Inhofe, the Last Flat Earther
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank attended a meeting of the Senate environment committee this week, and describes Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) as “the last flat-earther:” Washington Sketch: A hostile climate for Sen. Inhofe the warming skeptic.
“Eleven academies in industrialized countries say that climate change is real; humans have caused most of the recent warming,” admitted Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). “If fire chiefs of the same reputation told me my house was about to burn down, I’d buy some fire insurance.”
An oil-state senator, David Vitter (R-La), said that he, too, wants to “get us beyond high-carbon fuels” and “focus on conservation, nuclear, natural gas and new technologies like electric cars.” And an industrial-state senator, George Voinovich (R-Ohio), acknowledged that climate change “is a serious and complex issue that deserves our full attention.”
Then there was poor Inhofe. “The science is more definitive than ever? You keep saying that because you want to believe it so much,” he said bitterly. He offered to furnish a list of scientists who once believed in climate change but “who are solidly on the other side right now.” The science, he said, “already has shifted” against global-warming theory. “Science is not settled! Everyone knows it’s not settled!”
Inhofe called for more oil drilling. His aides tried to debunk the other senators’ points by passing around papers titled “Rapid Response.” Mid-hearing, Inhofe’s former spokesman, now in the private sector, sent out an e-mail — “Prominent Russian Scientist: ‘We should fear a deep temperature drop — not catastrophic global warming.’ “
Frank says: