Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the lead Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, held a climate-denial press conference at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on Thursday. Accompanying Inhofe were two rather questionable characters: an activist who believes the UN is starting the apocalypse and a British Lord who was banned from all UN climate conferences for impersonating the representative from Myanmar.

Inhofe’s first guest, Cathie Adams, is the President of the Texas Eagle Forum and former Texas GOP chair. She must have felt quite uncomfortable speaking at a United Nations function, as she has maintained for over a decade that the UN was the anti-Christ’s vehicle for stealthily taking over the world. From a 1999 newsletter:

The Bible tells us that in the end times there will be a world government headed by a world leader, called the anti-Christ, who will profess a world religion, but did you ever think you would live in the day when these things would come into being? That is exactly what the United Nations is doing behind the backs of most Americans.

Adams has singled out environmentalism as part of the UN’s sinister agenda, suggesting a fictional UN Pledge of Allegiance would require “worship[ping] the Earth.” She also believes, among other things, that the CO2 emissions do not cause climate change and that vaccination is a plot to steal American freedom.

Inhofe’s other guest, Lord Christopher Monckton, has a storied history of making things up, especially with respect to climate science. It’s a pattern Monckton fell into at the Doha negotiations, where he took the platform reserved for the Myanmarese delegation and claimed to be speaking for “Asian coastal nations.” The double pretense got him ejected from the nation of Qatar and banned from every future UN climate summit.

One might think this clown show would embarrass the Senator, but his record suggests otherwise: Inhofe has claimed that climate science is a hoax that contravenes the will of God and is currently working with the Heartland Institute — which suggests that climate change advocates are like the Unabomber — to de-fund the Environmental Protection Agency.

Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe joins the Heartland Institute at the Capitol building this morning to unveil a new campaign to rein in the “rogue” Environmental Protection Agency.

Inhofe is best known for his tirades against established climate science; the fringe Heartland Institute is best known for its billboard campaign comparing people concerned about climate change to the Unabomber.

The Environmental Protection Agency is best known for protecting America’s air and water.

The two partners say they have collected 16,000 signatures from people calling on lawmakers to slash the EPA’s budget by 80 percent and stop it from regulating carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas responsible for warming the planet.

16,000 sounds like a lot of signatures. That is, until they’re compared to the four million comments from people who say they support the EPA.

Over the last two years, as the agency has finalized new regulations for mercury, air toxics, and global warming pollution, groups supportive of such measures have acquired record numbers of comments in favor of the rules.

Earlier this year, environmental and public health groups collected and delivered more than 3.2 million comments supporting EPA’s carbon pollution standard for power plants; in 2011, they collected more than 800,000 comments supporting EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standard; and so far in 2012, groups have collected more than 420,000 comments supporting the EPA’s soot pollution standard.

Environmental organizations say the 3.2 million comments in support of EPA regulation of CO2 is the most of any federal rule, ever.

Once again: that’s more than four million comments in support of new EPA rules versus 16,000 signatures against them.

Considering the outcome of the election earlier this month, that disparity isn’t much of a surprise.

In the two months leading up to the November presidential election, groups specifically touting oil, coal, and gas spent more than $31 million on television ads. Throughout the whole campaign, pro-fossil fuel interests outspent environmental and clean energy interests 4-1.

However, in the end, environmental groups won nearly every single race they targeted, bringing in some key allies to the Senate and keeping President Obama in the White House.

One post-election poll from Zogby Analytics showed that 65 percent of voters say elected officials should act now to reduce carbon pollution. That poll also found that 44 percent of voters believe the government is doing too little to protect clean air, clean water, and other natural resources. Only 14 percent say the government is doing too much in this area.

by Anne Polansky

Conservative Republican Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, known internationally for his denialist viewpoint on climate change, and nationally for being a defense hawk, may soon be faced with the problem that his stubborn stance on the former conflicts with his ability to credibly pull off the latter.

