Tag Archives: oklahoma

The Future of Lethal Injection Is Being Debated at the Supreme Court. Read These 6 Stories Now.

by KarineGettinger Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Same-sex marriage is not the only major item on the Supreme Court’s docket this week: Today, the court will begin considering the future of a drug used in lethal injections. The suit, Glossip v. Gross, was brought by three Oklahoma inmates sentenced to death and challenges the use of the sedative Midazolam. The inmates’ lawyers argue that the drug—used in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett, who gasped for air and writhed in pain for a prolonged period as he was put to death—violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

While only four states currently administer Midazolam, a Supreme Court ruling upholding its use could lead more states to employ the drug in executions. An opposite ruling could make lethal injection, and death penalty execution in general, rarer than it is now. Outlawing Midazolam, one of the few available lethal injection drugs, could leave states without any viable alternatives. Ahead of the oral arguments, read up on Mother Jones‘ best coverage of lethal injection and death penalty issues.

The story of the botched Oklahoma execution that sparked the Supreme Court case.
Why lethal injection is a terrible way to kill people.
The facts on the lethal injection cocktail, which includes Midazolam, that states have begun using.
Sometimes, the executioners administering the drug have no idea what they’re doing.
Arizona has a particularly bad track record on lethal injection.
The story of Ohio’s effort to shield what happens in the execution chamber.

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The Future of Lethal Injection Is Being Debated at the Supreme Court. Read These 6 Stories Now.

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The Link Between Fracking and Oklahoma’s Quakes Keeps Getting Stronger

by BrittSpargo Posted on April 6, 2015

Mother Jones

Over the last few years, Oklahoma has experienced an insane uptick in earthquakes. As we reported in 2013, the count exploded from just a couple per year back in the mid-2000s to over a thousand in 2010, growing alongside a boom in the state’s natural gas drilling industry.

There is now a heap of peer-reviewed research finding that Oklahoma’s earthquake “swarm” is directly linked to fracking—not the gas drilling itself, but a follow-up step where brackish wastewater is re-injected into disposal wells deep underground. It’s a troubling trend in an industry that thrives under notoriously lax regulations, especially when the risk to property and public safety is so obvious.

If those numbers weren’t dramatic enough, here’s another: This year, Oklahoma has experienced an average of two quakes per day of magnitude 3.0—enough to be felt and inflict damage to structures—or greater. That’s according to a deep, comprehensive report on the subject out in this week’s New Yorker.

But even freakier than the earthquakes themselves, according to the story, is the pervasive denial of science coming from state agencies like the Oklahoma Geological Survey, whose job it is to oversee the oil and gas industry:

The official position of the O.G.S. is that the Prague Oklahoma earthquakes were likely a natural event and that there is insufficient evidence to say that most earthquakes in Oklahoma are the result of disposal wells. That position, however, has no published research to support it, and there are at least twenty-three peer-reviewed, published papers that conclude otherwise.

The story goes on to detail super-cozy relationships between top regulators and drilling company executives; the state’s ongoing and systemic habit of dismissing or ignoring the rapidly accumulating pile of evidence about the quakes; and a failure by regulators and the state legislature to take any meaningful steps to address the crisis. It’s really quite damning.

As a reporter covering the fracking industry, I’ve found that a lot of the problems associated with the technique aren’t necessarily inherent to it, and could be resolved with more pressure on companies to behave responsibly, or laws requiring them to. Better zoning regulations could keep wells out of neighborhoods. Stricter well construction standards could cut down on the leakage of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and help ensure that gas or chemicals don’t contaminate groundwater. In other words, while industry may resist them, there are ready solutions at hand to many of the most cited drawbacks. And the same could be true in the case of earthquakes: while many geologists have now found that drilling wells into deep “basement” rock can set off temblors, there still isn’t a law in Oklahoma that simply requires locating disposal wells elsewhere.

Their state’s lack of basic engagement on the fracking-and-earthquakes issue is, understandably, a source of great frustration to Oklahomans, including those who are otherwise totally supportive the drilling industry. They’re worried not only about above-ground damage, but about how quakes might effect the state’s vast network of oil pipelines and underground aquifers. It’s hard to imagine the nightmare that would result if a serious earthquake ruptured these pipelines and caused a major spill. That sentiment was nicely captured in the New Yorker by a quote from the town manager of Medford, a hamlet outside the oil center of Cushing:

“We want to be a good partner for the oil companies—it’s exciting for us that they’re here. But if they can move the disposal well even just three miles, what a difference that would make.”

