How Greens & Skeptics Read the Creation Story

JAMES INHOFE, the chairman of the American Senate's environment committee, pays close attention to the Book of Genesis. For example, he insists that the entire West Bank belongs rightfully to Israel, rather than to Muslim or Christian Palestinians; and he roots that belief in God's promise to Abraham, given in Hebron, that "...all the land which you see, to you I will give it and to your seed forever..."  (It was because America wavered in that belief that "a spiritual door was opened" for the 9/11 attacks, he thinks.) His intense hostility to the idea of man-made global warming, which prompted him to brandish a snowball on the Senate floor, also has a Biblical base. As proof that man simply cannot alter the interplay of the seasons, he cites God's pledge to Noah in Genesis 8:22.