Sen. John Barrasso: From believer to realist

Rising From the Right: Barrasso’s rise in Senate follows increasingly conservative course

Barrasso had initially signaled a pragmatic approach to climate change. Soon after he had been appointed to the Senate — in an October 2007 speech in Jackson at a climate and energy summit co-sponsored by the University of Wyoming’s Energy Resources — Barrasso warned energy producers of the inevitability of legislation to curb greenhouse gases linked to global warming, and urged them to get on board.
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But Barrasso soon changed his tune. He strongly opposed the so-called cap-and-trade bill, which would have established market mechanisms for limiting carbon emissions....In a July 2009 interview with Environment & Energy Daily, he described himself as “legislatively … on the same page” as Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has called climate-change science “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
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Barrasso was undeterred by the NAS report. On January 31, he introduced a far-reaching bill that would block federal agencies from regulating greenhouse gases and preempt lawsuits aimed at doing the same. “This legislation puts the brakes on Washington’s efforts to institute job-crushing regulations,” he said in an op-ed (published at WyoFile and USA Today) at the time. “It is a rebuke that unelected bureaucrats badly need.” The language of the bill played down the human contribution to climate change, asserting that “the climate of the Earth is dynamic, and changes in climate are caused by a complex combination of factors.”