Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a longtime foe of the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to cap carbon dioxide emissions, praised the agency's Administrator Lisa Jackson on Thursday, along with TV's Rachel Maddow and environmental champion Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
During an appearance on Maddow's MSNBC show, the Republican senator from Oklahoma offered kind words for the three left-leaning women.
"[Maddow] and Lisa Jackson and Barbara Boxer are my three favorite liberals, because I enjoy watching you very much," he said. "Lisa, she even has a picture of my 20 kids and grandkids hanging on her wall. She and I get along fine."
The EPA confirmed Inhofe's comment to The Hill.
This is not the first time Inhofe has expressed admiration for Jackson. At a 2010 hearing on the EPA's budget, Inhofe expressed his personal fondness of the agency's head before calling climate change a "hoax."
"I'm going to say in front of all these people: I really do like you," he said to Jackson. "We've spent time in my office, we've talked about our kids and all that, and I just say from my heart that I want you to know that that's true."
Inhofe's affection for Jackson may come as a surprise to many, as the Oklahoma senator is one of Congress' most outspoken critics of manmade climate change theories. He was on Maddow's show to discuss his new book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future and the so-called "Climategate" controversy, which posits that climate data used as evidence for global warming trends was manipulated in a scientific conspiracy.
Last fall, Inhofe led an investigation into the EPA's findings that greenhouse gases posed health threats. He has also accused President Obama of attempting to "kill fossil fuels" through the EPA's proposed caps on carbon dioxide emissions.
Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, frequently goes several rounds with committee chair Boxer over climate regulations. In 2009, after news broke that an international climate change agreement would be punted to the following year, Inhofe made headlines with his harsh words for Boxer.
"We won, you lost, get a life," he said during a committee meeting.
Watch Inhofe's full interview with Rachel Maddow:
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Worried about climate change and its devastating effects on our planet? Don’t be. God’s got it covered. And you don’t need to believe me. Believe instead Senator James Inhofe..
Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up Read More... there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.
Senator James Inhofe’s solution to dealing with climate change is to sit on your rear end and rely on a book written at a time when the earth was thought to be flat and much of medicine involved curing illness by way of spells and incantations. By the way, whatever happened to bloodletting? Did science go and kill off that most respectable method of fending off disease? Damn scientists.
So Inhofe goes off and writes a book he titles The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future but leaves out the fact that oil and gas industries have contributed over $1.3 million to his political campaigns. He also finds it outrageous and arrogant that anyone could possibly believe that humans have any effect over God’s climate but thinks it completely plausible that you accept that tens of thousands of scientists the world over have conspired to engineer this enormous hoax.
It’s so much easier to believe that the world’s atmospheric scientists are faking millions of bits of data in thousands of scientific papers in dozens of different scientific fields–and different languages–and cross-matching them so that they all tell a story that is 180 degree opposed from reality, and making sure no one spills the beans.
Well…yes, that is exactly what Inhofe and other climate change deniers want you to believe. After all, why shouldn’t rational people believe the brilliant minds on the right over the world’s top scientists, you know, those pinheads in white lab coats and elitist university degrees hanging on their office walls.
That great scientific mind, Billo, once summed up in eight simple words how scientific thought works in Wingnuttia. It goes like this, “Sun up, sun down. Tide in, tide out and no one can explain why it happens.”
Now let’s get back to the serious work of leeches and bloodletting.
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Posted: 03/16/2012 12:52 pm Updated: 03/16/2012 1:43 pm