No sooner did President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China announce goals for combatting climate change than Senator Jim Inhofe denounced them. The Oklahoma Republican called the accord a “non-binding charade” on Wednesday and told The Washington Post that he would do his utmost to let environmental devastation continue apace. In his actual words: “As we enter a new Congress, I will do everything in my power to rein in and shed light on the EPA’s unchecked regulations.”
That power isn’t minimal, given that Mr. Inhofe will take control of the Environment and Public Works Committee in January. Comforting, isn’t it, that the G.O.P.’s top guy on the environment plans to spend his time bullying the agency dedicated to protecting the environment?
Mr. Inhofe’s anti-environmentalist record is as pristine as an old-growth forest, which the senator would surely vote to turn into a logging site.
He published a book in 2012 called “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future” and said in 2006 that that United Nations invented the idea of global warming in order to “shut down the machine called America.”
Once the U.N. kicked things off, moneyed interests kept up the scam. “Those individuals from the far left,” he told Fox News in 2007, “and I’m talking about the Hollywood elitists and the United Nations and those individuals, want us to believe it’s because we’re contributing C02 to the atmosphere that’s causing global warming. It’s all about money. I mean what would happen to the Weather Channel’s ratings if all of a sudden people weren’t scared anymore?”
The Weather Channel bit might have been a joke. Mr. Inhofe showed his lighter side in the winter of 2010, after a snowstorm hit D.C., by building an igloo with a sign that read “Al Gore’s New Home.” Another sign read “Honk if you love global warming.”
Or maybe he wasn’t joking. He doesn’t appear to have been kidding around when he called the E.P.A. a “Gestapo bureaucracy.”
Confusingly, for someone so committed to the argument that climate change is a hoax, he also thinks that anyone who believes in it is unconscionably arrogant. In 2012, he said on a Voice of Christian Youth America radio program that “God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
Carbon emissions aren’t to blame for climate change. God is.