Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who calls climate change "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the gestapo, will "almost certainly" be the next chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee.
All together now: Fucking fuck.
Photo Credit: Sue Ogrocki/AP
Senator Inhofe, who is poised to become the most powerful senator on the environment, is the same man who has compared the scientific consensus over manmade global warming to Adolf Hitler's conception of the Jewish conspiracy.
Now, you might be asking yourself: Wait, is this the guy who compared the demonization of carbon dioxide to Hitler's demonization of Jews? No. You're thinking of climate-denying physicist William Harper. Senator Inhofe has a completely different Third-Reichian climate change theory. In a 2006 interview with Tulsa World, Inhofe said of the scientific consensus on manmade climate change:
"It kind of reminds... I could use the Third Reich, the big lie," Inhofe said.
Only Inhofe kind of flubbed the reference*. The "Big Lie," (or Große Lüge, in German) was a term coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf to describe the propaganda technique of Jews who purportedly told lies "so colossal" that no one would believe "others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." (Yes, the climate scientists in this analogy are the Jews.)
So, to clarify:
"Jews are carbon dioxide that we are demonizing" = William Harper.
"Climate scientists are Jews spreading lies" = Oklahoma Senator James M. Inhofe, the man likely to chair the Environment and Public Works Committee when the GOP takes control of the Senate next year.
And to make matters worse, Inhofe will be joined by a few climate-denying friends.
*Of course, Inhofe almost certainly meant to attribute the notion of a "big lie" to the third reich itself, as opposed to Hitler's conceptions of Jewish conspiracy, but we're not going to spend any more time sifting through his intentions, because the fact is that dissecting the meaning of any analogy that conflates climate scientists with Nazis is patently insane.