“Let me tell you, it wasn’t a red state then,” he said of his early days in Oklahoma politics.

His focus in 1994 on “God, guns and gays” — he was in favor of the first two, against the third — helped him win election to the Senate and served as a template for other Republicans seeking to defeat Democrats by using social issues as a cudgel.

Inhofe’s rejection of climate science was a central part of his legacy — typified by the moment in February 2015 when he threw a snowball on the Senate floor. For years, he was one of the GOP’s most vocal critics of environmental regulation, an issue he held vast sway over as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee during George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s presidencies.

He influenced environmental policy not only through his use of the gavel but through his cultivation of staffers who went on to take key positions at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Trump administration and worked to roll back Obama’s rules.

As news of his death rippled through Washington, former colleagues and staffers mourned. A portrait of Inhofe, who also chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee for two and a half years, was placed outside the committee room Tuesday morning.

Trump-era EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote on X that Inhofe “was a devout Christian and family man. He was also devoted to his former staff who he considered his extended family.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Inhofe “a mountain of a man” in a statement — a reference to Inhofe’s middle name, Mountain.

“Jim’s diligent stewardship of massive infrastructure projects transformed life across the Heartland,” McConnell said. “His relentless advocacy for American energy dominance unlocked new prosperity across the country. And his laser focus on growing and modernizing the U.S. military strengthened the security of the entire free world.”

Inhofe was remembered by former colleagues during an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing Tuesday morning.

“He was a real mentor. He was a members’ chairman. He was a man of tremendous faith. He leaves a great legacy, and I will miss him dearly,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said from the dais.

Inofe, the author of the 2012 book “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” argued that the concept of human-made global warming was a scam, based on fear, designed to enrich those who promoted the idea.

“Hoax is something accepted or established by fraud or fabrication,” he told host Susan Swain in a 2012 C-SPAN interview. “That fits it pretty well, I think. What you have, Susan, with the whole idea of the hoax, is there are people lined up to do very well financially.”

Donald Trump later adopted his use of the word “hoax” during his first presidential campaign.

Inhofe’s position on climate change frequently drew derision. An environmental group, the Center for Biological Diversity, awarded him its 2012 Rubber Dodo Award for general scientific obtuseness. “When it comes to denying the climate crisis — the single-greatest threat now facing life on Earth — James Inhofe has few peers,” the organization said.

Inhofe played a central role in the appointment of both of Trump’s EPA administrators — first Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, then Wheeler.

He served as the top Republican on the environment panel for 14 years, as chair from 2003 to 2007 and again from 2015 to 2017, and as ranking member for the period in the middle. He retired in 2023.

Inhofe had a light-hearted attitude about his opposition to green programs. In 2011, after getting sick from an algae bloom in an Oklahoma lake where he had gone swimming, Inhofe joked to the Tulsa World that it was a case of “the environment strikes back.”

But in his February 2015 stunt he brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to argue that human activity does not cause climate change.

“You know what this is?” he asked. “It’s a snowball, from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”

His mockery was often met blow for blow by those on the other side of the issue. “Leave it to today’s GOP to put someone who doesn’t believe in basic science at the helm of the committee that oversees environmental protection,” Democratic National Committee spokesperson Michael Czin said in 2014.

The 2015 snowball speech wasn’t even his first such use of a frozen prop.

“After a record-breaking snowfall blanketed the D.C. area in 2010, Inhofe’s family built an igloo decorated with a sign saying ‘Al Gore’s New Home,’” according to a 2014 POLITICO article that ran as he was set to ascend to the top spot on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

Inhofe’s rejection of climate science was based on his religious belief that God controls the climate and that it was hubristic to claim that burning fossil fuels could alter that.

“The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous,” he said in 2012.

James Mountain Inhofe was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on Nov. 17, 1934; Mountain was his mother’s maiden name and would lead, he would later say, to the nickname of “Mountain Man.” He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, subsequently attended the University of Tulsa, and would later serve as the city’s mayor from 1978 to 1984.

Before completing his University of Tulsa degree in economics, Inhofe served in the U.S. Army (1957-58) and also married Kay Kirkpatrick in 1959.

Inhofe worked in various businesses, including in the aviation industry. That was a natural vocation for someone with his love of flying; he would later claim to have logged more than 11,000 flight hours in his life, many of them on the campaign trail.

Among his childhood acquaintances was a local sports announcer named Ronald Reagan, who was a friend of his family. “My dad and Ronald Reagan played the pinball machine together. He would come out to the house. I always thought he was an uncle or some relative,” he said.

