Zeldin 2 Lee EPA

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mofo, evil pending kid killer soot etc welfare queen abrams,using doge BS as cover; fox free ride // pruitt

MERRI OK

SEE RED TEAM DOE REPORT

SEE EPA 6 T&Z

SEE SCI SUPPRESS 4 NCA // 2025 VOUGHT

SEE PFAS RFK MAHA

SZABO SWAMP THING METHANE

SEE FOX 9-11 BIZ 3

SEE 2009 ENDANGER 86 2 26 RED TEAM SUED BY UCS AND --- SHUT DOWN BUT...

In 2025, with John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, and Roy Spencer, McKitrick was a member of the United States Department of Energy's Climate Working Group and a co-author of its A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate (23 July 2025)^[7]

:{:{SEE COAL MERCURY}:

SEE PFAS NANCY BECK acc CROPLIFE MAHA FAIL GLYPHO XO ATZ DICAMBA}:

ARSENIC HVY METALS COAL ASH FOR AI DATA CTRS

see EJ kid killer ingrassia nazi stain

PUNKED CNN? 8 25

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MMA

MAHA Summit entrenches a divide between administration-aligned advocates and popular influencers

Some grassroots activists and popular influencers were notably absent from the event headlined by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and JD Vance

Written by Alyssa Tirrell

Published 10/02/26

What does this week’s MAHA Summit tell us about the state of the movement?

Earlier this week, the MAHA Center hosted the second annual MAHA Summit, described by the organizers as a convention of “senior health leaders across technology, business, and government working to make Americans healthier.” The summit's apparent cooperation with industry figures and the Trump administration seemed to drive further an existing wedge within the MAHA coalition, putting administration-aligned advocates at odds with some grassroots activists and popular influencers. As one activist put it, “I don’t recognize this version of MAHA.”

The MAHA Center — the nonprofit arm of a triad of organizations, including MAHA Action and the MAHA PAC, all tied to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — describes MAHA as “a nationwide movement focused on reversing the chronic disease epidemic in America through advocacy, grassroots activism, and policy reform.”

Nonetheless, several prominent grassroots advocates and MAHA influencers were absent from the lineup — including Turning Point USA’s Alex Clark, Moms Across America’s Zen Honeycutt, and Kelly Ryerson, known online as Glyphosate Girl. Instead, the panels primarily featured Trump administration officials and industry representatives — from health tech, insurance, and agriculture — many of whom delivered sales or policy pitches.

In recent months, elected Republicans have faced backlash from MAHA advocates for apparently siding with industry interests on priorities like glyphosate and agricultural legislation. An invitation to participate in the summit could have been an olive branch to MAHA influencers — but if they received invites, it appears those influencers declined.

A panel on reform at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services did feature podcaster Russell Brand as a moderator — a bizarre choice, not least because Brand has faced charges for numerous counts of rape and sexual assault. In his introductory remarks, Chief Executive Officer of MAHA Holdings Alex Hardy told the audience, “You'll hear from Russell Brand and Dr. [Mehmat] Oz. One's a heart surgeon, and one's a heart throb. We'll let you decide which is which.”

Some issues of recent MAHA activism featured lightly if at all during the panels. There were no dedicated panels for vaccine reform, glyphosate, and data centers — all of which have propelled MAHA advocacy in recent months and some of which would require a brush with industries that were represented among the summit’s speakers.

AI innovation was particularly emphasized throughout the summit, but the MAHA backlash against data centers was only mentioned in passing, when CMS Deputy Administrator Dan Brillman said, “The 58% that don’t use it, hate it. They hate data centers. We need more people using AI to better their health.” At the end of the event, RFK Jr. further promoted AI, telling the audience that it could “free us from medical tyranny” of experts.

Kelly Ryerson and Alex Clark also suggested that the MAHA Summit was not geared toward the women who made the movement a major political force. Ahead of the event, Ryerson told the Washington Examiner, “The MAHA Summit lineup does not reflect the issues that birthed the original MAHA movement and drove voters, especially women, to show up and vote for this coalition,” adding, “I don’t recognize this version of MAHA.” Similarly, NBC reported that Clark did not attend the summit. “Where are the original women who started the movement?” Clark asked.

Of the nearly 60 speakers who featured on the agenda, only 7 were women — one of whom was RFK Jr.’s wife Cheryl Hines, who appeared for just 5 minutes to announce future MAHA events.

Women have played a critical role in the movement — the introductory remarks of the event even paid lip service to “MAHA moms.” So it’s notable that the women of MAHA were largely excluded or chose not to participate in the summit. Their absence suggests that the MAHA coalition is now facing a familiar political question: Is compromise with prevailing power players a sign that the movement is succeeding or failing?

Is the summit just the tip of the iceberg?

The MAHA Summit highlighted an existing fracture in the foundation of the MAHA coalition. In recent months, MAHA Action and popular influencers have taken opposing lines on at least two issues related to the Trump administration.

One such example followed from the EPA announcement this past May that it would drop limits on some PFAS in drinking water. Ryerson, Clark, and MAHA activist Alexandra Muñoz expressed frustration with the move, while MAHA Action praised EPA efforts.

Before the rule was announced, Clark and Muñoz urged the EPA to change course. Clark wrote, “Don't weaken PFAS regulation!!!” and Muñoz posted, “Don't allow more PFAS in our drinking water!!!!”

In response to the change, Clark again expressed her frustration with the move, writing, “We are running one of the largest uncontrolled chemical experiments in human history from an alleged ‘MAHA EPA.’”

Ryerson seemed to agree with Clark and Muñoz, writing, “Yesterday, as predicted, the EPA announced they will be removing limits on certain PFAS in tap water.” Her post also included a quote she had given to The New York Times, strongly advising the EPA “not to move forward on deregulating PFAS if they want to win the November midterms.”

According to the New York Times, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin “sought to counter that anger by appearing Monday with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary who spearheaded the MAHA movement, and announcing nearly $1 billion to help states address the contaminants in drinking water.”

MAHA Action backed Zeldin's spin, praising the administration's move. The account wrote, “The EPA is putting $1 billion toward cleaning PFAS from America’s drinking water. After decades of contamination, communities are finally getting help to confront the ‘forever chemicals’ poisoning their water.”

In a separate joint post with MAHA Action President Tony Lyons, MAHA Action wrote that Zeldin and the EPA were “declaring war on forever chemicals.”

