(<< good one, eh?)

A notorious, if not famous, climate-denier is the man who just took over again as Chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.)

Remember his 2012 book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future? At amazon.com, one unhappy reviewer wrote: “The fact that the writer of this book has a senior position in the US Government makes it more of a horror story than an autobiography.” It’s actually an attempted repudiation of carbon emissions cap-and-trade, a market-based idea for reducing greenhouse gases. Like it or not, Inhofe and his allies managed to defeat any global warming cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Congress. One passed in the European Union, but a couple of years ago was reported in the media as being in deep trouble as the carbon market in those countries had essentially been abandoned. The program is linked here where a claim is made that the program is on track toward its GHG reduction 2020 goal. So, sounds like a work in progress…

Trying to find the other side of the coin on Inhofe’s book, I turned to CNN. Here’s what came up.

A supporter of Inhofe’s views on climate is Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic. Speaking in May of 2012 at The Heartland Institute International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago, he stated that the global warming alarmists “have succeeded in establishing the religion of environmentalism as the official religion of Western society, as the religion which asks for a radical transformation of the whole Western civilization.” He is also be known to say that “the purpose of this entire issue is to control human behavior—human liberty.” Klaus published a book in May of ’08 titled Blue Planet in Green Shackles – What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?

In a recent newspaper article about Sen. Inhofe, something that caught my attention was this: “There is one instance, however, when a burdensome regulation is worth it for Inhofe. And it involves turtles.

“For decades, he has vacationed off the coast of Texas on South Padre Island, among the few homes to the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle. Inhofe remembers the nights he used to volunteer to help hatching sea turtles make their way to the ocean, protecting them from predators. In 2003, Inhofe co-sponsored a bill to force shrimpers to put turtle excluders on their boats to keep from accidentally catching them in their nets.

“‘It was  very inconvenient for them, taking up all that room that they could use to catch more shrimp,’ [Inhofe] said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office. ‘The Chamber of Commerce was mad, the infamous Tom DeLay was really mad because it was in his district. And people say I’m not concerned about the environment.’

“Asked what made sea turtles more worthy of burdensome regulations than other objects of environmental concern, Inhofe looked wistfully at a painting of a sea turtle in his office.

‘You know, you’d really just have to see a Ridley sea turtle to understand.'”

So, there’s a stepping stone to somewhere.

Related– In the Gates Foundation’s 2015 letter, Bill Gates writes:

“The most dramatic problems caused by climate change are more than 15 years away, but the long-term threat is so serious that the world needs to move much more aggressively — right now — to develop energy sources that are cheaper, can deliver on demand, and emit zero carbon dioxide. The next 15 years are a pivotal time when these energy sources need to be developed so they’ll be ready to deploy before the effects of climate change become severe.”

Some think Gates’s message falls a little short. Climate change is already severe, they would claim. Heh, one can see all the Chinese tourists in Japan who admit coming, in part, for some fresh air. I know personally how bad it can be in Shanghai; and, it’s much worse in interior Chinese cities.