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The Link Between Fracking and Oklahoma’s Quakes Keeps Getting Stronger

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Oklahoma scientists pressured to downplay link between earthquakes and fracking

by TraceeZerangue Posted on March 4, 2015

Oklahoma scientists pressured to downplay link between earthquakes and fracking

By on 4 Mar 2015 4:01 pmcommentsShare

Oklahoma has been experiencing an earthquake boom in recent years. In 2014, the state had 585 quakes of at least magnitude 3. Up through 2008, it averaged only three quakes of that strength each year. Something odd is happening.

But scientists at the Oklahoma Geological Survey have downplayed a possible connection between increasing fracking in the state and the increasing number of tremors. Even as other states (Ohio, for example) quickly put two and two together and shut down some drilling operations that were to blame, OGS scientists said that more research was needed before their state took similar steps.

Now, though, emails obtained by EnergyWire reporter Mike Soraghan reveal that the University of Oklahoma and its oil industry funders were putting pressure on OGS scientists to downplay the connection between earthquakes and the injection of fracking wastewater underground. In 2013, a preliminary OGS report noted possible correlation between the two, and OGS signed on to a statement by the U.S. Geological Survey that also noted such linkages. Soon after, OGS’s seismologist, Austin Holland, was summoned to meetings with the president of the university, where OGS is housed, and with executives of oil company Continental Resources. Continental CEO Harold Hamm was a major university funder, while the university president David Boren serves on Continental’s board, for which he earned $272,700 in cash and stock in 2013. From EnergyWire:

“I have been asked to have ‘coffee’ with President Boren and Harold Hamm Wednesday,” [Holland] wrote in an Nov. 18, 2013, email to a co-worker.

The significance was not lost on his colleague, OGS Public Information Coordinator Connie Smith.

“Gosh,” Smith responded. “I guess that’s better than having Kool-Aid with them. I guess.”

A meeting with such powerful figures in the state would be intimidating for a state employee such as Holland, said state Rep. Jason Murphey of Guthrie.

“Wow. That’s a lot of pressure,” said Murphey, a Republican whose district has been rattled by numerous quakes. “That just sends chills up your spine if you’re from Oklahoma.”

Oklahoma geologist Bob Jackman, who has tried to get the word out about the connection between fracking and the quakes, recalls Holland saying last year that he couldn’t do the same. According to Jackman, Holland, when pressed, blurted out, “You don’t understand — Harold Hamm and others will not allow me to say certain things.”

Holland says Jackman misremembered the conversation. Holland publicly denies being pressured by the university or industry.

Other scientists at OGS weren’t happy to see the agency downplay the link between one oil and gas project, called the Hunton dewatering, and an earthquake swarm near Oklahoma City. One wrote to a family member, “I am dismayed at our seismic people about this issue and believe they couldn’t track a bunny through fresh snow!”

Even the USGS picked up on something fishy when Holland suggested alternative hypotheses to explain earthquakes instead of linking them to fracking processes. A science adviser with the federal agency wrote to Holland saying one alternative theory was “unlikely” and “could be very distracting from the larger issue of earthquake safety in Oklahoma … and the role that wastewater injection may be playing.”

In July 2014, Holland told Bloomberg that if a link between fracking and the quakes were to be discovered, he’d have to advise the state to shut some drilling operations down. “If my research takes me to the point where we determine the safest thing to do is to shut down injection — and consequently production — in large portions of the state, then that’s what we have to do,” he said. “That’s for the politicians and the regulators to work out.”

The research is there, even if UO President David Boren or Continental CEO Harold Hamm aren’t pleased about it. Let’s see what those politicians and regulators do next.

Source:
Okla. agency linked quakes to oil in 2010, but kept mum amid industry pressure

, EnergyWire.

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Oklahoma scientists pressured to downplay link between earthquakes and fracking

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The Strict Abortion Ban that Abortion Foes Fear

by TarahFreeland Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last month, a Kansas Republican promised that his state House committee would consider a bill banning abortions after the fetus has a detectable heartbeat—around the sixth week of development. The legislator, Steve Brunk, said he is confident the measure will pass in the GOP-controlled legislature. And Gov. Sam Brownback (R) has never vetoed an abortion bill.

