Climate Skeptic Senator James M. Inhofe Dies at 89

He was criticized for voting against federal disaster-relief funding after hurricanes hit the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, but he voted for federal relief for victims of tornadoes and other disasters in his home state.

He consistently favored smaller government and a strong national defense.

It was in a Senate speech in 2003 that Mr. Inhofe first formally attacked a growing body of claimed evidence on global warming. After that, he became the capital’s most vociferous ‘climate denier’, repeatedly calling it a hoax perpetrated by environmentalists, their liberal allies in the news media and “extremists who simply don’t like capitalism, free markets and freedom.”

Mr. Inhofe furthered that position in a book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future” (2012). It offered political and economic arguments and scientific rebuttals to claims of ‘climate change’.

“God’s still up there,” he said at one point, and 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.”

In one widely publicized episode, complete with a photograph, Mr. Inhofe tossed a snowball to a colleague in the Senate on a cold February day in 2015, saying it served as evidence that the earth could not be warming dangerously.

Mining, oil, gas, coal and utility interests were generous contributors to Mr. Inhofe’s Senate campaigns. As chairman or as the ranking Republican member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee for many years, he spoke often against the ‘consensus’ that humans were fostering ‘climate change’ by burning ‘fossil fuels’.

For much of that time, particularly during the Obama years, Mr. Inhofe denounced the Environmental Protection Agency as an “activist organization” that unfairly burdened businesses with regulations.

When Republicans regained control of the Senate after the 2014 elections, he became chairman of the Environment Committee, and he did not let up on his attacks. He called the E.P.A. “a Gestapo bureaucracy,” opened investigations and called for cuts in E.P.A. funding.

With Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, Mr. Inhofe’s status in Washington was greatly upgraded.

Although term-limits barred his continuation as chairman of the Environment Committee in 2017, Mr. Inhofe’s influence on the Trump environmental agenda soon became evident.

Scott Pruitt, an Inhofe protégé who as Oklahoma’s attorney general had built his career on suing the Obama administration over environmental regulations, was nominated for E.P.A. administrator.

Mr. Inhofe gave him a glowing introduction in the Senate, which confirmed his appointment, 52-46.

As news reports challenged Mr. Pruitt’s ethics, including booking taxpayer-paid first-class air travel and purchasing a $43,000 secure office phone booth, Mr. Inhofe did not defend him.

But behind the scenes he pushed for Mr. Pruitt’s deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist and Mr. Inhofe’s former chief counsel, to succeed him. When Mr. Pruitt resigned, Mr. Wheeler was named acting E.P.A. administrator and was later nominated by Mr. Trump to be the permanent administrator. The Senate confirmed him.

After Senator John McCain died in 2018, the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee passed to Mr. Inhofe, which gave him wide powers to shape defense policy and the Pentagon’s budget.

That changed the panel’s relationship with the Trump administration. In contrast to Mr. McCain’s often critical assessments, Mr. Inhofe often hailed Mr. Trump’s foreign policy decisions and deferred to Defense Secretary James Mattis on military matters.

But Mr. Inhofe, like much of the Senate Republican leadership, broke with Mr. Trump’s decisions in 2018 to withdraw American forces from Syria and retrench troop strength in Afghanistan.

In the same month, a Senate financial disclosure report revealed that Mr. Inhofe had bought $50,000 to $100,000 of stock in Raytheon, a major defense contractor, a week after Mr. Trump announced that he planned to request a Pentagon budget increase to $750 billion, from $717 billion, for the 2020 fiscal year.

Ethics watchdogs said the purchase raised conflict-of-interest questions.

Mr. Inhofe denied any wrongdoing. “I am not consulted or involved in any stock transaction,” he said in a statement at the time. “When this came to my attention, I took immediate action to reverse the trade.”

James Mountain Inhofe was born in Des Moines on Nov. 17, 1934, the youngest of four children of Blanche (Mountain) and Perry Dyson Inhofe Sr., an insurance claims adjuster. James and his siblings, Marilyn, Joan and Perry Jr., attended public schools in Des Moines.

When James was 8, his father moved the family to Tulsa, where he had been offered a position as an insurance executive.

At Tulsa Central High School, James ran on the track team and learned to fly small airplanes, which became a lifelong passion. After serving in the Army, he enrolled at the University of Tulsa, majoring in economics.

Official biographies said he earned a degree in 1959, but when challenged years later he acknowledged that he had been a few credits short and did not officially graduate until 1973.

Mr. Inhofe married Kay Kirkpatrick in 1959. She survives him, along with their children James Inhofe II, Molly Rapert and Katy Swan; a sister, Marilyn Davis; and 12 grandchildren. A fourth child, Perry II, died in a plane crash in 2013.

After Perry Inhofe Sr. died in 1970, his children inherited interests in Mid-Continent Casualty, which their father had helped found. James and his brother, Perry Jr., became principals.

In a stock trade in 1979, Perry Jr. acquired control of Mid-Continent, and James acquired a spinoff, Quaker Life, which later failed. Lawsuits disrupted the family, and James won a $3 million settlement from Perry in 1990.

James, who became active in Oklahoma Republican politics in the mid-1960s, was a member of the State House of Representatives from 1967 to 1969 and of the State Senate from 1969 to 1977. He was a popular mayor of Tulsa, running unopposed for his second term and taking 59 percent of the votes for his third.

In 1986, when Representative James R. Jones, a Democrat, stepped aside to run for the Senate, Mr. Inhofe handily won his seat. In 1994, when Senator David Boren, a former Oklahoma governor, resigned in his third term to become president of the University of Oklahoma, Mr. Inhofe won the seat.

Mr. Inhofe’s exploits as one of the few licensed pilots in Congress attracted wide attention. He campaigned across Oklahoma in his private plane. In 1991, he and three other pilots flew a Cessna around the world in 18 days to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Wiley Post’s solo circumnavigation.

He also claimed 11,000 hours of flying time.

Header image: Inhofe, right, with actor and National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston at an N.R.A. rally in Oklahoma City in 2002. Bryan Terry / The Daily Oklahoman, via Associated Press.

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