Inhofe Watch: Senator assembling 'truth squad' for December climate talks

by Emily Gertz

categories: Global Warming Denial, Inhofe Watch, Politics

Published September 29, 2009 @ 09:13AM PT

Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Congress' leading climate change denier, told the National Review Online last week that he wants to "lead a truth squad" to December's United Nations climate treaty talks in Copenhagen.

No word at that time on other members of the squad. "I'll see who's willing to come," said Inhofe, who wants "to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in the United States Senate.

"Some people, like Senator Barbara Boxer, will tell the conference, with Waxman-Markey having passed in the House, that they can anticipate that some kind of bill will pass EPW."

Inhofe is speaking of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which he is the ranking minority member. Although Inhofe has been eager to portray climate legislation as moribund in the Senate, Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) are apparently going to introduce a climate bill tomorrow, as I reported from Pittsburgh last week.

Recalling a similar faux-delegation that he led to the Milan climate talks in 2003, Inhofe said, "I was the outcast at that time." Science blogger Chris Mooney in 2004 recounted the Milan experience:

Inhofe's Milan appearance triggered considerable controversy, as well as some fun at the senator's expense. The National Environmental Trust (NET) whipped up posters showing Inhofe's picture and his famous quotation, displaying them for the delegates present. "The reaction in the halls was -- well, they just believed it was lampoonable," notes one Democratic Senate staffer. Inhofe apparently loved the poster, though. "He had a sense of humor about it," says NET's Mark Wenzler, adding that Inhofe "actually signed a copy of the poster for us."

During the GOP's most recent majority in Congress, Inhofe used his chair position on the EPW to stall rational, fact-based progress of climate change policy in favor of delay. He's also famously compared enviro-regulation advocates to Nazis and calling global warming a United Nations conspiracy. (Cue the black helicopers?)

These days, he busies himself reading junk science and disingenous policy analyses into the record. As TPMDC notes:

"With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?" he famously declared in 2003. "It sure sounds like it." And he's kept it up ever since -- in 2006, he compared people who believe in global warming to "the Third Reich, the big lie," and in 2009 he has said: "If global warming really exists, tell that to the people of Oklahoma. We had the largest snowstorm in the history of Marches, three days ago."

It's puzzling that Oklahomans keep sending a man to the Senate with such a poor grasp of the difference between climate and weather -- and happily shows it off.