Many anti-abortion activists are cheering Brunk on. But one voice is noticeably absent: that of Kansans For Life, the state’s most influential anti-abortion group. When asked, last week, if Kansas For Life supports the so-called heartbeat bill, the group’s legislative director hung up the phone.

Like a bill introduced in Oklahoma and another coming soon in Alabama, the Kansas bill would ban abortion far earlier than is constitutional. (In fact, it would prohibit abortion before most women even know they are pregnant.) Supporters say, that’s the point. The bans are meant to challenge Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a right to abortion. But the National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s most prominent anti-abortion group and the parent group of Kansans For Life, has spent years trying to convince anti-abortion lawmakers that heartbeat bills could actually lead to a Supreme Court decision expanding abortion rights.

“The Supreme Court, as it is constituted right now, may not be ready to overturn Roe,” says James Bopp, the chief counsel for the National Right to Life Committee. Provoking such a direct confrontation, Bopp tells Mother Jones, could end in a decision that puts the right to abortion on firmer legal ground than Roe. And that “would be a powerful weapon in the hands of pro-abortion lawyers that would jeopardize all current laws on abortion,” Bopp has warned.

Heartbeat bill supporters are unfazed. “There are ten things that God carved into stone,” says Janet Folger Porter, an anti-abortion activist who wrote the first heartbeat bill, which was introduced in Ohio in 2011. “And one of them was not, ‘Thou shalt be erudite about not killing babies.'”

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The Strict Abortion Ban that Abortion Foes Fear

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The Senate Officially Believes Climate Change Is Real

by KarineTowns Posted on January 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on The Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Let it be recorded for history that late in the afternoon of January 21, 2015, the United States Senate formally acknowledged that climate change is real.

As to that other critical question of whether human beings are contributing to it? Well, the Senate is not so sure. In a series of largely symbolic votes Wednesday afternoon, newly-disempowered Democrats tried to force Republicans to stake out a firm position on climate change after years of party leaders trying to dodge the question by saying they’re “not scientists.”

The result was a split decision: The Senate overwhelmingly voted, 98-1, in favor of an amendment stating that “climate change is real and not a hoax.” In an amusing twist, the chamber’s most notorious climate denier, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, signed on to the amendment at the last minute, mostly because it didn’t attribute a cause to global warming. “The climate is changing. The climate has always changed,” Inhofe said. He then criticized supporters of man-caused climate change by saying that the real “hoax” was “that there are some people that are so arrogant to think” that they can change the climate. (The only senator to oppose that statement was Roger Wicker, a conservative from Mississippi.)

After establishing that climate change is real, the Senate went no further, although it came close to declaring that human activity contributes climate change. With most Republicans opposed, an amendment stating so fell a single senator short of the 60-vote threshold (this is the Senate, after all) for passage. A second measure that stated that human activity “significantly” contributes to climate change drew just five Republican votes.

So why all the votes on climate change? In short, Democrats were trying to take advantage of a pledge by the new Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to open up the floor to amendments after years in which Republicans complained that Harry Reid shut down debate, and shut down the minority party. The Senate is now debating legislation to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which critics worry would increase carbon pollution. The amendments would not have substantively changed the bill or any other aspect of federal policy—they merely stated what “the sense of the Senate” was on the topic.

Politically, Democrats wanted to shame Republicans who won’t go on record supporting what a vast majority of experts say is scientific reality. But from a legislative standpoint, they wanted a baseline vote to see just how far they needed to go to persuade the GOP to support federal policies—a carbon tax, for example—aimed at reversing climate change. While Senator Bernie Sanders said the mere acknowledgement of climate change was “a significant step,” it’s clear Democrats have a long way to go.

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The Senate Officially Believes Climate Change Is Real

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Fracking is definitely causing earthquakes, another study confirms

by DaciaPamphlett Posted on January 7, 2015

Fracking is definitely causing earthquakes, another study confirms

By on 7 Jan 2015commentsShare

Yet another study has found a link between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes. This one examined 77 minor quakes near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:

The sequence of seismic events, including a rare “felt” quake of a magnitude 3.0 on the Richter scale, was caused by active “fracking” on two nearby Hilcorp Energy Co. well pads, according to the research published online [Tuesday] in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

The study found that although it is rare for fracking associated with shale gas extraction to cause earthquakes large enough to be felt on the surface by humans, seismic monitoring advances have found the number of “felt and unfelt” earthquakes associated with fracking have increased over the past 10 years.