A similar dynamic ensued following the announcement of Heidi Overton's nomination for FDA commissioner late last month. Again MAHA Action fell in line with the administration, while Clark, Ryerson, and Muñoz criticized the move.

MAHA Action and Lyons, along with the account MAHA Mommas, praised Overton's nomination, writing, “Secretary Kennedy has given his full endorsement of President Trump’s pick for the next FDA Commissioner, Dr. Heidi Overton.” The post added, “Kennedy is making clear that under Overton, the FDA will answer to science and the American people, not the status quo.”

Clark pushed back, writing, “This is who wrote the glyphosate executive order by the way,” seemingly referring to a February executive order aimed at boosting glyphosate production. Clark’s post was shared by Muñoz. (White House officials disputed the claim that Overton wrote the order, saying it was authored by Trump’s national security advisory team.)

Ryerson again seemed to agree with Clark and Muñoz, writing of the nomination, “Very sad day for MAHA."

The divide hasn’t escaped Lyons, it seems. Earlier this fall, he discussed the MAHA coalition’s role in driving GOP midterm results with Rumble’s Flyover Conservative, saying, “I think the strategy has to be to look at the coalition that worked in the fall of 2024, where we got a few million people to switch parties and to recognize that, like I said before, the party that they thought represented them really didn't.”

Lyons added, “On the more activist side of the MAHA movement — activists are never happy, they're not meant to be happy, the idea for activism is that you can always do better.”

MAHA advocates are rallying against GOP “traitors” who passed the farm bill

09/17/26

MAHA influencer: Trump's executive order on glyphosate was a “slap in the face to MAHA” that “might cost the midterms for the Republican Party”

04/28/26

Backlash from MAHA influencers and right-leaning podcasters over glyphosate is loud, but they still stop short of breaking with Trump

03/30/26

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mma omg

Fox blames climate policy for Europe’s climate-exacerbated heat deaths

Fox News and Fox Business figures applied that same framing to U.S. heat coverage to make fossil fuels look like the answer to deadly heat

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 07/09/26

As Europe reeled from a deadly heat wave, coverage on Fox News and Fox Business made air conditioning the story, claiming that climate policy had made it harder and more expensive for Europeans to survive the heat.

However, extreme heat is becoming more dangerous because of fossil fuel-driven warming, which makes climate policy more necessary. Fox networks instead used Europe’s deaths to argue against climate action, doubling down on the fossil fuel economy that is exacerbating dangerous climate impacts.

That argument is already being adapted to U.S. heat coverage. As American heat waves expose the strain on infrastructure built for a less dangerous climate, Fox figures blamed climate policy for making cooling more expensive, attacked climate mitigation and resilience planning, and defended more fossil fuel infrastructure. It is a convenient reversal: Fox casts fossil fuels as the answer to deadly heat, while eliding their role in making extreme heat worse.

Europe and the U.S. are both facing deadly heat made worse by climate change

Extreme heat is killing people on both sides of the Atlantic, and scientists have connected both events to fossil-fueled warming.

Reuters reported at least 3,700 excess deaths during the June 20-28 heat wave that gripped France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. World Weather Attribution found that climate change made the European heat wave hotter and more likely, with a similar weather pattern now producing temperatures that would have been “virtually impossible” in June 1976 and still “highly unlikely at any time of the year.”

Europe’s lack of widespread air conditioning — which is shaped by its historically cooler climate, higher energy costs, and concerns about rising power demand from cooling — helps explain the death toll, but not in the way right-wing media suggest.

Much of Europe was built for a cooler climate baseline that no longer exists. As Mark O’Connell wrote in The Irish Times, “Our societies are not built, either figuratively or literally, for the world we now inhabit.” Europe is now the fastest-warming continent, warming more than twice as fast as the global average, and extreme heat is exposing the gap between the climate its systems were designed for and the climate people are now living in.

The American heat wave showed why the story cannot stop at air conditioning. Even though the U.S. has far more air conditioning than Europe, deadly heat is still outpacing the energy infrastructure that keeps people safe.

The New York Times reported that World Weather Attribution scientists also determined that the recent heat and humidity across the northeast U.S. and eastern Canada would have also been “virtually impossible” without human-caused warming, while Axios reported the event killed at least two dozen people, including 22 heat-related deaths in New Jersey.

Air conditioning saves lives during extreme heat, and more people will need it as heat waves become more frequent and deadly. However it does not solve the underlying danger. Instead, it moves part of the risk onto the power system, which is already being stressed by hotter summers, higher cooling demand, and climate-driven disruptions. During the recent heat wave, the Department of Energy issued an emergency order for PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, as extreme heat pushed electricity demand toward possible shortfalls.

In addition, widespread air conditioning cannot protect people working outside, people without stable housing, people who cannot afford reliable indoor relief, or people who lose power when demand peaks. The scale of the risk is already visible in the American Southwest. In Maricopa County, Arizona, home to Phoenix, heat killed at least 579 people in 2023, the county’s deadliest year on record. As United Nations climate assessments link rising extreme heat to worsening health risks in the region, more of daily life is becoming harder to sustain safely without major adaptation.

Right-wing media coverage strips this context away. Global warming is making dangerous heat more frequent, but their answer is to attack climate policy while directing people back to the fossil fuel economy that has already made extreme heat worse. More cooling will be essential, but expanding air conditioning alone is not the solution. It will need to be paired with clean power, more energy efficiency, and heat adaptation to mitigate stress on fragile grids and reduce the burning of fossil fuels that are driving these harmful impacts.

## Fox claimed Europe’s heat deaths were caused by climate policies that limited access to air conditioning

Fox’s coverage turned Europe’s heat wave into a story about air conditioning, energy restrictions, and green ideology.

- Climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg pitted air conditioning against climate action during an appearance onAmerica’s Newsroom. After anchor Dana Perino asked whether “government policies have failed the people,” Lomborg argued that Europe needed “much more air conditioning,” questioning whether governments wanted to help vulnerable people “a tiny bit in 100 years” or help “old and vulnerable people right now.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [6/26/26; DeSmog, accessed 7/7/26]

- The Ingraham Anglecalled European heat deaths “the true cost of the green energy scam.” Over a chyron that read “Sweating the green agenda,” guest host Charlie Hurt said “Europe spent years treating air conditioning as the problem and now we’re having a reality check,” while guest Lawrence Newport, co-founder of U.K.-based group Looking for Growth, claimed air conditioning is “essentially banned” in “a vast number of homes across this country.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [6/26/26]

- Fox News host Sean Hannity used Europe’s heat wave to attack “climate alarmism” and European climate politics. Hannity said Europe was blaming U.S. emissions for the heat wave after embracing “socialism” and “radical climate alarmism,” while his guest, Outnumberedco-host Emily Compagno, argued that Europe was making “a ridiculous stance against climate change” rather than protecting elderly people from deadly heat. Fox News, *Hannity*, [6/29/26]

- Discussing heat deaths in Europe onThe Five, Fox’s Greg Gutfeld suggested “this is a way for Europeans to unload the elderly and blame it on climate change.” Co-host Dana Perino argued that the “so-called science” has been “debunked” and said European officials had a “tool” that could alleviate the problem but “would rather their people suffer and die.” Fox News, *The Five*, [6/30/26]

- Hannity blamed Europe’s deaths on “climate alarmism” and an “anti-air conditioner crusade.” He said the “brutal heat wave now gripping Europe” had caused more than 1,300 deaths, “which by the way is all thanks to the climate alarmism and the anti-air conditioner crusade that’s taken place in Europe.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [6/30/26]

## Fox is also turning American heat waves into an argument against climate policy

Fox figures treated the burden of surviving extreme heat as proof that Americans need fewer climate rules, not stronger climate actions to mitigate worsening heat.

- Discussing the European heat wave on Fox News, Environmental Protection Administration head Lee Zeldin portrayed climate policy as a threat to Americans’ access to air conditioning. On America Reports, Zeldin dismissed the idea that Americans should feel “guilt or shame” over air conditioning use and attacked new environmental rules that could leave “grandma” without a working air conditioner during the summer. He added, “There’s no more hoax where we are saying that the world is about to end.” Zeldin ended by claiming Europeans were “seeing the implementation of their standards, and it’s destroying their economy.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [6/30/26]

- On Fox Business’Mornings with Maria, Energy Secretary Chris Wright framed extreme heat-driven stress on power grids as a reason to loosen climate constraints on utilities. Wright said peak demand would test the PJM grid, blamed “the previous administration” for leaving too little capacity, and argued that the Trump administration was “letting utilities run their business” to prioritize reliability and ratepayers over “climate cult gods.” Fox Business, *Mornings with Maria*, [7/2/26]

- Perino connected New York City’s thermostat guidance to Europe’s lack of air conditioning and blamed “liberals” for weakening the grid. After co-host Greg Gutfeld said New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was “coming for your thermostat,” Perino pointed to Europe’s heat wave and said that at an European Union building, lower floors “were not allowed to have air conditioning” while “all the fancy people” above them could keep air conditioning. “You start rationing things,” she said, before blaming New York’s vulnerability on “liberals who took away Indian Point” nuclear facility and “only want renewables.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/2/26]

- Hannity defended fossil fuels as the source of lifesaving air conditioning during heat waves. The Fox host attacked New York City’s thermostat guidance as “a small taste of socialism,” saying “the same fossil fuel industry” Democrats want to challenge provides the electricity for “the very air conditioning systems that are protecting all of us from heat waves.” He warned that “new regulations will make everything a struggle” and drive energy bills “through the roof.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/2/26]

- OnJesse Watters Primetime, longtime climate contrarian Marc Morano recast New York City’s heat wave and air conditioning guidance as “climate communism.” After guest host Charlie Hurt mocked New York City’s 78-degree air conditioning guidance and referenced a New York Times report linking the heat wave to fossil fuels, Morano claimed “climate communists” were relying on “scientifically fabricated fears” to “control every aspect of our lives.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/6/26; DeSmog, accessed 7/8/26]

## Deadly heat is exposing the lie at the center of right-wing climate politics

The recent heat waves in Europe and the U.S. show the contradiction in right-wing media's response to deadly heat. They defend the fossil fuel system that is making extreme heat more dangerous, then cast fossil fuel energy as the only practical way to survive it. Their coverage gives audiences a simpler story: The real danger is climate policy, not the fossil fuels driving the heat. But each devastating heat wave makes that story harder to sustain because the crisis they blame on climate action is the crisis climate action is meant to contain.

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CLAIMS NO DOGE/ NO AI ?

WAPO? CITY DESK NTBCW JRNL BS

https://citydesk.org/2025/04/21/interior-secretary-gives-doge-aide-sweeping-powers-to-remake-department/

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has given a former oil executive and aide to Elon Musk broad latitude to cut costs and consolidate work within his vast department, which oversees more than 500 million acres of land across the United States.

In an order issued Thursday, Burgum put Tyler Hassen, who came to the Interior Department as a representative of the U.S. DOGE Service, in charge of a sweeping effort to “create significant efficiencies” and eliminate “redundant efforts” across the department. Hassen’s broad portfolio includes IT, human resources, training, financial management, international affairs, contracting, communications and other tasks.

With this unusual move, Burgum appears to be going further than most other Cabinet members in granting power to a DOGE representative who has not gone through a Senate confirmation process. Hassen’s decisions could have major implications for how Interior – which is responsible for maintaining national parks, protecting endangered species, and overseeing drilling in public lands and waters – operates going forward.

Conservationists accused Burgum of improperly ceding oversight to an unaccountable leader from DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency.

“If Doug Burgum doesn’t want this job, he should quit now,” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement. “Instead, it looks like Burgum plans to sit by the fire eating warm cookies while Elon Musk’s lackeys dismantle our national parks and public lands.”

Before joining the Trump administration, Hassen worked for Basin Energy, an oil field equipment manufacturer and services company. After the inauguration, he was embedded in Interior as a representative of DOGE, and since March he has been delegated the authority of assistant secretary of policy, management and budget.

Sitting for a Fox News interview alongside Musk and other DOGE members in March, Hassen said his team was reviewing “every single contract, every single grant” at Interior.

“When things come to my attention that don’t make sense, I’m bringing them to Secretary Burgum,” Hassen added. “He’s a businessman. He’s very supportive of DOGE.”

Hassen has been scrutinizing all grants and contracts worth $50,000 or more, according to an Interior employee briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to comment publicly.

A second DOGE aide named Matt Luby has been deciding whether to approve new spending and has requested access to GrantSolutions, the internal system used to control all grant awards, the employee said. Luby is the chief of staff and childhood friend of Vivek Ramaswamy, who helped launch DOGE with Musk before departing to run for governor of Ohio.