When he returns for the 113th Session of Congress in January, Sen. Inhofe will give up his role as Ranking Minority Member on the Environment and Public Works Committee (forced by Senate rule) and take up the same role on the Senate Armed Services Committee, replacing Sen. John McCain. Though he’s served on this Committee since 2009, his new position will give him more power and responsibility; he’ll be leading the Republican members and working alongside Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) to oversee, direct, and authorize key military programs in the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines. He’s looking forward to it: “My focus on the committee will be on military readiness, acquisition reform, and preventing the potential hollowing out of our forces,” he’s said in the press.

Let’s talk about military readiness, through the lens of a new analysis conducted by the National Academy Sciences at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency. Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis is a thoughtful 218-page brief that makes the case that the military should boost its overall readiness for, and understanding of, the threats that a disrupted global climate could pose to US national security. It builds on and verifies previous studies with similar conclusions, and elaborates on the destabilizing effects of restricted access to, or prolonged shortages of, essential resources, such as arable land and potable water. Competent staffers should place this report on Senator Inhofe’s must-read list for the winter recess.

On Climate Progress and elsewhere, much ink is dedicated to the nonsensical mutterings and obstructionist shenanigans of Sen. Inhofe on the topic of global warming and climate change. As Chair of Environment and Public Works from 2003-2007 and Ranking Minority Member under the chairmanship of Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) since 2007 when Democrats regained control of the Senate, Jim Inhofe has made every attempt to quash meaningful legislative proposals to cut carbon and deal with climate impacts.

He’s taken every opportunity to spout off about how climate change is one of the “biggest hoaxes ever played” on the American people (and even published a book about it); how NASA scientist James Hansen is not a real scientist and is not to be believed (but that his own cherry-picked but poorly credentialed scientists are); and how anthropogenic global warming is impossible anyway since, well, “God is still up there” and it’s “outrageous” and arrogant to believe human beings are “able to change what He is doing in the climate.” Check, check, and, uh, check.

In early 2008, soon after the Democrats had retaken the Senate and Sen. Barbara Boxer had taken back the gavel, she invited former V.P. Al Gore to testify on climate change, and brought a full hearing room to rare applause when she skillfully intercepted another typical Inhofe filibuster by reminding her colleague that, indeed, “elections have consequences” and she was now enforcing the rules. (Translation, he should shut up now.) Many had high hopes that the Congress would finally take on and pass serious carbon-cutting provisions, but it was not to be. While the demise of the 2009 House-passed comprehensive climate change “Waxman-Markey” bill (named the American Clean Energy and Security Act) in the Senate can’t be blamed just on Inhofe, he incessantly urged his colleagues to defeat the bill and repeated his mantra that a cap-and-trade bill will never pass into law in the US.

In a rare appearance earlier this year on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show, he admitted: “I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this. I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost.” Oops. The truth, outed.

But from what I read in the CIA-requested National Academy of Sciences report, drawn from a panel of top experts, higher-ups in our military forces are worried about the costs of failing to deal squarely with a climate-change-disrupted world:

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by Bob Berwyn, via Summit County Citizens Voice

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe this year joins a list of dubious anti-environmental characters in receiving the Rubber Dodo award,  given annually to those who have done the most to drive endangered species extinct.

The award is given each year by the Center for Biological Diversity. Previous winners include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2011), former BP CEO Tony Hayward (2010), massive land speculator Michael Winer (2009), Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (2008) and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne (2007).

When it comes to denying the climate crisis — the single-greatest threat now facing life on Earth — James Inhofe has few peers. The Oklahoma Republican is the ringleader of anti-science climate-deniers in Congress and a driving force behind the tragic lack of U.S. action to tackle this complex problem.

“As climate change ravages the world, Senator Inhofe insists that we deny the reality unfolding in front of us and choose instead to blunder headlong into chaos,” said Kierán Suckling, the Center’s executive director. “Senator Inhofe gets the 2012 Rubber Dodo Award for being at the vanguard of the retrograde climate-denier movement.”

