin said.
Greenhouse gases, primarily from burning fossil fuels, have warmed the planet 1.4 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution began, according to the World Meteorological Organization, which has determined that the last 11 years are the hottest in recorded history. Rising temperatures have intensified extreme weather and disasters like floods and wildfires, turbocharged deadly heat waves and imposed costs through death, declining agricultural productivity, health ailments and property damage, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Attendees at the Heartland annual conference disagree with most, if not all, of those conclusions. They instead championed the role carbon dioxide plays in promoting plant growth, which they argue has been ignored by mainstream climate science — and past U.S. administrations. The overwhelming body of science shows that the negative consequences of climate pollution far outweigh the possible benefits, researchers say.
Zeldin, who has been floated as a possible replacement for former Attorney General Pam Bondi after she was fired by Trump last week, was met by loud applause when he spoke of EPA’s recent move to scrap a 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health by contributing to climate change.
The so-called endangerment finding undergirded all Clean Air Act rules aimed at containing planet-warming emissions. Its removal puts them all in legal jeopardy.
The appearance of the U.S. government’s top environmental official reflected a significant change from Republicans' past approaches to climate change, said James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute. He recalled the “uphill battle with people who would be our natural allies,” asserting that former President George W. Bush elevated officials who did not challenge the science showing that greenhouse gases are heating the planet.
He said that changed with Zeldin, who has led the Trump administration’s headlong charge into the long-simmering culture war surrounding climate change.
“We're seeing a deference to science — not what pollsters say will resonate with suburban women or whatever voting bloc they're looking at,” Taylor told the audience. “We even have the top environmental official in the administration — EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin — who is showing support, who is here to talk with us and to speak the truth. How times have changed.”
Zeldin’s remarks Wednesday amounted to an endorsement of the conference’s thesis that increased industrial emissions would benefit humans and the environment, not harm them. He said that the endangerment finding was based on the most pessimistic projections in a broad range of scenarios for human-driven climate disruption. Elites had elevated the worst-case scenarios to maximize their power, he said.
“There would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” Zeldin said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”
The message was a vindication for the longtime attendees of the conference, who for years have sought to influence Washington policy from the fringes.
It was an “important” moment to have the nation’s top environmental official defy critics and address the annual event, said James Carlson, who recently retired from the Institute for Defense Analyses.
“It means that the administration wants to do the best for the country, period. It doesn't want to just follow a political realm,” he said.
EPA’s move to revoke the endangerment finding is at the heart of the tension between climate science and Trump’s vow to slash regulations, which he has said will boost the economy. EPA claimed when it repealed the finding that the move applied only to rules for motor vehicles — which were undone as part of the same regulatory package. But on Wednesday, Zeldin made it clear that the action could be applied to other sources of climate pollution.
He accused the Obama administration of issuing the finding “in order to be able to hoard more power for themselves,” starting with “light, medium and heavy vehicles” and moving “to stationary sources and oil and gas and airplanes.” EPA upended the finding solely on the basis of legal arguments — including that the Clean Air Act did not allow for the regulation of global pollutants like greenhouse gases — rather than assertions that would have tried to discredit climate science.
Zeldin spoke just before a panel took the stage to discuss a controversial Energy Department report on climate science that was initiated last year to support EPA’s endangerment finding repeal. The paper, which was written by five climate contrarians who were hand-picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, was cited heavily in last year’s proposed endangerment repeal before being sidelined in the final rollback. Attorneys warned that citing it could create legal vulnerabilities as the Trump administration defends the action in court.
States and environmental organizations have already filed legal challenges to the repeal. If Zeldin is confirmed to succeed Bondi he could lead the Justice Department as it defends the endangerment finding.
Zeldin was mum Wednesday on reports that he is being considered for attorney general. But he pledged as EPA administrator to stick to the letter of the law and not “fill that void by creatively giving myself powers that don't exist in statute.”
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