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Former Sen. James Inhofe (R-Big Oil), who was for decades one of America’s leading deniers of the reality of climate change, died today following a “brief illness” at the age of 89. In his long career — he was Oklahoma’s longest-serving senator, in office from 1994 to 2022 — Inhofe was a constant friend of science deniers and the fossil fuel industry, and blocked legislation on climate at every opportunity. He’s most famous for tossing a snowball on the floor of the Senate in 2015 to prove that there’s no global warming, because winter still exists.
Inhofe was a devout believer that God put oil and coal in the ground so people could dig it up and become rich, and considered the idea that human activity could affect the Earth’s climate to be a kind of blasphemy, as he explained in a 2012 radio interview promoting his fake book about climate:
“My point is, God’s still up there,” he said. “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.”
Inhofe’s hoax book was titled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, and it was published by the always truthy WND Press. Hilariously, Inhofe’s certainty that all of climate science is fake was, as a reviewer in 2012 noted, based on a fraudulent paper that distorted scientific evidence and was funded by the American Petroleum Institute.
Inhofe accused climate scientists of being just like Nazis because, well, they kept saying climate change is real, and backing that up with scientific evidence. Or as Inhofe put it,
“You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it and that’s their strategy,” he said of environmentalists, scientists and public officials who argued that manmade emissions had altered the planet’s climate.
That strategy, Inhofe […] told the Tulsa World in 2006, reminded him of “the Third Reich, the big lie.”
Inhofe called the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a “Gestapo bureaucracy,” fought Democratic efforts to cap greenhouse gas emissions, calling it “hysteria,” and sought tax incentives for domestic oil and gas production.
When fellow climate denier and fossil fuels enthusiast Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Inhofe was happy to promote one of his Oklahoma protégés in oil promotion, Scott Pruitt, when Pruitt was nominated to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, Oklahoma’s former attorney general, was perfectly qualified for the job since he had spent most of the Obama administration suing the EPA and other agencies trying to roll back regulations on the oil industry. Oh, what heady, or head-rolling, days those were, when Pruitt fired a bunch of scientists from the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors so he could replace them with people from industries regulated by the EPA.
But lest anyone think that Inhofe was some sort of Jimmy-one-note who only cared about boosting polluting industries, don’t forget that he was also a raving anti-LGBTQ+ bigot, gun humper, and a dedicated aeroplane pilot who damn near killed everyone on his plane when he landed in 2010 on a closed runway and almost hit construction vehicles and workers who were working on the runway. But he missed, so no harm, no foul.
The FAA required him to take some remedial training, to which he responded by trying to give pilots greater ability to challenge FAA disciplinary actions. Then in 2020, he did a campaign ad in which he flew his plane inverted, to prove his fitness for office, or at least to demonstrate his worldview.
Oh yes, and a few months after his 2015 snowball stunt, Inhofe told Pope Francis to butt out of discussing climate change, since it isn’t real and the oil industry already knows all anyone needs to know about science.
In conclusion, goodbye to James Inhofe and goodbye to his brand of “It’s not real” climate denial, which fossil fuel fans have found increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of increasing climate-related extreme weather and rising global temperatures. The cool science-denying kids now are all lying that it’s actually “bad for the environment” to transition away from fossil fuels, because nobody can afford an EV and don’t those batteries require digging up minerals anyway? (Fact check: maintaining fossil fuel infrastructure is orders of magnitude more polluting.)
In memory of Senator Inhofe, I will make sure to go ride my electric bike somewhere nice today. May we never see his like again.
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