Former Sen. Jim Inhofe dead at 89
The Oklahoma Republican held enormous sway over environmental policy during his time in the Senate.
Former Sen. Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who once brought a snowball onto the Senate floor as a brazen symbol of his denial of climate change, died on Tuesday. He was 89 years old.
His death after a stroke on July 4 was confirmed in a post on X by former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler.
“Former Sen Jim Inhofe passed away this morning. He was a devout Christian and family man. He was also devoted to his former staff who he considered his extended family,” wrote Wheeler, who served in former President Donald Trump’s administration and was a former Inhofe staffer.
One of the GOP’s most vocal critics of environmental regulation and the science of climate change, Inhofe held vast sway over environmental policy during his time as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — not only through his use of the gavel, but through his cultivation of staffers who went on to take key positions at EPA during the Trump administration and worked to roll back those rules.
Inhofe long maintained that climate change was a “hoax,” going so far as to include it in the title of a 2012 book on the matter. Donald Trump later adopted that language during his first presidential campaign.
Inhofe played a central role in the appointment of both of Trump’s EPA administrators — first Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, then Wheeler.
Inhofe served as the top Republican on the environment panel for 14 years, as chair from 2003 to 2007 and again from 2015 to 2017, and as ranking member for the period in the middle. He retired in 2023.
Inhofe had a light-hearted attitude about his opposition to green programs. In 2011, after getting sick from an algae bloom after swimming in an Oklahoma lake, he joked to the Tulsa World that it was a case of “the environment strikes back.”
But in a February 2015 stunt he brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to argue that human activity does not cause climate change. A wide swath of experts quickly pushed back, arguing that just because it snows sometimes in Washington, D.C., doesn’t mean human carbon emissions aren’t rapidly warming the climate.
Inhofe’s rejection of climate science was based on his religious belief that God controls the climate and that it was hubristic to claim that burning fossil fuels could alter that.
“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,” he said in 2012.
Despite his staunch positions on environmental policy, Inhofe enjoyed a friendly working relationship with liberal California firebrand Barbara Boxer, who served as his Democratic counterpart on the Environment and Public Works Committee during much of his tenure there. The unlikely pair collaborated on a number of major highway and water infrastructure bills.
Inhofe was first elected to the Senate in 1994 after serving in the House of Representatives. His political career began in 1966 when he won a seat in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives after serving several years in the Army.
