https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/climate/climate-change-deniers-trump.html
By Maxine Joselow – Reporting from Washington
Excerpt:
Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by “leftist politicians.” Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless.
These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for the next attorney general.
“We aren’t just following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom-and-gloom prediction of the day is,” Mr. Zeldin said at the conference, which drew around 220 attendees to the basement ballroom of a hotel in downtown Washington.
“We won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” Mr. Zeldin added, drawing applause from the crowd, which had given him a standing ovation before his speech.
The event made clear that climate change deniers are experiencing a triumphant resurgence in Mr. Trump’s Washington after years of feeling sidelined by the scientific and political establishments.
Mr. Trump, however, has derided the scientific consensus on global warming as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” And Mr. Zeldin has said that the E.P.A. is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” by rolling back dozens of regulations that burdened the fossil fuel industry.
The conference on Wednesday brought together people with varying levels of skepticism of the scientific consensus. Some attendees flatly denied that the planet was warming, while others recognized the trend but argued that it was not an emergency and that the potential solutions were too costly.
