Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe got so beligerent with former Vice-President Al Gore at the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works last week that new Chair Barbara Boxer had to cut him off (check out the video at the end of this post).

That, presumably, is because Senator Inhofe is accustomed to a different quality of input in testimony before this committee. When he was chair, he preferred likeminded lobbyists (Joseph Bast, Heartland Institute, testimony here) and fiction writers (Michael Chrichton, testimony here) as witnesses to committee hearings.

James Inhofe, former chair of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and the leading Republican climate change denier recieved more in donations from the oil and gas sector than any other Senator, in the 2002 election cycle. According to the latest available election financing data, in the last five years Inhofe has received just over $3.4 million in donations from 20 industry sectors - almost $1 million (29%) is from the Energy/Natural Resources Sector and their respective PACS.

It was a night of disappointments as President G.W. Bush delivered his State of the Union Address to the joint Houses of Congress Tuesday.

First, the rumoured White House policy shift on global warming never materialized. It's true that President Bush mentioned climate change for the first time in a State of the Union address, but it was a less-than stirring reference:

"America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs... these technologies will help us become better stewards of the environment -- and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change."

The Heartland Institute, one of those think tanks that Exxon may or may not have stopped funding to misrepresent climate science, has this new feature on its Environment & Climate News website. Dated February 1, 2007 (ony 10 days from now), the article is actually an edited version of the tired speech that Senator James Inhofe delivered last year when he was still the Chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

Wrong then. Wrong now. But with a smaller audeince.