Sen. Inhofe Uses TV Interviews to Sound Cap-and-Trade Death Knell

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., during TV interviews, said he planned to attend the United Nations-led Copenhagen climate change summit and that the controversial "Climategate" e-mails had intensified his belief that climate change was "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." Inhofe told CNN's "American Morning" that some Democratic Senators planned to attend the summit to pass the word that Congress was leading toward passing cap-and-trade legislation, when that may not be the case: "I want to make sure that they know it's dead; it is not going to pass the United States Senate. It's not even close."

Inhofe said analyses from reputable science and economics schools indicated that the legislation would cost about $330 billion a year and that "equates to about $2,000 an American family, every taxpayer. So that's a huge tax increase." The senator noted that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has said that the cap-and-trade measure alone would not reduce emissions worldwide at all and would simply cause "our jobs to go over to countries, like China and India and Mexico, where they don't have any restrictions."

On "Fox and Friends," Inhofe said the overall response to EPA's endangerment ruling on CO2 would be a landslide of lawsuits. Inhofe said that when Jackson addressed a congressional committee after the Climategate news broke, he asked her about whether the EPA would review its endangerment findings in wake of the turmoil over the e-mails. Said Inhofe: "She didn't answer for a long time. She finally said, yes. Now, how can you do that when it's totally based on IPCC science, which has been debunked now officially?"