The DOGE team at Interior has asked each office to provide a list of its grants that could be terminated, according to the employee familiar with the matter and emails reviewed by The Washington Post.

“In light of this very large existing grant program and our efforts to maximize taxpayer savings, we would appreciate it if you could please provide us with a list of $30-50M in discretionary grants that could potentially be terminated in the near future,” Hassen wrote in a January email to officials in the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.

Hassen and Luby have also requested a list of all Interior grants going to Maine, the emails show. Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from Maine unless the Democratic-led state complies with his executive order barring transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.

In addition, Hassen has sought for his team to have access to a major personnel payroll system housed at Interior that serves more than 50 agencies and 276,000 employees across the federal bureaucracy.

Officials including Anthony Irish, one of Interior’s top career attorneys with about two decades of experience at the department, spelled out in a memo concerns over the unusual nature of such a request and the legal risks of allowing broad access to sensitive personnel files.

“Such elevated access to critical high-value asset systems is rare with respect to individual systems and no single DOI official presently has such access,” they wrote.

In response, Hassen sought to remove Irish from his job, accusing him of “subverting, obstructing and delaying” the granting of access. Irish remains on leave as of Monday, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which is representing Irish in challenging his proposed removal.

“Tony Irish is being punished for doing his job,” PEER executive director Tim Whitehouse said. “Elevating important concerns up the chain of command is how government is supposed to work.”

When reached for comment, the Interior Department declined to say when the reorganization will be complete and how many employees will be impacted. In a statement, Interior spokeswoman J. Elizabeth Peace said the department is “implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency and government accountability.”

One of Hassen’s first tasks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration was visiting a Northern California water pumping station to push one of Trump’s long-standing priorities: rerouting water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state.

During his first campaign for president, Trump argued that too much water is allocated toward protecting an imperiled river fish called the delta smelt instead of going to farmers.

More recently, Trump accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) of protecting an “essentially worthless fish” instead of sending water to Southern California during the historic fires. But many experts dismissed Trump’s claim that the blazes could have been averted by transferring water from the north.

DOGE employees have also sought to control spending and staff at other environmental agencies. Reuters reported that the DOGE team at the Environmental Protection Agency is using artificial intelligence to monitor employees’ emails for hostility toward Trump and his agenda.

During a Monday briefing with reporters, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin declined to confirm the report on the use of AI. But he emphasized that he is overseeing the DOGE team at the agency, which has an office on the third floor of the EPA headquarters near his own executive suite.

“Anyone inside of the agency who’s working on a mission related to DOGE works for EPA,” Zeldin said. “We don’t have any non-EPA employees here inside of this building.”

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GRIST 7 26

Inside the government’s push to divert Puerto Rico solar funds to a bankrupt utility

Naveena Sadasivam

Solutions

### After a civil rights complaint, Chicago built the nation’s largest air monitoring network

Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco

### Indigenous cultural practices are a climate solution, report finds

Joseph Lee

### The Colorado River is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird

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The EPA website got the basics of climate science right. Until last week. | Grist dec 2025

Story}:

The EPA website got the basics of climate science right. Until last week.

Kate Yoder Politics

If you want to know what’s causing climate change and how it affects where you live, don’t turn to the Environmental Protection Agency for answers. The government agency purged basic facts about global warming from its website last week — including references to how human activity releases planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The EPA’s page explaining the causes of climate change now focuses on how “natural processes,” like variations in Earth’s orbit and in solar activity, influence the climate.

“Human causes are not even on the list, which is simply misinformation. It’s false,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “And moreover, it’s clearly deliberate, because a week ago, that page correctly reflected the scientific understanding of climate change.”

At least 80 pages related to climate change vanished from the EPA’s site in early December. It’s one of the most far-reaching removals of climate change information from government websites since President Donald Trump took office in January. “Up till now, we really had not seen hardly any changes on EPA pages,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

While important resources have already disappeared from other government sites — including the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated climate reports translated for public consumption — many of the previous changes were language swaps, replacing “climate change” with more innocuous phrases like “future conditions” or “extreme weather.” The EPA’s most recent overhaul represents a more radical rejection of mainstream science.

“Yes, there’s been climate information coming down, but so far it hasn’t actually necessarily been the nuts-and-bolts climate science information,” Swain said. “This is pretty fundamental physical science.” The resources on the EPA’s site were used by teachers, businesses, and local and tribal governments, as well as the public, since they translated the jargon-filled language of scientific reports into something more useful and accessible.

For example, the agency deleted a resource explaining the signals of a warming world — everything from rising temperatures and melting ice sheets to the damage toll on wildlife and human health — with more than 100 charts and maps. Also gone is a website quantifying the physical and economic risks. The effect is to isolate climate change from the issues that affect people’s lives, Gehrke said: “It’s specifically targeting the information about why we should care.”

From left: An archive of an EPA webpage from October highlights how humans have contributed to climate change. By December, the EPA had updated its page on climate change to remove references to human activity. *Courtesy Internet Archive; courtesy epa.gov

In response to questions about why the EPA’s climate change resources were removed, the agency said it was upholding “gold-standard science.”

“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”

Swain said the changes could be a way for the EPA to bring its public-facing information in line with the proposal to reverse the agency’s own “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis that allows the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. The agency is expected to finalize the repeal soon, in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has promised to be “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

How to get a Trump pardon: Forget the DOJ, call “Bobby” and other influencers

A Reuters investigation found nearly all the clemency decisions made by President Trump during his current term flouted longstanding Justice Department guidelines. In place of traditional rules, the White House relies on a network of influential advocates espousing pardons based on partisan, personal criteria.

By Marisa Taylor, Chris Prentice, Kaylee Kang and Allison Martell

June 11, 20263:50 AM PDTUpdated June 11, 2026

WASHINGTON - Days before granting him a pardon in March of last year, President Donald Trump phoned Trevor Milton, an electric-vehicle entrepreneur and Republican donor who was convicted of defrauding investors of more than $660 million.

The president, according to previously unreported details of the conversation reviewed by Reuters, told Milton that high-profile advisors convinced Trump that Milton had been unfairly prosecuted by the Justice Department of President Joe Biden. Among those who put in a good word, Trump said, was U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Milton’s treatment was unjust, Trump said, and similar to his own targeting by federal investigators around the same time. “You had a lot of support,” Trump told Milton. “Bobby Kennedy. You have to call Bobby and thank him.”

