James Inhofe

Inhofe’s plan: Stall climate action until the next president

The Heartland Institute, an outpost for climate change skeptics, is holding its Third International Conference on Climate Change here in Washington, D.C., this week (just three months after its second one). Yesterday the meeting played host to the Senate’s top climate-change denier, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe. Inhofe, best known for calling global warming “the greatest […]

Senate Spoil Sports

Most of the news coverage in recent days, understandably has focused on the Markey climate hearings and speculation about when his subcommittee will actually start voting.  And now there is scrutiny of efforts by “moderate” House Democrats to gut the Waxman-Markey bill on behalf of Duke Energy, the Edison Electric Institute and other forces of […]

EPA’s climate finding ticks off industry, energizes enviros and congressional leaders

Here come the reactions …Grist’s Kate Sheppard has a great story on today’s big news, the EPA decision that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare: The long-expected finding, set in motion two years ago by a Supreme Court ruling, moves the Obama administration one step closer to regulating CO2 emissions from a number of […]

Key Democrats deal opening hand in climate debate

House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders released the much-anticipated draft of their climate and energy legislation on Tuesday, a proposal that includes emissions goals more ambitious than those proposed by the Obama White House but also leaves open many of the most contentious questions on climate policy. Sponsors Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) […]

Inhofe’s resident media agitator leaving to start a new climate-skeptic website

The barons of Big Oil and Big Coal will undoubtedly chink glasses with their paid mouthpieces this weekend over news that fellow cynic Marc Morano is leaving his taxpayer-funded propaganda job to establish a climate change “news” website. Morano, if you don’t already know, has been the Roscoe P. Coltrane to one of the Senate’s […]

Marc Morano's secret list of climate deniers

Originally posted at the Wonk Room.

Marc Morano, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)'s environmental aide, sits at the center of the right-wing global warming denier propaganda machine -- of fifty-two people. Conservative columnist Fred Barnes recently refused to tell TPM Muckraker who's informed him "the case for global warming" is falling apart, but all signs point to Marc Morano. Morano's "entire job," David Roberts explains, "is to aggregate every misleading factoid, every attack on climate science or scientists, every crank skeptical statement from anyone in the world and send it all out periodically in email blasts" to the right-wing echo chamber. The Wonk Room has acquired Morano's email list, and we can now reveal the pack of climate skeptics, conservative bloggers, and corporate hacks who feed the misinformation machine.

Promoted on the Drudge Report and Fox News, Morano's moronic misinformation enters mainstream discourse through columns by Barnes, George Will, Robert Samuelson, and others. Many in the Morano gang are funded by right-wing think tanks, though a few are committed activists, conspiracy theorists who believe their home-brew interpretations of climate data. Others are aging scientists with strong conservative beliefs, motivating them to challenge action on global warming not because they disbelieve its existence, but because they are ideologically opposed to regulation of pollution:

The entire conservative media is informed on climate science by the office of James Inhofe

I'm seeing a lot of people passing around a link to this story on TPM, which mocks Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes for saying that the case for man-made warming is "falling apart" but refusing to divulge any of his sources for that seemingly significant piece of info.

At first I just laughed about it, but it occurred to me later that maybe people really don't know the answer to this question -- maybe people really don't know where Barnes is getting his info. The answer is an open secret:

Barnes gets his information on climate change the same place everyone in the right-wing media world gets it: from Marc Morano, the in-house blogger/agitator for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the environmental party?

"So she is pretty extremist in my eyes in terms of her liberal leanings. Where do you draw the line between an extreme liberal and a Socialist? You know, everyone has a different view of that."

-- Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), commenting to FOX News on the crypto-socialism of Obama's new energy adviser Carol Browner

Uh oh, looks like the news media is tired of getting played

“Senator, if there is a hoax, isn’t it this report of yours?” — MSNBC’s David Shuster, asking Sen. James Inhofe about his farcical list of 650 “scientists” that dispute the theory of anthropocentric climate change