It’s no surprise that Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-OK) take on the recent EPA decision (that carbon dioxide is a danger to public health and must be regulated) is negative.
Inhofe, ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, doesn’t believe in anthropogenic global warming, and has called the EPA’s stance the beginning of a regulatory climate which will destroy American jobs, raise consumer energy prices, and make it impossible for the U.S. to complete in a global economy.
Inhofe’s position, that Congress should pass legislation to stop the EPA ruling in its tracks, is typical of global warming deniers, who prefer bombast, manufactured evidence and creating hysteria to actual fact. All have, at one time or other, parroted their misinformed “proof” that Obama’s green economy plan will cost every American family $3,128 per year in rising energy costs.
Inhofe doesn’t stand alone. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the ranking Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, has been heard to quote the same figure, which derives from an MIT study so purposefully misunderstood it’s no wonder our formerly Republican-dominated economy is in shambles. The real cost, less than $300 a year, is being obscured by denialists in a cloud of hyperbole almost as dense as Beijing’s air on a hot summer day.
Inhofe’s other comrades-in-arms include Marc Morano, former communications director for Inhofe’s committee and now the purveyor of a startup climate-change denial website, Climate Depot, which professes to “redefine” global warming reportage.
Morano recently got New York Times press alongside such well-known warming deniers as Rush Limbaugh and John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel. Morano, formerly known as Rush Limbaugh’s ‘Man in Washington’, was also a reporter at CNS News.
This group has its proponents, notably the Drudge Report and Fox News, as well as the now-legendarily misinformed George Will (Washington Post reporter), equally misguided Robert Samuelson (contributing editor at the Post and Newsweek), and Fred Barnes, co-host of the Fox News show Beltway Boys – and no slouch in the get-it-wrong department himself, as witness his anti-warming proofs.
All are birds of a feather, and so far off center in the facts department as to be laughable. The odds, that Congress will act against the EPA’s ruling, or that the EPA will backpeddle after stalling the carbon dioxide assessment for years claiming that CO2 could not be regulated because it was not a pollutant, are somewhere between slim and none. Yet the denialists persist, like greedy children who believe candy will be forthcoming if only they whine loudly enough.