In an emailed statement, Milton didn’t answer questions from Reuters about the exchange with the president or any support he received from Kennedy or others. The Department of Health and Human Services, where Kennedy is serving as secretary, didn’t respond to requests for comment on this report.

Trump’s reference to “Bobby” is emblematic of how the president has upended the pardon process in his second administration, discarding over a century of protocol overseen by the Justice Department, or DOJ. Today, winning a pardon or other grant of presidential clemency routinely hinges upon an informal and highly personalized network of influencers and advocates appealing to Trump himself, according to a Reuters analysis of pardon, lobbying, and electoral records, as well as interviews with over 80 people familiar with clemency decisions during the president’s current term.

Pardon applicants once had to comply with longstanding DOJ guidelines, such as a five-year wait after conviction or demonstrated remorse for their crimes. Reuters’ analysis shows that under Trump, clemency now is far more dependent upon access to his inner circle. That access, Reuters found, is enhanced when an applicant can craft a narrative that resonates with the president’s own sense of victimization, a sentiment he has regularly expressed since being indicted twice by federal prosecutors during his four years outside the White House.

Reuters reviewed thousands of records to document a cast of characters involved in pardons or commutations granted by Trump since he returned to the presidency. Using public databases and artificial intelligence to help search, compile and analyze the records, reporters identified many of the recipients, their advocates and Trump administration insiders involved in clemency for more than 1,700 people since January 2025. The review found:

96% of Trump’s second-term clemency grants have gone to recipients who didn’t fulfill longstanding DOJ guidelines for such requests. Past presidents on occasion have sidestepped those rules before. But fewer than 1% of those who received clemency during the Biden administration and just 14% of recipients in Trump’s first presidency failed to meet the guidelines.

Reuters identified 290 advocates, or influencers, who publicly or privately helped secure clemency for 197 recipients. Because some of the advocates worked on behalf of multiple candidates, their efforts at times overlapped, representing 624 different acts of influence. Among the influencers, 73 helped secure more than one pardon or sentence commutation. Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney now in private practice in Utah, has been involved in at least 12 pardons or commutations. Roger Stone, a veteran political consultant and longtime Trump confidant, had a hand in at least five.

Of the influencers identified by Reuters, at least 110 are known Trump allies. Eleven of those received clemency themselves from Trump during his first term. High-profile advocates and pardon recipients include Stone and Angela Stanton King, a conservative author and campaign advisor to Kennedy before he ditched his 2024 run for the presidency and backed Trump.

Six people familiar with recent clemency acts said intermediaries with proven access to Trump’s entourage can charge as much as $2 million for their services. Reuters, however, couldn’t establish how much each advisor it identified had charged for help with a given pardon.

Stone and Stanton King each acknowledged to Reuters their role in advocating for pardon recipients. Stone said he received no money for his services; Stanton King declined to say how much she was paid. Tolman, the Utah attorney, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“The constitutional authority to issue pardons and commutations rests solely with the president,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, wrote in a statement. “The White House has a rigorous pardon review process which includes the White House counsel, the Department of Justice, and ultimately the president.”

The statement didn’t answer Reuters’ questions about the president’s call with Milton or the role of Kennedy or other specific administration officials in clemency decisions.

In a separate statement, a DOJ spokesperson wrote that it plays “a key role in assisting the president with exercising his constitutional authority.” The department continues “to make recommendations to the president that are consistent, unbiased, and uphold the rule of law. There has been no departure from this long-standing process.”

Trump’s new pardon protocols, and the privileged access that has come to define them, have sparked coverage in the media and uproar among legal experts, traditionalists at the DOJ, and victims of some of the pardoned offenders. Even some of Trump’s top aides, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, have pressed for a pause in clemency ahead of the midterm elections, fearing further criticism could harm Republican chances, according to three people familiar with discussions over the matter.

A White House official who declined to be identified disputed the assertion that Wiles has argued for a slowdown in pardons.

The Reuters review is the first to measure the scale of the influencer network and identify the repeat roles that some of these advocates are playing. Because most of the advocacy isn’t officially reported to government regulators, the news agency was unable to identify every single person involved in each act of clemency.

Roger Stone, a Trump confidant and pardon recipient himself during the president's first administration, is one of the high-profile influencers who has helped clemency seekers during the current term. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

Reuters was also unable to determine the total amount of money, including attorney or consulting fees, involved in securing these high-profile influencers. Insiders say the value they provide is clear: “I have access, I have relationships,” Stanton King, the author and former Kennedy advisor, told Reuters. “Because of that, I’m in the perfect position to be able to advocate and make sure that someone’s name or application isn’t just sitting over somewhere in a pile getting dusty.”

In this new landscape, personal access to Trump or his confidants is more effective than traditional methods of wooing an administration. Reuters found only two successful pardon recipients who disclosed hiring registered lobbyists, a conventional path for courting influence, to work on their behalf, paying a combined $2.7 million. Another 26 people, lobbying records show, spent a total of nearly $1.9 million on lobbyists to no avail.

In her statement, the White House spokesperson wrote that “anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money.”

Lobbyists must disclose in federal filings their persuasion efforts and what they do for the money. The hush-hush of informal influence is more difficult to track. One influencer, who asked not to be identified, has helped several clemency recipients through access to Trump’s confidants. The tactic “is a little bit like Game of Thrones – who’s in power, who’s important,” the person said. “We’ll say to a client, ‘tell us anybody you know in the political world. It could be your best friend’s cousin from elementary school.’”

That influencer was one of several who told Reuters their advocacy has included outreach to Trump family members including Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. The person declined to elaborate on those contacts. In a statement, Andy Surabian, a spokesperson for Trump Jr., said: “Don has not advocated for any pardons for anyone during his father’s second term.”

Some pardon recipients and their advocates have gained favor by making political donations or with help from well-funded partisans or political organizations. Although criticized by some ethics experts as a possible quid pro quo, it’s not a crime for a president to grant clemency to benefactors of their campaign or party, unless an explicit agreement to sell forgiveness exists.

According to Federal Election Commission records, 10 of the recipients, influencers and companies they ran – including Milton, the EV entrepreneur – donated a total of more than $10 million to Trump-related political coffers, both before and after clemency decisions. Others, including a Florida man convicted of stealing fishing gear used to trap sharks for research, benefitted when political interest groups espoused their causes.

