It’s no surprise that profitable industries try to protect their interests. However, what’s truly concerning is our Environmental Protection Agency chief, Lee Zeldin, “celebrating vindication” with a keynote speech at the Heartland Institute, where he promoted his rollback of the legal grounds for climate change legislation (News, April 9).

The Heartland Institute is a think tank funded by major corporate interests, including oil and gas companies. Study after study has shown irrefutable evidence that carbon emissions, mostly from fossil fuels, are the main contributors to the warming of the earth and climate change.

If our business was threatened by bad news, wouldn’t we want to spin that bad news into fake news? The direct connection between climate change and burning fossil fuels is well established by nearly all scientists, except for a very small minority.

Who are these outliers? They’re the same sort of scientists who, in the 1990s, denied the link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer. Notably, it was also the Heartland Institute — then funded by the tobacco industry — that spent years trying to discredit the overwhelming evidence about the dangers of secondhand smoke.

Maybe some people benefit from secondhand tobacco smoke and climate change. Still, most of us would be better represented by an attorney general who is not corrupted by these minority viewpoints. With Mr. Zeldin now possibly under consideration for attorney general, I do not see any reason to celebrate his celebration at the Heartland Institute.

Richard Hackel
Chebeague Island