I had to chuckle when I read the headline for this interview. I know that it's supposed to read Headline: Earth (pause) Talks to Senator James Inhofe. But at first glance it reads like HEADLINE (pause) Earth talks to Senator James Inhofe. What an exclusive that would be!! We finally get the real answers on Global warming as the earth contacts Senator Inhofe.

Anyway the interview is good and I like what "Headline: Earth" is doing to try and bring some balance and perspective to the important issue of Global Climate Change. Keep up the good work.

Sen. Inhofe is one of the few voices of reason in the Senate. This man represents the people of a farming state, and it's awful hard to pull the wool over the eyes of a farmer. As such, he knows this is all a crock and isn't about to back down for political correctness. Listen to the guy! He obviously has studied this a lot more than the Goracle. I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but he's bang on with this AWG nonsense.

Senator Inhofe is very brave to have stood up against the tidal wave of AGW hysteria. I'm glad to see that more and more experts and others are doing the same. Unfortunately, you almost never hear of them on most media outlets, who continue telling us that there is no debate because every expert agrees.

Please watch the the new (March 8) BBC Channel 4 documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle", available free from Google Video at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831
It features interviews with many scientists who don't buy into AGW, and then looks at the politics behind it.

I'm new to using Google Video, but got good results by pressing "download" so that the I could watch it without the data catch-up interruptions.

BBC Channel 4's notes on the show are at:
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/index.html

Inhofe should at least be honest. His opinion "changed" when he started racking in the $$$$ from the oil & gas lobby. Money talks, and don't Inhofe know it.

Thanks for your persuasive post Chris! I'm convinced! The answer to the issue of global warming... you can't fool a farmer!

Sen Inhofe should not resist change because anthropogenic warming is likely to be relatively modest this century. He should support a carbon tax and incentivization legislation as a means to reduce real air pollution. Gasoline is a pernicious substance that threatens ground and surface water. Even the president recognizes this. My neighbor dumped a few ounces just to the other side of the property line last summer. It was a stink that lasted the whole day. The best way to deal with polluters and idiot neighbors is to outlaw the pollution. We can start with gasoline! Spilled or not; burned or not( evaporated ) it's a pollutant! Gasoline has got to go!

Mark,

Can you put a date on when Inhofe "started" raking in the big oil money? He has been in Oklahoma politics since the 60's so I'm thinking that he's been pretty much neck deep in oil money since back when global cooling was the fear. Of course, I'm sure that there is no money involved on the other side of this issue.

Can you put a date on when Inhofe "started" raking in the big oil money? He has been in Oklahoma politics since the 60's so I'm thinking that he's been pretty much neck deep in oil money since back when global cooling was the fear. Of course, I'm sure that there is no money involved on the other side of this issue.

Well, it would appear from the various aggregations of federal campaign disclosures (such as here and here) that his cozy relationship with the energy industry goes back to at least 1989.

Multiple sources (all based on FEC data) list his total from the "Oil and Gas" sector, from 1989 to 2006, as $854,573 -- comfortably more than twice as large as the next sector, "Health Professionals" (at $356,687).

Whatever his posture was historically, his public statements, posture, and votes since attaining his Senate seat have vigorously and loyally supported the agenda of his single largest financing sector, while equally vigorously avoiding, distorting, misleading, misquoting, or just plain lying about the public statements, posture, and recommendations of the mainstream scientific community.

Some of us think that that reeks of corruption. Some of us don't.

Inhofe should at least be honest. His opinion "changed" when he started racking in the $$$$ from the oil & gas lobby. Money talks, and don't Inhofe know it.

REPLY: Kind of like with Ozone Al racking in the $$$$ from the Greenpeace lobby, eh Mark????.......;-D......No money talking there, huh????........

Thor:

Thanks for finally putting forth your concerns over this issue. The silly neighbor of yours stinking up a day with just a few ounces of gas on the ground. This fully explains your desire to turn to the Amish way of life noted in a previous post.

I'm curious though, can you tell the rest of us how to live in a world devoid of gasoline, and I presume diesel and kerosene by corollary, driven machines?

Mark: I'm also curious, why is it that the only money that counts for something is that which is received from oil and gas companies? Seems a bit hypocritical to call out the pot.

Brookline Tom,

Read what I said a little more closely. I said pretty clearly that he likely has been getting oil money since the 60's. That is like, say, 1968 which is a little earlier than your "1989". He is from an oil and gas state and was a Tulsa city councilman. I'm pretty sure that he was raising money back then in order to finance his campaigns for office. How very unusual that he would be advocating the position of the state which he represents. To paraphrase myself and Darren, above, why is it that the provenance of all the dirty cash is only considered bad on one side of the argument? That is corruption? Assuming that you are from Brookline Mass., you should know a bit about corruption, coming from a state that has continuously re-elected a senator who drove off a bridge and left the woman in the pasenger seat to drown.

The mainstream scientific community? Look up H. pylori on wikipedia and get back to me as to the worth of that.