Compared with the past, “there’s nothing other than money, praise, partisanship and relationships that dictates who gets pardons,” said Ty Cobb, a White House counsel during the first Trump administration who is now a private attorney in South Carolina.

Clemency Connections

Roger Stone

Political Consultant

Juan Orlando Hernandez

Former President of Honduras

Scott Howard Jenkins

Former Sheriff

Michele Fiore

Former Las Vegas City Councilwoman

Michael McMahon

Former NYPD Officer

Rod Blagojevich

Former Governor of Illinois

Stone’s advocacy has helped at least five people, including a former Virginia sheriff convicted of taking bribes, receive clemency from President Trump during his current term. Photos: REUTERS/Ricardo Arduengo, Andy Buchanan, Screenshot/Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office via Wayback Machine, Screenshot/City of Las Vegas via Wayback Machine, Brendan McDermid, Vincent Alban

“CREATE A STORY”

The pardon power, meant to correct injustices and allow for mercy from outside the judicial system, is entrusted to the president by the U.S. Constitution. It is broad in reach. Presidents can pardon, or forgive, any federal criminal conviction. They can commute sentences to shorter terms.

To formalize the process, and minimize any corruption associated with it, the DOJ began overseeing pardon recommendations in the late 19th century. Most presidents since have followed the department’s guidelines, but there have been exceptions.

Bill Clinton in 2001 notoriously pardoned Marc Rich, a billionaire commodities trader who fled the United States rather than face charges including tax evasion, after Rich’s associates made donations and advocated on his behalf. Joe Biden, just before leaving office, broke a public vow by pardoning his troubled son Hunter, who had recently been convicted on federal gun and tax charges.

Both former presidents have defended their clemency actions.

Starting his first day back in office, Trump outdid them all. He immediately granted clemency to the estimated 1,500 people who stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021, none of whom would have qualified under DOJ guidelines. More than 200 other pardons and commutations have followed, including at least two pardons initiated by the White House before recipients had even sought one.

Can you create a story that is similar to what members of this administration, including the president, have gone through?

Sam Mangel, clemency consultant

Most of those subsequent recipients have employed what several people involved in the actions described as a “hybrid” process. The approach entails some combination of personal appeals, influential intermediaries, political donations, and a narrative of victimization by Biden-era prosecutors. It has enabled those who get the right access to leapfrog a line of other applicants. Liz Oyer, a former DOJ pardon attorney during the Biden administration and early in Trump’s current term, calculates the current backlog at about 20,000 applications.

Sam Mangel, a Florida clemency consultant, said he has worked on behalf of 10 successful recipients during this Trump term and is currently pressing for about 20 others. He described the process this way: “Can you create a story that is similar to what members of this administration, including the president, have gone through? Then, can you somehow get it into the hands of the White House counsel?”

Mangel declined to name his clients, but said he usually charges tens of thousands of dollars to advise them.

Milton, founder of Nikola, a failed electric vehicle manufacturer based in Arizona, was convicted in October 2022 of defrauding investors by promoting a business venture for products that didn’t work. Among other evidence cited by federal prosecutors, he famously filmed a promotional video of a truck rolling down a hill – but gravity, not electricity, was propelling it. When Trump re-entered the White House, Milton was out on bail, appealing his conviction and four-year prison sentence, and heavily courting the new president and his allies.

Trump last year pardoned Trevor Milton, shown here on his YouTube channel, following his conviction for defrauding investors in Nikola, a failed EV manufacturer, of more than $660 million. Screen capture via YouTube

In 2024, electoral records show, Milton contributed at least $1.84 million to campaigns supporting both Trump and Kennedy ahead of the presidential election. Reuters couldn’t ascertain when or where Milton and Kennedy may have first crossed paths. But Trump in his phone call to Milton in early 2025 made clear that Kennedy was a strong advocate.

Trump also spoke fondly about his own personal meeting with Milton and his family at an undisclosed place and time before the pardon. According to previously unreported details of the conversation, Trump said: “You made a great impression – your father, you and your wife.”

The president said he identified with Milton’s plight. “When I met you I said, ‘This man didn’t do anything wrong,’” Trump told Milton. He disparaged the federal prosecutors on the case. “I heard the scum that was after you was the same scum that was after everybody.”

After being pardoned, Milton expressed little of the remorse traditionally required of recipients. According to the DOJ guidelines: “A petitioner should be genuinely desirous of forgiveness rather than vindication.” In a social media post the day of his pardon, Milton wrote he was one of many Americans “railroaded by the government.” He added that “trust and confidence in the Justice Department has eroded to nothing.”

Milton, in a social media post the day of his pardon, showed little of the remorse traditionally required by Justice Department guidelines from recipients of pardons. Screenshot via X.com

In his statement to Reuters, Milton blamed a plot among the media, financial markets and federal prosecutors to “burn my company to the ground.” He said he was targeted because of his longstanding support for Trump. He offered no substantiation of those claims. “They came after me, my family, and everything I had built because of it.”

That sense of grievance is widely voiced among the president’s populist supporters. It’s a throughline for much of Trump’s mercy – from the Capitol riot clemency to the pardons he granted shortly thereafter for 24 activists convicted of interfering with abortion clinics. Then there was the pardon last November for Troy Lake, a truck shop owner in Wyoming.

Sentenced in 2024 to just over a year in prison, Lake had pled guilty to altering emissions controls on at least 344 diesel trucks. The tampering was a violation of the Clean Air Act, an environmental law long derided by conservatives. Lake’s sentence caused outcry among critics including Cynthia Lummis, a Republican senator from Wyoming. Last year, citing Lake’s case, Lummis sought to amend the act, arguing that Democrats and environmental regulators “wage war on rural America.”

Meanwhile, two military veterans, friends of Lake’s, petitioned Lee Zeldin, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. “Please reach out to the President,” they wrote in an August email reviewed by Reuters, “to request a pardon, clemency, or commutation.”

EPA spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Holly Lake, Troy’s wife, said Zeldin’s intervention proved crucial. “That’s when we started getting some movement,” she said in an interview. The movement included a phone call from Sean Hayes, a White House attorney, to discuss a pardon. Hayes is a central figure in any pardon process, according to several people familiar with the administration’s clemency efforts.

Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, are among administration officials who have advocated for pardon recipients. The two cabinet members spoke earlier this year at a Washington event. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Reuters was unable to reach Hayes outside official White House channels for comment.

