The Arsonist at the Fire Station: Zeldin Celebrates While the Thermometer Screams

WASHINGTON — The air conditioning was on full blast inside the Marriott ballroom where the Heartland Institute held its annual conference, which is fitting because outside, the country just finished the hottest March in recorded American history. Nine point four degrees Fahrenheit above the twentieth-century average, according to NOAA, the agency that still bothers to count. Ten states broke their all-time March records. Five hundred counties — a full quarter of the continental United States — hit temperatures that have never been measured before. The planet is, as they say, cooked.

Anyway.

Inside the ballroom, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin took the stage to deliver a keynote address to a room full of people who believe that carbon dioxide is good for you, that greenhouse gases are a net positive for humanity, and that the climate scientists of the world have been running a decades-long con. He was met with the kind of standing ovation usually reserved for coaches who win conference championships in mid-major basketball. The man beamed. He told them to "celebrate vindication."

Let me say that again, because I've been staring at my screen for twenty minutes and the words still haven't rearranged themselves into something less insane: The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency — the person whose job it is to protect the environment — gave a keynote speech at a climate denial conference and told the attendees that they were right all along. This has the structural integrity of a screen door on a submarine.

Zeldin is the first EPA chief in the agency's history to attend the Heartland gathering. Not a single one of his predecessors — not under Nixon, not under Reagan, not under either Bush — saw fit to grace this particular room with their presence. But Zeldin walked in like a man returning a library book he was proud of never having read.

"There would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology," Zeldin told the audience, referring to the process by which the United States used to base its climate policy on, you know, science. The word "cabal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I'd put the over/under at zero percent that Zeldin can name three climate models without checking his phone.

Before Zeldin spoke, Heartland Institute President James Taylor — not that James Taylor, though I suspect the singer would also be horrified — argued that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations would actually be beneficial. He praised the administration for showing "a deference to science." Sir, this is a climate denial conference. The word "science" should burst into flames the moment it crosses your lips.

The timing is a masterwork of unintentional comedy. On the same day NOAA released data confirming that March 2026 shattered every heat record in the books, the EPA administrator stood in a ballroom in Washington and told a room of contrarians that the ruling class had been lying to them about the weather. January through March of this year was the driest period in American history since 1910. European forecasters now put the odds of a strong El Niño by August at 80 percent, with a 22 percent chance of what they're calling a "super" event. I don't know what a super El Niño looks like, but I imagine it has the energy of a Wendy's Frosty machine that someone forgot to turn off for a decade.

But we are not here to talk about the weather. We are here to talk about the man who wants to be the next Attorney General of the United States.

That's right. Zeldin, who just finished telling a room of climate skeptics to celebrate, is reportedly under consideration to replace Pam Bondi, who was fired by Trump last week. The head of environmental protection may soon be the head of the Justice Department, which would mean that the man who scrapped the endangerment finding — the legal cornerstone of every Clean Air Act regulation aimed at climate pollution — would now be in charge of defending that decision in court. He would be both the arsonist and the fire marshal investigating the blaze. No cap — this man is cooked.

The endangerment finding, for those who haven't been doomscrolling EPA press releases, was a 2009 determination that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health. It was the legal foundation for every climate regulation that followed. Zeldin's EPA repealed it earlier this year, claiming it only applied to vehicle emissions. But on Wednesday, Zeldin made it clear that the repeal could be applied to stationary sources, oil and gas operations, and airplanes. The whole buffet. States and environmental groups have already filed legal challenges.

Zeldin accused the Obama administration of issuing the finding "in order to be able to hoard more power for themselves." He said the elites, the ruling class, the grifters had rigged the system. He called out John Kerry, Al Gore, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by name, which is a strange flex at a conference where the median attendee appears to get their climate data from a blog post written in 2007.

There is a 61 percent chance that nobody in that ballroom has read the IPCC's latest report. There is a 100 percent chance they don't care.

Here is what I keep circling back to: during his confirmation hearing, Zeldin told the Senate he believes "climate change is real." He has since praised carbon dioxide as "necessary for life." Both of these things are technically true in the same way that water is necessary for life but you can still drown in it. The trick is in the framing. This bill has the reading level of a DoorDash receipt and the moral clarity of a Magic 8-Ball.

Meanwhile, the Energy Department's own report on climate science — the one that was supposed to support the endangerment repeal — was written by five hand-picked contrarians selected by Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The report was cited heavily in the proposed repeal, then quietly sidelined in the final version because attorneys warned it would create legal vulnerabilities. They wrote the justification, realized it couldn't survive a courtroom, and published the rule anyway. This has Ozempic energy — it promises transformation but the side effects are catastrophic.

Zeldin promised to stick to the letter of the law. "The Supreme Court — in my opinion, quite correctly — would say that the EPA should not be putting forth trillions of dollars of regulation without there being a vote in Congress," he said. Which is an interesting position from a man who just unilaterally repealed the legal basis for those regulations without a vote in Congress.

"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." — Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator, speaking at the Heartland Institute, April 8, 2026

He's not wrong about the walls collapsing. He's just confused about which side of them he's standing on.

The thermometer doesn't care about your conference. The ocean doesn't read your press releases. Five hundred counties just set heat records and the man in charge of the environment is in a ballroom telling people the problem doesn't exist. I've been reading about this for six hours and I'm starting to hallucinate. Which, ironically, is what the EPA's policy team appears to have been doing.

The forecast calls for a super El Niño, record droughts, and the continued dismantling of every regulatory tool designed to address the crisis. The vibes are, as they say, immaculate. The vibes are also on fire. The whole country is on fire. The man with the extinguisher just threw it in the dumpster and called it vindication.

Senator, if you're reading this — and I know you're not, because you're at a conference celebrating the benefits of carbon dioxide — everyone can see you. The thermometer can see you. History will see you. And history, unlike the Heartland Institute, does not grade on a curve.