During a 2004 memorial tribute to Reagan, Inhofe credited the late president’s 1964 speech “A Rendezvous With Destiny” with inspiring him to go into politics.

“I remember I almost memorized that speech. In fact, I still have most of it memorized,” Inhofe said. “As a result of that, the next year I decided, well, if he did it, if he really feels this concerned, I should, too, and I went and filed for office and ran for the state legislature. So that is how I happened to get started.”

Inhofe was first elected to the state legislature in 1966. At the time, Oklahoma was dominated by conservative Democrats; during his first term, there were only nine Republicans in the state Senate (as opposed to 39 Democrats) and 23 Republicans in the House (versus 76 Democrats). Inhofe served two years in the House and then eight in the Senate.

He made an unsuccessful run for governor in 1974 and for Congress in 1976. Two years later, he was elected mayor of Tulsa, and then won an open seat in Congress in 1986. During his tenure in the House, he began attending Bible study and became a born-again Christian.

In a special election for a seat vacated by Democrat David Boren, Inhofe was easily elected to the U.S. Senate in 1994. The Democratic candidate was Dave McCurdy, a fellow member of Congress and chair of the Democratic Leadership Council who was initially favored to win. Inhofe capitalized on the widespread unpopularity of President Bill Clinton, whom McCurdy had campaigned for around the country in 1992.

“This is the race that will take the Senate away from Bill Clinton,” Inhofe said on the campaign trail. He drew 55 percent of the vote in a year in which Republicans captured every close race nationally to indeed win control of the Senate.

Inhofe would easily win reelection two years later and then four more times. No Democrat has been elected to the U.S. Senate from Oklahoma since then.

Once ensconced in the Senate, Inhofe was a hawk on defense (he liked to say: “There are two things we should be doing here in Congress: infrastructure and defense”) and a foe of government regulation.

“Inhofe has been a staunch supporter of larger military budgets and increased end strength, and a critic of defense cutbacks in recent Democratic presidential administrations,” the Air Force Times wrote in 2022 when he announced his retirement. “More recently, he pushed for the United States to provide more military assistance to foreign allies, particularly Ukraine.”

Inhofe connected American might to American right, the notion that the United States was obligated to shine a light of freedom around the globe.

“We must never forget that many around the globe are denied the basic rights we enjoy as Americans. If we are to continue enjoying these privileges and freedoms we must accept our mission of expanding democracy around the globe,” he said in January 2005 on the day President George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term.

Representing a petroleum-producing state, Inhofe was a foe of environmental laws from the get-go. “America has adopted an attitude that places more value on the life of a critter that on a human being,” he said during debate on the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act, lamenting that the nation had done nothing to prevent partial-birth abortions.

Through his career, the veteran pilot would introduce legislation pertaining to aviation. And in 2020, he was shown in a campaign ad flying a plane upside down. “I’ve always set out to serve you as a United States senator as long as I can fly upside down,” he said.

His occasional aviation mishaps were the subject of Washington lore. In October 2010, for instance, he had a run-in with the Federal Aviation Administration after landing on a runway closed for maintenance work at a rural Texas airport. In July 2016, he was forced to land during bumpy weather in Ketchum, Oklahoma, and had to dodge a deer on the runway. No one was hurt in either incident.

His family did, however, suffer an aviation tragedy: His son Perry, one of the senator’s four children, died in a crash of his own plane in November 2013.

Though he invariably found himself at odds with liberal Democrats on a large number of policy issues, Inhofe did get along well with many of those on the other side of the aisle, including Sens. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.).

Despite his staunch positions on environmental policy, Inhofe also enjoyed a friendly working relationship with liberal California firebrand Barbara Boxer, who served as his Democratic counterpart on the Environment and Public Works Committee during much of his tenure there. The unlikely pair collaborated on a number of major highway and water infrastructure bills. Inhofe also played a key role in delivering federal aid to Flint, Michigan, in response to the city’s massive lead drinking water crisis in 2016.

Boxer was one of his “three favorite liberals,” he said in 2012. The other two were Lisa Jackson, Obama’s first EPA administrator, and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

In March 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said during a town hall at Ohio State University that Inhofe was his best friend among Republicans in the Senate.

“Jim is a climate change denier. He is really, really conservative, but you know what, he is a decent guy and I like him, and he and I are friends,” Sanders told CNN host Jake Tapper.

“He is what he is, and he’s not ashamed of it,” Inhofe said in response.

In his farewell speech in November 2022, Inhofe touted the importance of friendship in the Senate.

“Real friendship exists in the United States Senate, but nobody knows it,” he said.

Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.