(RepublicanDaily.org) – Longtime conservative House member turned Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma died July 9 at the age of 89.
Inhofe started out as mayor of Oklahoma’s second-largest city, Tulsa, before moving on to the House of Representatives where he served for eight years. He then won election to the Senate in 1994, a seat he kept until his retirement last year owing to what he said were the long-term effects of a Covid infection. Inhofe was the longest-serving Senator from his state.
An unabashed conservative, Inhofe famously scoffed at the notion of man-made climate change, and did battle with environmental activists whom he saw as pushing for unnecessary and economically destructive regulations. While chairing the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, he accused climate activists of merely repeating false claims until everyone believed them.
In 2006, he told the Tulsa World that man-made climate change was like the ideology of the Third Reich, “a big lie.” Continuing the same thing, he labeled the Environmental Protection Agency a “Gestapo bureaucracy” while pushing back on Democrats’ efforts to cap so-called greenhouse gas emissions, saying they were a hysterical reaction. Instead, he wanted to give tax breaks to American companies that produced oil and natural gas.
One of his most famous stunts was throwing a snowball onto the Senate floor in 2015 to mock the idea that the globe was warming. Democratic opponent Sheldon Whitehouse shot back in a way now familiar to American, appealing to what we now call “the science.” Whitehouse mocked Inhofe for not trusting NASA satellite measurements and other scientific evidence.
Inhofe fought against President Bill Clinton’s 1990s effort to tighten clean air standards.
In 2012, Inhofe wrote a book titled “The Greatest Hoax” that argued that the idea of global warming was merely a “conspiracy theory.” He called humans “arrogant” to believe they had more control over the weather than God.
In his spare time, Inhofe was an enthusiastic pilot. He flew around the globe in 1991, recreating the circumnavigation done sixty years earlier by trailblazing pilot Wiley Post.
Inhofe was married to his wife Kay, with whom he had four children. Funeral services have not yet been announced.
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