Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt had some strong words on the subject of climate-change deniers:
"You can hold back knowledge, but you cannot prevent it from spreading. You can lie about the effects of climate change, but eventually you'll be seen as a liar."
So it's struck a lot of people as very strange that just a few weeks later, Google hosted a Washington, D.C. fundraiser for Congress's Global Warming Denier-in-Chief, Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.
Inhofe's skepticism about human-caused climate change—in the face of a growing consensus among scientists about the issue's reality and urgency—is legendary. A decade ago, he called it "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." He's hardly backed off that stance since. Last year, he published "The Greatest Hoax," which expanded on the theme and charged, among other things, that global warming is nothing more than a cover for cap-and-trade schemes, which he called "the largest tax increase in American history." (Cap-and-trade exchanges, like the one in California, function as markets for buying and selling carbon emission credits.)
A few months later, he gave a long Senate floor speech laying out his position and dismissing those who assert "that global warming is occurring today and is occurring because of the release of CO2 and anthropogenic gases, methane and such as that—that's really a hoax."
Earlier this year, Inhofe was featured prominently in "Greedy Lying Bastards," a no-holds-barred activist documentary that examined the energy industry's efforts to thwart a government response to climate change.