This guy, who thinks climate change is a hoax, will soon be head of the
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
As a consequence of Tuesday's election, the most aggressive climate change denier in the Senate, Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma, will be replacing Barbara Boxer of California as chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. That's like having an arsonist at the head of the local fire brigade. Except that arsonists usually hide in the shadows. And that's one thing Inhofe doesn't do.
Two years ago, WND Books published Inhofe's,The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.
In it he cites as his favorite Bible verse, Genesis 8:22: “As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” About that, he said to a radio interviewer at the Voice of Christian Youth America: "My point is, 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."
He hasn't changed his mind about what he wrote in his fantasy tome. Of the International Panel on Climate Change's Synthesis Report released last week, he said:
The idea that our advanced industrialized economy would ever have zero carbon emissions is beyond extreme and further proof that the IPCC is nothing more than a front for the environmental left. It comes as no surprise that the IPCC is again advocating for the implementation of extreme climate change regulations that will cripple the global economy and send energy prices skyrocketing. The United States is in the midst of an energy renaissance that has the potential to bring about American energy independence, which would strengthen our national security and energy reliability for generations into the future. At a time of economic instability and increased threats to American interests, the IPCC’s report is little more than high hopes from the environmental left.
If we were going to have a replacement for Boxer, who has shown excellent leadership on the committee and introduced climate legislation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, it should have been Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Starting in October 2011, when he gave
this bullseye speech, he has been speaking every week on the floor of the Senate about climate change and what should be our response. Of course, most of those speeches are given to an empty chamber. Whitehouse also plans to introduce carbon pricing legislation in the near future. Obviously, that bill will go nowhere. It may not even get a hearing on the EPW committee.
This cannot all be blamed on Republican know-nothings.
Boxer and Whitehouse are two of the 24 Democrats on the Senate's Climate Action Task Force. The task force has a counterpart in the House, the Safe Climate Caucus, that has 40 members (minus whoever lost Tuesday). Together they make up 12 percent of the membership of Congress, half the Democrats in the Senate and fewer than a fourth of those in the House.
There is no excuse for any Democrat—not even West Virginia's Joe Manchin—for not being part of these groups. No excuse for not endorsing Boxer/Sanders legislation or the legislation to come from Whitehouse. No excuse for being delayers. No excuse for going along with right-wing tropes like the "war on coal." Democrats in Congress should stand united on dealing with climate change and they should ALL be speaking with the passion of Whitehouse and Boxer. They should be looking at states like California for guidance on climate change policy. Instead, all too many of them have been chickenshits about it. Or bought off by fossil fuel interests.
Aggressively putting climate change in the spotlight every day and proposing policies to ameliorate its effects is one of the many ways to persuade voters who stayed home this year, especially young voters, to turn out for Democrats in 2016. And that could make Inhofe's chairmanship a two-year affair. Continuing to avoid this issue, however, as so many of them have done, doesn't stir anyone to take the party seriously on this very serious matter. Why should it?