In addition to discussing her husband’s pardon, Holly Lake said, Hayes asked the couple whether they knew of other cases in which defendants had been targeted by overzealous prosecutors. They have since advocated for others prosecuted on similar charges involving emissions devices. In January, the DOJ said it would stop prosecuting such cases.

Lake, who served seven months of a yearlong sentence, told Reuters the president believes that regulatory agencies have gone too far. “They’re going rogue,” he said. “In his second term, he really realized how much is wrong out there.”

Some politically influential organizations have worked to bring cases to the White House’s attention. After Trump’s November 2024 election, the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation, libertarian organizations dedicated to limiting the role of government, both highlighted the case of John R. Moore, Jr., a Florida boater and diver. Moore was convicted in 2022 of stealing fishing gear used to catch sharks by a company licensed to do so for research.

Moore and a colleague were fined and sentenced to probation for theft in federal waters. The men thought they were freeing the sharks from illegal capture, Moore told Reuters.

After the two libertarian organizations published opinion pieces criticizing the convictions, Jim Jordan, a Republican congressman from Ohio and Trump ally, highlighted the case in a May 2025 hearing of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. Also at the hearing were a Cato researcher and Tolman, the former U.S. attorney who has been involved in at least 12 pardons. Michael Fox, the Cato researcher, told Reuters that Tolman, while not part of Moore’s defense team, helped draw attention to the case.

“I had no idea that anyone was working on my behalf,” Moore said in a telephone interview. “I’m still surprised that my case resonated.”

After the hearing, Hayes, the White House counsel, called Marc Seitles, Moore’s attorney, to discuss a pardon that Trump ultimately announced weeks later. “I was shocked,” Seitles said in an interview, noting he hadn’t even requested a pardon yet. “He asked, ‘Can you tell us the facts and circumstances of the case?’ And of course I took full advantage of that.”

As with Lake, the Wyoming truck mechanic, Seitles said Hayes asked if he knew of other cases of prosecutorial excess. Seitles said he has since made recommendations for others.

“PUT A KIND WORD IN”

Among the most effective advocates, Reuters’ review shows, are Trump associates who themselves have received clemency. The official the White House has dubbed its “pardon czar,” responsible for organizing clemency efforts, is Alice Marie Johnson. She was pardoned by Trump during his first term after serving more than two decades in prison on a conviction related to a cocaine conspiracy and money laundering. When Trump announced her appointment last year, he described her as “an inspiration” and told her “to find people just like you,” perceived to have been victimized by the courts.

Last year Trump appointed Alice Marie Johnson, a pardon recipient during his first term, as his "pardon czar," telling her to find others who had been unfairly treated by the courts. The two appeared here at a White House event in February. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Another top advocate is Stone, the political consultant. At the end of his first administration, Trump pardoned Stone, who had been convicted in 2019 for obstructing a Congressional investigation regarding the 2016 presidential election. Stone’s connections have proven valuable for clemency seekers. Not only does he enjoy access to the White House, Stone also hosts a radio show on prominent conservative broadcasters, where he has championed some of the recipients’ causes.

In a text message exchange, Stone said he is motivated by justice, not remuneration. “I have not received a single penny,” he told Reuters. “I was moved by either prosecutorial overreach or misconduct, judicial bias, or political weaponization.” Reuters was unable to confirm his assertion.

Trump last year posted online about his pardon of Jenkins, the former Virginia sheriff convicted of accepting bribes. Jenkins, Trump wrote, was a victim of "Radical Left 'monsters.'" Screenshot via TruthSocial.com

One beneficiary is Scott Howard Jenkins, a former county sheriff in Virginia. Jenkins was convicted by a federal jury in December 2024 of accepting over $75,000 in bribes from area businesspeople in exchange for appointing them deputies. Despite vocal opposition from Virginia public officials, Stone was among several advocates who urged the administration to pardon Jenkins, an outspoken Trump supporter.

In May 2025, as Jenkins prepared to surrender for a 10-year prison sentence, Trump pardoned him. In a post online, the president said Jenkins had been “persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters.’” Jenkins appeared on the day of the pardon on Stone’s show. “All of you who have put a kind word in and did the work you did to communicate with the White House,” Jenkins said, “I’m forever indebted.”

Absent from Trump’s clemency: three others who cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and pled guilty to paying Jenkins the bribes. Stone, by text message, said he didn’t speak up for the others because he found their testimony flawed and characteristic of the “politically motivated” trial.

In one case, prominent connections enabled a longtime Democratic operative to receive clemency. Carlos Watson and Ozy Media, his California-based media company, along with co-conspirators were found in 2024 to have defrauded investors of more than $60 million by lying about business deals with Google and Oprah Winfrey. Watson, who is African American, argued at his sentencing that prosecutors unfairly targeted him because of his race, that his conviction was “a modern lynching.”

Watson didn’t respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

An attorney for Carlos Watson, a media entrepreneur convicted of defrauding investors, reached out to influential contacts who helped secure clemency from Trump last year. Watson is pictured here in 2023. REUTERS/David Dee Delgado

With Trump’s return to office, Watson’s attorney, Arthur Aidala, turned to friends in high places, according to three people familiar with the process. Based in the president’s native city of New York, Aidala had represented figures including Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump attorney, and Steve Bannon, the populist ideologue and White House strategist during the first Trump administration. Both men, accused separately of federal crimes, are themselves among Trump’s pardon recipients.

The people familiar with the process told Reuters that Bannon knew Watson before his conviction and spoke to his family about the clemency bid. Bannon told them they could use him as a reference, these people said.

Bannon in a telephone call confirmed the interaction, but declined to elaborate. Neither Aidala nor Giuliani responded to requests for comment.

Multiple moves supporting Bayer

Since the meeting, the Trump administration’s support for Bayer has taken many forms.

In a 1 December filing with the US supreme court, D John Sauer, the solicitor general appointed by the Trump administration in April 2025, told the court that it should take up the Bayer case, and the supreme court subsequently agreed to do so, setting a hearing for 27 April.

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AI Overview

As of May 2026, Turner Bridgforth serves as the Senior Advisor for Agriculture & Rural Affairs to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Bridgforth has been involved in discussions with industry leaders regarding Supreme Court action, litigation, and pesticide labeling, specifically regarding Bayer's glyphosate (Roundup) cases, agency records indicate.