Studies have found that it’s not just the actual drilling and extraction that causes the earthquakes; more often, the routine practice of injecting fracking wastewater into deep disposal wells is to blame. Once the toxic mix of water, sand, and chemicals is underground, it can travel for miles, changing the pressure on fault lines and sometimes triggering earthquakes.

The practice has caused a surge in earthquakes in many areas where fracking is common. Oklahoma in particular has been hard-hit. Once a state where tremors were few and far between, Oklahoma in 2014 had 564 quakes that were at least of magnitude 3 — the most in the contiguous U.S.  From 1975 until 2008, the state had, on average, only three such quakes per year. From E&E EnergyWire:

The Sooner State was shaken by 564 quakes of magnitude 3 and larger, compared with only 100 in 2013, according to an EnergyWire analysis of federal earthquake data. California, which is twice the size of Oklahoma, had fewer than half as many quakes. …

“Who’d have ever thought we’d start having so many earthquakes out here in the middle of the country?” asked Max Hess, a county commissioner in Grant County, which had 135 quakes last year. He also thinks the quakes are related to oil and gas, which has been an economic boon for the rural county northwest of Oklahoma City.

“It’s been good,” Hess said of the drilling, “but it’s got its drawbacks.”

EnergyWire reports that many in Oklahoma’s oil and gas regions are cautiously tolerant of the earthquakes because of the money that comes with the drilling boom. But scientists in the state’s geological survey are concerned about the trend. “If my research takes me to the point where we determine the safest thing to do is to shut down injection — and consequently production — in large portions of the state, then that’s what we have to do,” seismologist Austin Holland told Bloomberg this summer.

Source:
Study: Fracking caused earthquakes in existing faults in Ohio

, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Shaken more than 560 times, Okla. is top state for quakes in 2014

, E&E EnergyWire.

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Fracking is definitely causing earthquakes, another study confirms

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Let’s Blame Conservatives For All the Killings They’re Responsible For

by FinleyBernier Posted on December 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Atrios, here is America’s-mayor-for-life Rudy Giuliani commenting on the killing of two New York City police officers yesterday by a deranged gunman:

“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”

….The former mayor also criticized President Barack Obama, Holder, and Al Sharpton for addressing the underlining racial tensions behind the failure to indict the white police officers who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island and Mike Brown in Ferguson. “They have created an atmosphere of severe, strong, anti-police hatred in certain communities. For that, they should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.

Fair enough. But I assume this means we can blame Bill O’Reilly for his 28 episodes of invective against “Tiller the Baby Killer” that eventually ended in the murder of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. We can blame conservative talk radio for fueling the anti-government hysteria that led Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City. We can blame the relentless xenophobia of Fox News for the bombing of an Islamic Center in Joplin or the massacre of Sikh worshippers by a white supremacist in Wisconsin. We can blame the NRA for the mass shootings in Newtown and Aurora. We can blame Republicans for stoking the anti-IRS paranoia that prompted Andrew Joseph Stack to crash a private plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing two people. We can blame the Christian Right for the anti-gay paranoia that led the Westboro Baptist Church to picket the funeral of Matthew Snyder, a US Marine killed in Iraq, with signs that carried their signature “God Hates Fags” slogan. We can blame Sean Hannity for his repeated support of Cliven Bundy’s “range war” against the BLM, which eventually motivated Jerad and Amanda Miller to kill five people in Las Vegas after participating in the Bundy standoff and declaring, “If they’re going to come bring violence to us, well, if that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.” And, of course, we can blame Rudy Giuliani and the entire conservative movement for their virtually unanimous indifference to the state-sanctioned police killings of black suspects over minor offenses in Ferguson and Staten Island, which apparently motivated the murder of the New York police officers on Saturday.

Or wait. Maybe we can’t do any of those things. Maybe lots of people support lots of things, and we can’t twist that generalized support into blame for maniacs who decide to take up arms for their own demented reasons. Maybe that’s a better idea after all.

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Let’s Blame Conservatives For All the Killings They’re Responsible For

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Nebraska and Oklahoma Sue to Overturn Legal Weed in Colorado

by CelestaWaite Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The attorneys general of Nebraska and Oklahoma petitioned the US Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn pot legalization in Colorado, arguing that its legal weed has been spilling across their borders and fueling crime.

“The state of Colorado has created a dangerous gap in the federal drug control system,” the suit alleges. “Marijuana flows from this gap into neighboring states, undermining Plaintiff states’ own marijuana bans, draining their treasuries, and placing stress on their criminal justice systems.”

