Inhofe retired from the Senate in January 2023 after nearly 60 years in politics, beginning with a career as a state legislator and mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second-largest city.
He served in the House for nearly eight years before being elected to the Senate in 1994. Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional scholar and senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, said Inhofe became the state’s longest-serving lawmaker and “a stalwart of the Republican Party.”
Inhofe has been a reliable supporter of conservative causes, including abortion rights and opposition to same-sex marriage, and an effective champion of restrictive policies that benefit oil-rich states.
After the death of Sen. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2018, he served as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, where he forcefully argued for strong military spending.
But he was best known for his sometimes combative opposition to the scientific consensus around human-caused climate change.
“Given all of this hysteria, fear and fake science, is man-made global warming the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people?” Inhofe said in a Senate floor speech in 2003. “It certainly seems that way.”
Inhofe has described himself as a “one-man truther” on the issue, and in 2012 published a book called “The Biggest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy is Ruining Your Future.”
He argued that only God could change the climate, writing, “God is still there, maintaining the seasons, and has promised that there will never be cold or heat as long as the earth stands.” It is arrogant of humans to think otherwise, Imhof argued.
In the winter of 2015, while he was chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in an attempt to deny global warming. “It’s so cold outside. It’s unseasonable,” he said, before throwing the snowball at the sitting Senate president.
(Though temperatures in Washington were cold that winter, the Washington, D.C., area has warmed by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century due to human-induced climate change, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.)
During a major snowfall in Washington in 2010, Mr. Inhofe and his grandsons built an igloo and erected a sign that read “Al Gore’s New Home,” a reference to the former vice president who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change.
Mr. Inhofe’s influence in Washington grew during the term of President Donald Trump, whom he supported, as he filled key administration posts with officials aligned with his approach to deregulating the environment. Mr. Inhofe once described the EPA as a “Gestapo bureaucracy.”
Inhofe’s protégé, former Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, was the first EPA administrator in the Trump administration before resigning amid an ethics scandal in 2018. Andrew Wheeler, who succeeded Pruitt as EPA administrator until the end of the Trump administration, served under Inhofe on the Senate Environment Committee.
In 2021, Inhofe defied President Trump and his supporters by voting to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election that Trump was trying to overturn. Inhofe said at the time that his vote and any other action would have been a “violation of my oath of office.”
James Mountain Imhof was born in Des Moines on November 17, 1934, and grew up in Tulsa.
After serving in the Army, Inhofe followed in his father’s footsteps into the insurance business (he eventually became president of Quaker Life Insurance Company) and moved into real estate development, but his motivation for entering politics was partly due to his dissatisfaction with government regulation.
Inhofe was elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 1966 and to the Oklahoma Senate two years later. He completed his college education while in the House, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Tulsa in 1973, at age 39.
After completing his term as a state senator, Inhofe served as mayor of Tulsa from 1978 to 1984. He lost races for governor and Congress, but was elected to the House of Representatives in 1986.
Eight years later, Inhofe defeated Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.) in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Democrat David L. Boren, who resigned to become president of the University of Oklahoma. Inhofe completed his first term in the Senate in 1996 and was re-elected four times before retiring at age 88.
Inhofe was a licensed pilot and flew regularly to and from Washington, D.C. In 1991, he and three other pilots flew around the world in a Cessna in honor of Wiley Post, the Oklahoma man who had made the record-breaking round-the-world flight 60 years earlier.
In 2010, Mr. Inhofe landed a plane on a runway at a rural South Texas airport that was closed and under construction. He agreed to undergo remedial training in lieu of punishment.
In a 2020 election ad, Inhofe, who was 85 years old, flew a plane upside down to show off his aerial prowess.
Inhofe is survived by his wife, Kay Kirkpatrick, whom he married in 1959, and their three children, Molly, Jimmy and Katie. His son Perry, also a pilot, died in 2013 when the private plane he was piloting crashed near Owasso, Oklahoma.
Despite his conservative positions and combative rhetoric, Inhofe appears to have built strong working relationships and friendships with many Democrats in the House of Representatives.
“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Mr. Inhofe, I don’t agree with everything you say, but I understand your position,'” he once told the Tulsa World.
Former Sen. Barbara Boxer, Inhofe’s Democratic colleague on the Environment Committee, told The Washington Post in 2015 that while Inhofe’s views on climate change were “dangerous” and “well outside the mainstream,” she saw the two as brothers with different world views. During congressional hearings, Inhofe sometimes wore a tie with a polar bear on it that Boxer had given him.
Maxine Joselow contributed to this report.
