Friday, July 9, 2010

Inhofe's Energy Problem: Oklahoma Senator Makes the Wrong List

Tulsa's own Jim Inhofe is making energy news again. Naturally, it's not good news for Oklahoma or, more importantly, the environment.

Sen. Inhofe, you may recall, has made a fool of himself for years as a environmental denier, criticizing anything that smacks of seriousness regarding the environment. With Inhofe, the whole idea of environmentalism is some sort of socialist plot to deny hard-working Americans their right to foul the earth as much as they want to. 

Unlike Inhofe, AT is willing to follow the science wherever it leads. That sort of logic is lost on Sen. Jim, who has his mind made up. He has no use for science or scientists—why those guys are closet socialists too.

Inhofe's environmental recklessness and energy bravado has put him in a select group of lawmakers—people who keep the U.S. from making progress on energy and the environment. This list, published by The Daily Beast, includes a telling slideshow, complete with embarrassing details.

A link to the slideshow is here.

2 comments:

Tulsan said...

Gotta love our good, old, reliable Man of the West. His latest post is a response to this very AltTulsa post. Here he goes:

I Swear, I Can't Make Stuff Like This Up

(MotW fastidiously avoids linking to this blog to avoid sending hits this way. I, "Tulsan," on the other hand, want people to read his stuff. It tends to speak for itself.)

Today, MotW tells his readers that he finds this very AT post "richly amusing" (if so, it seems a bit selfish of him to deny his readers the first-hand pleasure he received.)

How is MotW's funny bone tickled so thoroughly? The fact that AT gives credence to environmental science.

It's "richly amusing" (what a phrase!) to me that he portrays the matter as settled in the eyes of those in the know.

His "knowing group" is conspicuously minus the overwhelming majority of scientists actively studying the matter.

So how does MotW come by the hubris to make out that he chuckles from Olympian intellectual heights? Who knows?

He also considers it a settled matter that the universe came into being on a date close to that calculated by Bishop Ussher in 1654 as October 23, 4004 BC.

If you find thinking of this style and quality to be your cup of tea, check out MotW's blog for more.

Tulsan said...

I don't mean to put down Bishop Ussher. Note this from the Wikipedia article about him:

"Even his efforts to identify the date of creation, often derided these days, gathered together the most up to date scientific, chronological, historical and biblical scholarship in an impressive synthesis. Ironically, many of those who try to uphold the truth of Ussher's dating of creation today, can only do so by ignoring what Ussher deeply respected - the consensus of mainstream contemporary scientific and biblical scholarship."

We might reasonably speculate that if Bishop Ussher lived today, he would be very interested in mainstream scientific thinking, such as environmental science---unlike our anchoritic Man of the West.