The chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is telling Pope Francis to stay out of the ongoing debate over global warming.

“Everyone is going to ride the pope now. Isn’t that wonderful,” Sen. James Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, said Thursday, according to the Guardian. “The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours.”

A few moments later, Mr. Inhofe said: “I am not going to talk about the pope. Let him run his shop, and we’ll run ours.”

Mr. Inhofe is one of the leading global warming skeptics on Capitol Hill, bringing a snowball onto the floor of the United States Senate earlier this year to make his point.

The issue has been a topic of discussion ahead of the pope’s forthcoming encyclical on the environment, with former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, recently making a similar entreaty to the Vatican.

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