The Department of Justice pledged last year not to interfere with pot legalization in Colorado and Washington, but only if the states met a list of conditions, including preventing legally purchased marijuana from being diverted to states where it’s illegal. Nebraska and Oklahoma are now arguing that the Supreme Court should compel the DOJ to act.

Evidence has been mounting that Colorado can’t contain all of its weed. In June, USA Today highlighted the flow of its marijuana into small towns across Nebraska. Since 2011, the paper reported, felony drug arrests in Chappell, Nebraska, a town just seven miles north of the Colorado border, have jumped 400 percent.

But marijuana reformers argue that governments can’t contain illegally purchased weed either, and that a few growing pains on the path to a more sensible drug policy are inevitable. “These guys are on the wrong side of history,” Mason Tvert, communications director for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, said in a statement. “They will be remembered similarly to how we think of state officials who fought to maintain alcohol prohibition years after other states ended it.”

Nebraska attorney general Jon Brunning has actually become too eager to support the alcohol industry, Tvert adds. Between 2008 and 2012, beer, wine, and alcohol interests donated $86,000 to Brunning. In 2012, he advocated for a lower tax rate for sweetened malt beverages such as hard lemonade. “It appears he is fighting to protect their turf,” Tvert says. “He should explain why he thinks Colorado adults should not be able to use marijuana instead.”

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Nebraska and Oklahoma Sue to Overturn Legal Weed in Colorado

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Executions Just Hit a 20-Year Low

by MargariLaurens Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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There’s some encouraging news this week in the usually gloomy realm of criminal justice. According to a new report from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), there were fewer executions this year than in any year since 1994—and fewer new death sentences imposed than any year since 1974. That may be of little comfort to the family of Robert Wayne Holsey, a low-functioning man whose severely alcoholic court-appointed lawyer sealed his ultimate fate—Georgia executed him earlier this month—but the numbers are certainly dwindling. In 2012, states put 43 people to death. In 2013, the number was 39. This year, it’s down to 35.

Perhaps more encouraging for foes of capital punishment: Only 72 new death sentences were imposed this year (a measure the DPIC considers a more accurate indicator of the trend). That’s a 77 percent decline since 1996, as more and more states have offered juries the option of imposing a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Death Penalty Information Center

In addition, an increasingly smaller group of states accounts for the majority of executions. Seven states put prisoners to death this year (down from 20 just 15 years ago)‚ but just three of them—Florida, Missouri, and Texas—accounted for 80 percent of all the executions. The number of states that sanction the death penalty may be waning, too. In 2014, the governors of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington all imposed moratoria. And for what it’s worth, 2014 was the first year since 1997 that Texas didn’t lead the country in executions. (It tied with Missouri, at 10 apiece.)

Death Penalty Information Center

Aside from the continued decline in public support for capital punishment—just over half of Americans were for it in 2014, as opposed to nearly two-thirds in 2011—some new factors may have contributed to this year’s numbers. Botched executions in Ohio, Arizona, and Oklahoma shed light on the untested drug cocktails states are now using for lethal injections, after European drugmakers cut off their supplies. Following widespread press coverage of these gruesome execution attempts—some of which appeared to violate the Eighth Amendment’s protection from cruel and unusual punishment—Oklahoma and Ohio halted executions for the rest of the year. (In response to the mishaps, the Justice Department is expected to release a major report next year.)

We’ve also seen increased scrutiny this year of states’ willingness to execute the mentally ill or intellectually disabled. Earlier in the year, the Supreme Court ruled in Hall v. Florida that Florida’s fit-for-execution standard—merely having an IQ exceeding 70 was enough—violated standards of decency. And the case of Scott Panetti, a schizophrenic man that Texas is determined to execute, put that state’s low standards on international display. (A federal court has temporarily stayed Panetti’s execution, a move even prominent conservatives have supported.)

Major battles lie ahead for death penalty opponents. More than 3,000 people are still on death row and 30 executions have been scheduled for 2015. Fourteen states, including some the ones that botched their executions, have pursued legislation that would shroud many aspects of the execution process in secrecy—particularly the details about what’s in their lethal cocktails.

But momentum against the death penalty is strong. “Overall, the decline in the use of the death penalty has been going on for 15 years, and is likely to continue,” explains Richard Dieter, the executive director of the DPIC and an author of the new report. “For the public, the death penalty has already receded as a significant part of the criminal justice process.”

