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Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave the keynote speech at a conference on Wednesday morning, one which was hosted by a prominent climate-denying thinktank that previously compared those concerned about the climate crisis to the Unabomber on billboard posters in 2012.

“No longer are we going to rely on bad, flawed assumptions instead of accurate, present-day facts, without apology or regret,” Zeldin said at the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change in Washington DC, referring to well-established climate science.

Zeldin has been widely criticized by climate experts. Last month, more than 160 environmental and public health organizations called for him to resign or be fired, saying no EPA administrator in history “has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission”.

In his speech, Zeldin poked fun at the media for calling him “controversial” for not “following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom and gloom position of the day is from John Kerry or Al Gore or AOC” – referring to the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” he said.

He derided previous administrations’ heeding of climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, and for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet”.

“What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”

Ahead of Zeldin’s Wednesday-morning speech at the Heartland conference, Environmental Defense Fund Action put up posters around Hotel Washington critiquing the EPA administrator’s participation and saying climate denial does not improve Americans’ lives. “Lee Zeldin is executing on the playbook of denial written by the Heartland Institute,” Joanna Slaney, a vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said.

The Heartland Institute has accepted money from big oil companies including Shell and ExxonMobil, and from the Mercers, a family of Republican mega-donors. The thinktank was a contributor to Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration.

The Heartland Institute rejects the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is real, human-caused and urgent. Since the early 2000s, it has been a leading promoter of climate doubt, even branding climate science as “fake news”.

Experts agree that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet, resulting in dangerous increases in temperatures and in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Scientists have long warned that the world must quickly phase out fossil fuels in order to preserve a livable climate.

Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed the climate crisis as a “hoax” and dismissed environmental policies as a “scam”. And under Zeldin, the EPA has exempted polluting facilities from regulations, shuttered climate and environmental research offices, and shrunk its workforce. It has also rolled back dozens of environmental and climate protections.

“What we are doing in the last 14 months is no surprise,” Zeldin said in his speech. “It is what I pledged during my confirmation hearing, and it is what the American public voted for when they put Donald J Trump back in office. And thank God they did.”

The EPA administrator also spoke about his most controversial environmental rollback: the shredding of the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations, known as the “endangerment finding”. Scientists and other experts widely condemned the repeal, but the Heartland Institute has celebrated it.

“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth and happens to result from every single bit of human and animal activity on the planet, is not a pollutant and never was,” Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the thinktank, said in a February statement praising the repeal.

References to the rollback were met with cheers at the conference in Washington DC on Wednesday morning, and Zeldin expressed “admiration” for the Heartland Institute’s advocacy against the endangerment finding in his speech.

Craig Rucker, the president of CFACT – a rightwing group which complains about “climate exaggeration”, introduced Zeldin at the conference as a “friend of sound science [and] climate realism, a real rock star”.

Another panel at Wednesday’s conference convened the authors of a contentious Department of Energy report that was written to back up the repeal of the endangerment finding. The publication was derided by climate scientists as making a “mockery of science”, and was not used in the justification for the final repeal of the finding.

“While the world warned, a lot of things improved and got better, and continues to do so,” said Ross McKitrick, an author of the report, at the conference.

Another report author, Judith Curry – a climatologist who rails against climate “alarmism” – criticized the “monolithic consensus” on climate science that is “presented to the world”. Though the US government disbanded the group which produced the controversial report on the endangerment finding, Curry said the authors are currently reviewing comments on the report and preparing a new version to release this year.

Earlier on Wednesday morning, the Heartland Institute’s president, James Taylor, kicked off the conference with a rousing speech in which invoked the debunked climate myth that increased carbon emissions are good for plants: “Restoring CO₂ and restoring warmth to our world is … a restoration to more ideal conditions,” he said.

“The truth is clear: there is no climate crisis,” said Taylor. “The science is very clear.”