Wow, I hope Katie goes as easy on Barbara Boxer next week as she did on this guy. This idea that momentum is moving toward the skeptics is patently ridiculous, and she just throws fuel on the fire, instead of challenging him on it. Then I thought she's get real for a second when said "let's talk about big business." Nope! For Inhofe to be blaming big business for profiting off AGW, when he's in the energy industry's pocket--that's rich! And Al Gore has been advocating for the environment for decades. He was into it long before there was a bandwagon to jump on. Wrote a book about it and everything.

Were you folks born yesterday? Half of the world makes money from the oil industries. Just start tracking down every job on the planet directly or indirectly connected and dependent on oil and oil based products that are sold in every store, installed in everything you can think of and used daily in every way, shape or form, in every country.

Now track down, if you dare, where the money comes from to support environmentalism and I don't just mean the up-front money. You may find somewhere down the chain that the oil industry has an invisible finger in that pie also, through donations from large industry executives wives holding their non-profit "save the sea turtle and the world too" tea parties.

They make important and profitable contacts with other science, military and industry executives wives. Then they have a dinner party at their mansion where the wives bring their husbands, who inevitably talk business and make new billion dollar deals. This keeps the gals in diamonds and designer duds. It's a smaller world than we think.

Thor,

I think we can safely say that you're probably the only guy in the entire state that wants to eliminate gasoline.

I suppose no forms of pollution come out of your house either, like sewage, garbage, wind-born roofing tar molecules, foundation tar leaching, penatox treated fence and deck lumber, anything made of glued plywood or pressed board, formalthahyde in some older homes, all plugged in appliances that trickle electricity, meat filled dog and cat crap on the lawn, barbeque smoke, ground radon in the basement, cooking oils, dishwater, bathwater, TV radiation, chimney exhaust, house wiring electrical fields, etc.

The Gore family represented tobacco interests for a very long time, using the same rationale that rbnyc just outlined.

Was this a good thing? When lawmakers advocate the private monetary interests of specific companies and industries, is this a good thing?

How very unusual that he would be advocating the position of the state which he represents.

Does Inhofe advocate the position of "the state of Oklahoma", or of the oil barons who happen to do business in the state of Oklahoma? I wonder how many of Oklahoma's poor people Inhofe "represents".

When a lawmaker accepts campaign contributions from an individual, a company, or a trade group and, in a quid pro quo, works specifically on their behalf, it's called corruption. Something the current GOP lawmakers seem to be rather familiar with -- perhaps the names Abramoff, DeLay, and Ney ring a bell.

The mainstream scientific community? Look up H. pylori on wikipedia and get back to me as to the worth of that.

Excuse me? It seems to me that the history of H. pylori in the mainstream scientific community demonstrates rather spectacularly the success of the scientific method and process. A long-held dogma was shown to be invalid, based on concrete and reproducable data and theory. The discredited dogma was discarded, and the community moved forward. Meanwhile, Warren and Marshall received a Nobel Prize for their contribution.

Is there a negative aspect to this?

BT says,

-----"When a lawmaker accepts campaign contributions from an individual, a company, or a trade group and, in a quid pro quo, works specifically on their behalf, it's called corruption. Something the current GOP lawmakers seem to be rather familiar with -- perhaps the names Abramoff, DeLay, and Ney ring a bell".

Just so you don't lose sight that ALL politicians are capable of crimes and misdemeanors, what about these dems that hit the headlines in the last few months:

U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) is under criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for possible bribery in exchange for promoting business deals in Africa...$90k in the freezer ring a bell?

Frank Ballance - a former Democrat Rep. from North Carolina was sentenced to four years in federal prison for conspiring to divert taxpayer money to his law firm and family through a charitable organization he helped start

Raymond Reggie, a New Orleans political Democratic consultant and fund-raiser who is Senator Kennedy's brother-in-law was sentenced to a year in prison yesterday after pleading guilty to bank fraud charges.

Some stats from the Clinton years: Number of individuals and businesses associated with the Clinton machine who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes: 47 - Number of these convictions during Clinton's presidency: 33 - Number of indictments/misdemeanor charges: 61 - Number of congressional witnesses who have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, fled the country to avoid testifying, or (in the case of foreign witnesses) refused to be interviewed: 122

You are capable of blaming volcanic activity on the GOP, aren't you?

Dave

Boris,

People write books to make money. Many would think I was a skeptic, but I could write a laymans book about anything concerning the environmental problems of the world, put a whale or a polar bear on the cover with the word "extinction" and half of the left would buy it before they realized it said the same thing as all the other similar books. I would get a tidy sum for doing very little.

That's why Gore wrote a book.

John D.

As to banning gasoline, very unscientific of your sampling; and you can't pin the Al Gore hypocrisy on me because my natural gas thermostat is set low to where I feel I need a sweater. I dont have a gas or charcoal grill. And I use my car sparingly among other environmental friendly behavior. I also make it a habit of unplugging my trickle electricity devices before I go to bed and I use nothing but cfls for lighting.

My point about gasoline was more facetious than realistic but make no mistake, alternative fuels will eventually eliminate a large consumption of gasoline. Too bad it took this long. GWB was not pro-active enough.