Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the ranking Republican member of the Environment and Public Works committee, told The Daily Caller on Monday that climate change skeptics have won the debate over global warming on Capitol Hill.
“We’ve won the fight because there’s no way in the world they could pass through legislation a cap and trade bill,” Inhofe said, referring to proposed laws that would limit carbon emissions. “It’s dead, gone, forever.”
Inhofe, the author of “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” says that he initially believed claims that humans were responsible for climate change. But after reviewing the science behind the claim, Inhofe now says he believes that the theory is a lie, and that the United Nations is largely responsible for promoting it.
“The history goes back to 1972 when this whole thing started,” Inhofe said. “And who was it? It wasn’t Al Gore. It wasn’t MoveOn.org. It was the United Nations.”
The United Nations, he said, has been promoting cap and trade style efforts to combat the non-existent threat of global warming for decades. And if such legislation were ever to make its way through Congress, he argued, it would amount to the largest tax hike in American history.
“I think this was orchestrated. Certainly I think it started with the United Nations, then the Hollywood elites jumped in,” Inhofe said. “Al Gore was clearly the leader, and he was very successful for a period of time. And the vast majority of Americans thought this was for real.”
“That’s all changed now,” he continued.
One way skeptics have won the debate, Inhofe said, is by debunking “every assertion” in “Al Gore’s science fiction movie” — a reference to the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” He also alluded to polls indicating that Americans have grown much more skeptical of global warming claims in recent years.
When asked what he thought proponents of the belief in man-made global warming have to gain from peddling ideas they know to be false, Inhofe demurred.
“I can’t answer the question because I’m not a liberal, so I don’t know what their motive is other than the fact it’s quite evident that they feel they want to be in a position to run everybody else’s life,” he said.