This year is on track to become the warmest on record; some 40,000 temperature records have been broken in the United States in 2012 alone, while Arctic sea ice melted to a record low. According to conservation activists, this summer’s record droughts, crop failures, massive wildfires, floods are unmistakable signals that manmade global warming is tightening its grip, threatening people and wildlife around the globe.

“Senator Inhofe’s pet theory that climate change is an elaborate hoax would be hilarious, if only he weren’t an elected representative of the American people,” Suckling said. “If he were, say, a performance artist, it’d be really funny. But sadly he has the power to affect U.S. climate policy. The United States has a chance — and a duty — to take significant steps to slow the climate crisis, and a brief window of time before it’s too late for us to do so. Deniers like Inhofe, in positions of leadership, are dooming future generations of people to a far more difficult world.”

More than 15,000 people cast their votes in this year’s Rubber Dodo contest. Other official nominees were Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, who put a rider on a must-pass bill that stripped Endangered Species Act protection from wolves, and Shell Oil, a company bound and determined to pursue dangerous oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.

Background on the Dodo
In 1598, Dutch sailors landing on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius discovered a flightless, three-foot-tall, extraordinarily friendly bird. Its original scientific name was Didus ineptus. (Contemporary scientists use the less defamatory Raphus cucullatus.) To the rest of the world, it’s the dodo — the most famous extinct species on Earth. It evolved over millions of years with no natural predators and eventually lost the ability to fly, becoming a land-based consumer of fruits, nuts and berries. Having never known predators, it showed no fear of humans or the menagerie of animals accompanying them to Mauritius.

Its trusting nature led to its rapid extinction. By 1681 the dodo was extinct, having been hunted and outcompeted by humans, dogs, cats, rats, macaques and pigs. Humans logged its forest cover while pigs uprooted and ate much of the understory vegetation.

The origin of the name dodo is unclear. It likely came from the Dutch word dodoor, meaning “sluggard,” the Portuguese word doudo, meaning “fool” or “crazy,” or the Dutch word dodaars meaning “plump-arse” (that nation’s name for the little grebe).

The dodo’s reputation as a foolish, ungainly bird derives in part from its friendly naiveté and the very plump captives that were taken on tour across Europe. The animal’s reputation was cemented with the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Based on skeleton reconstructions and the discovery of early drawings, scientists now believe that the dodo was a much sleeker animal than commonly portrayed. The rotund European exhibitions were accidentally produced by overfeeding captive birds.

Bob Berwyn is Editor of the Summit County Citizens Voice. This piece was originally published at the Summit Voice and was reprinted with permission.

With more than 300 votes targeting the Environmental Protection Agency, de-funding clean energy, and promoting unfettered use of fossil fuels, the current House of Representatives has been dubbed the most anti-environmental House in history.

And if Republicans gain control of the Senate, the same record will define that body too. That’s the warning from Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Senate candidate running against incumbent Republican Scott Brown.

In a debate last night between the two candidates, Warren responded to a question about the existence of climate change. Her answer: the election is about far more than policy leadership on the issue from a Massachusetts senator, it’s about determining the future of how the entire Senate acts on climate change.

“Sen. Brown has been going around the country, talking to people, saying, you’ve got to contribute to his campaign because it may be for the control of the Senate. And he’s right. … What that would mean is if the Republicans take over control of the Senate, Jim Inhofe would become the person who would be in charge of the committee that oversees the Environmental Protection Agency. He’s a man that has called global warming ‘a hoax.’ In fact, that’s the title of his book.”

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is one of the fiercest climate deniers in Congress. Along with making factually incorrect claims about climate change, Inhofe has also attempted to roll back EPA clean air regulations and stop the military from investing in clean energy technologies. He’s also the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Public Works, a body that deals with a wide range of environmental and infrastructure issues.

Under a GOP-controlled Senate, Inhofe would become Chairman and play a much more prominent role in dictating energy and climate policy.
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