Inhofe framed climate denial as religious moral duty

Evidence

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who once brandished a snowball on the Senate floor as proof that climate change was a myth, has characterized global warming as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (Sheppard, 2015). In his attacks on climate science, he sees himself as “doing the Lord’s work” (Johnson, 2011). Ironically, Pope Benedict had a different view on God’s will. The pope invoked a “global responsibility” to find the “moral will” to fight the “threatening catastrophe of climate change” (Johnson, 2011). When Pope Francis published his environmental encyclical Laudate si’, Inhofe-currently the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and still adamantly denying climate change- opined, “The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours” (Goldenberg, 2015). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2741

Categorization

• XREF: Moral justification as disengagement mechanism — recasting harmful policy as serving a higher moral or divine purpose — parallels the vault’s claims about how Islamophobic policy gets framed as righteousness.
• SEED: Angle: how opposing factions each claim divine sanction for opposite climate positions — Inhofe’s ‘Lord’s work’ vs. papal encyclicals — showing moral justification is available to every side of a policy dispute.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2741