The New Lede +1

Role and Focus: Turner Bridgforth engages with agricultural stakeholders for the EPA, focusing on policies relating to farming, ranching, and rural communities.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (.gov) +1

Bayer/SCOTUS Litigation: Records show Bridgforth was involved in meetings with Bayer CEO Bill Anderson in March 2026, which covered "Supreme Court Action" and "Litigation" concerning glyphosate, amid intense scrutiny over the pesticide's cancer risks.

The New Lede +2

Context: These discussions take place as the Trump administration handles lawsuits from thousands of farmers regarding Glyphosate (Roundup) and potential EPA actions related to it.

YouTube·NowThis Impact +1

Predecessor: Rod Snyder served as the EPA Senior Advisor for Agriculture from 2021 until August 2024.

E&E News by POLITICO +1

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nyt

Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington

A conference near the White House drew hundreds of people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change. The mood was triumphant.

A man stands in front of a crowd with a slide on a screen. The slide reads, “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture and forestry!”

William Happer, a Princeton professor emeritus of physics who has argued that global warming is good for humanity, during a presentation at the Heartland Institute’s International Climate Change Conference in Washington on Wednesday.Credit...Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

Maxine Joselow

By Maxine Joselow

Reporting from Washington

April 9, 2026

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.

A man holds a pamphlet that reads, "Fossil Fuels are the Greenest Energy Sources."

A vast majority of scientists agree that climate change is real and that it is caused by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. They expect average global temperatures to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels within the next decade, unleashing dire impacts that include more deadly heat waves, coastal floods, water shortages and crop failures.

Earth has already warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) since the Industrial Revolution, scientific estimates suggest.

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.

The event was organized by the Heartland Institute, a research organization that says it promotes free-market solutions and that has attacked mainstream climate science for decades. Other sponsors included the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that claims falsely that planet-warming carbon dioxide is beneficial to humans.

The influence of both groups waned under the Biden administration, which embraced the science behind climate change and pushed policies designed to address it. Mr. Zeldin’s appearance at the conference underscored how the groups’ sway has grown in the Trump era.

Image

A sign reads "thank you for emitting/"

:{:{A display at the event.}:

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute poses for a portrait.

Last month, the CO2 Coalition successfully nominated an eye doctor with no background in air pollution science to a committee that advises the E.P.A. on the latest air pollution research. On Wednesday, the group gave out tote bags, pamphlets, mints and blue-and-green stress balls that resembled miniature Earths to conference attendees. The white lettering on the stress balls read: “Don’t stress. There is no climate crisis.”

Next to the CO2 Coalition’s booth, a chemist and businessman from Wisconsin, Stephen Einhorn, was distributing copies of his own pamphlet, whose cover promised to reveal “what the climate activists don’t know or don’t want you to know.”

Threats to library funding end with a settlement by Trump Administration.

Anna Paulina Luna calls for the quick expulsion of Eric Swalwell from the House.

:{:{Trump’s explanation for the image of him as Jesus: “I thought it was me as a doctor.”}:

“I’m very happy that Trump appointed Zeldin,” Mr. Einhorn said in an interview. “I’m surprised at how much progress he’s made toward informing the American people what the actual science is, which is that we have a wonderful climate. We’re blessed. There’s nothing to worry about.”

The Heartland Institute does not disclose its funders. In the past, it has received financial support from oil and gas interests as well as the Mercer Family Foundation, an influential donor to conservative causes.

“Because we’re not as well-funded by industry as people think, we don’t have a fancy green room,” James M. Taylor, the president of the Heartland Institute, said in an interview outside the main ballroom.

The group receives around $4 million each year from foundations and individuals, Mr. Taylor said. If the Heartland Institute had recently received funding from the fossil fuel industry, he added, he wasn’t aware of it.

Pausing to reflect, Mr. Taylor said the second Trump administration had done more for the climate change denial movement than any other administration in history. He pointed to the E.P.A.’s extraordinary move in February to renounce the federal government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

“This is absolutely a moment of triumph,” Mr. Taylor said, adding, “It’s nice to be winning.”

Image

A stack of books including "Climate Change Reconsidered."

Patrick Morrisey, the governor of West Virginia, stands behind a podium.

In addition to Mr. Zeldin, the speakers at the conference included West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican who has built a career opposing federal climate regulations.

“I’m very hopeful that we’re going to keep the White House for a number of terms, but let’s take advantage of where we are now,” Mr. Morrisey said.

William Happer, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University who has argued that global warming is good for humanity, delivered the lunchtime address. He dismissed concerns about rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over a relatively carbon-intensive lunch of roasted chicken breast, cannellini bean ragù and ricotta cheesecake.

EDF Action, the political arm of the Environmental Defense Fund, put up posters outside the conference that protested the event and highlighted the effects of climate change nationwide.

“Climate denial won’t lower insurance costs,” one poster read, referring to high home insurance premiums in areas prone to wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters fueled by rising global temperatures.

The conference was set to continue on Thursday with a speech by John Clauser, a Nobel physics laureate who has claimed, falsely, that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet.

Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Gathering Shows Upswing of Climate Denial Groups. Order Reprints | Today’s

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[### Zeldin gives keynote address at climate skeptic conference

The Hill

https://thehill.com › policy › energy-environment › 58...](https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5823061-zeldin-heartland-institute-speech/)

2 days ago — EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin speaks at a climate denial conference and discusses his actions regarding climate policy.

[### Zeldin stars at climate denial conference

Politico

https://www.politico.com › news › 2026/04/08 › zeldin...](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/08/zeldin-stars-at-climate-denial-conference-00863533)

2 days ago — Zeldin stars at climate denial conference. The EPA administrator became the first agency chief to speak at the Heartland Institute's annual ...Read more

Missing: 2024 ‎| Show results with: 2024

[### Zeldin Touts GHG Rollbacks In Appearance At Climate ...

InsideEPA.com |

https://insideepa.com › daily-news › zeldin-touts-ghg-rol...](https://insideepa.com/daily-news/zeldin-touts-ghg-rollbacks-appearance-climate-skeptic-conference)

2 days ago — EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin used an appearance at the annual conference of the climate skeptic group Heartland ... 2024, I'm pretty ...Read more

Time to Wake Up #305: Lyin’ Lee Zeldin

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

20,934 views Mar 26, 2026

March 26 | Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) delivers his 305th speech in his Time to Wake Up series, this time on Trump's EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin. Sheldon Whitehouse represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate, where he champions policies to uphold American leadership in the world, protect our planet in a changing climate, and hold the powerful accountable.