By SCOTT WALDMAN
Excerpt:
At a Heartland Institute conference, climate contrarians celebrated the rollback of regulations under EPA chief Lee Zeldin while urging President Donald Trump not to elevate him to attorney general, fearing it would stall their agenda.
There was one overarching message from a large group of climate contrarians gathered Wednesday at a hotel near the White House: please keep EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in place.
The Heartland Institute’s annual conference attracts a familiar crowd of fringe researchers who downplay climate science, their fans and the think tanks that use their work to fight against climate regulations.
Zeldin, who has been rumored to be under consideration to replace Pam Bondi as attorney general, was a keynote speaker this year, the highest-ranking administration official to ever speak at the conference.
Zeldin’s appearance, a clear sign of the Institute’s growing influence inside the Trump administration, comes amid a complete revamping of climate regulations. Under Zeldin, the EPA has cut billions of dollars in climate grants awarded under the Biden administration, slashed pollution controls and, most significantly, eliminated the legal bedrock of climate regulations.
Earlier this year, Zeldin traveled to the White House to announce the roll back of the 2009 endangerment finding, which determined greenhouse gases are harmful to public health by causing climate change.
But amid all the excitement about the vast amount of government climate science and regulations destroyed by the Trump administration in the last year, there was also concern that the work was not done and that the best man for the job was Zeldin.
“We don’t want to lose him at EPA,” said Marc Morano, of the conservative think tank the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. “I think he’s been the most consequential EPA chief in the agency’s history.”
Legal challenges to many of Zeldin’s actions are now winding their way through the courts. Climate and environmental activists have called for his resignation because they view him as the most dangerous EPA administrator in U.S. history.