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Executions Just Hit a 20-Year Low

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Inhofe’s Grand Climate Conspiracy Theory: It’s All About Barbra Streisand

by Jimmy Charles Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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The recent news on the front page of the New York Times was stark. As thousands of diplomats were gathering in Lima, Peru, to work on an agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, scientists and climate policy experts were warning

that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding—events that could harm the world’s population and economy.

But with an effort under way in Lima to protect the difference, as the newspaper put it, “between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one,” one fellow in Washington is readying himself to prevent any progress toward a climate accord: Sen. James Inhofe. The 80-year-old Republican from Oklahoma is one of the most notorious deniers of human-induced climate change. He has contended that God controls the Earth’s climate, not Homo sapiens, and he has quoted the Bible to make this point: “As long as the Earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” And Inhofe, thanks to the recent elections, is in line to chair the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee when the Republicans assume control of the Senate next month. He has vowed to do all he can to block regulations aimed at cutting emissions.

With diplomats in Lima wrestling with the challenges of climate negotiations and Inhofe counting the days until his likely ascension to one of the most powerful environment-related positions on the planet, I’m reminded of a bizarre encounter I had with the senator at a previous climate summit.

In December 2009, the United Nations hosted a global gathering in Copenhagen to hammer out what some participants hoped would be a binding accord that would compel a reduction in emissions around the world. Thousands of diplomats, policy advocates, and scientists flocked to the Danish city for the session, and thousands of reporters were there to chronicle the talks. Inhofe came too. To troll. Or, as he put it, to be “a one-man truth squad.” He slithered in and out of the cavernous media filing center, ever at the ready to speak to reporters looking for the other side quotes denigrating the proceedings, claiming that climate change was no more than a hoax, and celebrating the summit’s failure to produce a binding and comprehensive treaty.

Inhofe was usually mobbed by reporters—especially non-American journalists who found it newsworthy that a US senator would say such things. Judging from the smile on his mug, Inhofe enjoyed skunking up the party. After watching this for a few days, I could not resist the urge to engage.

As he strolled through the media center one afternoon, accompanied by several camera crews recording his pronouncements, I approached and politely asked if I could put a question to him. Sure, he said, in his folksy, avuncular manner.

Look around us, I said, spreading my arms wide. There are thousands of intelligent and well-meaning people in this gigantic conference center: scientists, heads of state, government officials, policy experts. They believe that climate change is a serious and pressing threat and that something must be done soon. Do you believe that they have all been fooled?

Yes, he said, grinning.

That these people who have traveled from all points of the globe to be here are victims of a well-orchestrated hoax?

Yes, he said, still smiling.

That’s some hoax, I countered. But who has engineered such a scam?

Hollywood liberals and extreme environmentalists, Inhofe replied.

Really? I asked. Why would they conspire to scare all these smart people into believing a catastrophe was under way, when all was well?

Inhofe didn’t skip a beat: To advance their radical environmental agenda.

I pressed on: Who in Hollywood is doing this?

The whole liberal crowd, Inhofe said.

But who?

Barbra Streisand, he responded.

I nearly laughed. All these people had assembled in Copenhagen because of Barbra Streisand. A singer and actor had perpetuated the grandest con of the past 100 years?

That’s right, Inhofe said, with a straight face. And others, he added.

By this point, he was losing patience and glancing about for another reporter who wanted to record his important observations. And I was running out of follow-up queries. After all, was I really going to ask, “And Ed Begley Jr. too?” So our conversation ended, and I headed back to reality.

But I was struck by this thought: Did this senator truly believe Barbra Streisand was the devious force behind a completely phony global campaign to address climate change? He seemed to.

In his 2012 book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Inhofe does mention Streisand—but only once, lumping her together with Leonardo DiCaprio and John Travolta as celebs whose environmental “alarmism” had to be debunked. But his book did not shy away from clearly identifying the charlatans and hoaxers who have hornswoggled the planet: “environmental activist extremists,” Al Gore, MoveOn.org, George Soros, Michael Moore, and, yes, “the Hollywood elites.”

Perhaps when Inhofe seizes the reins of the Senate environment committee, he can further expose this conspiracy—and for the first witness…Barbra Streisand. It’s time for her to come clean.

Excerpt from:  

Inhofe’s Grand Climate Conspiracy Theory: It’s All About Barbra Streisand

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