There are few more powerful forces in nature than Henry Waxman in righteous fury. The California Democrat, scourge of the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical business, the oil lobby and other malefactors of great wealth, is trying to adjust to his new role in the minority in the House. It is not going well.

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Mr. Waxman, the erstwhile chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and now the ranking Democrat under its new Republican leadership, is fighting a rearguard action on behalf of health, telecommunications, energy and environmental legislation passed in the last Congress, when Democrats held the majority and he wielded the gavel of arguably the most powerful committee in Congress.

On Monday morning, Mr. Waxman appeared at the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning research firm founded by John Podesta after he left Bill Clinton’s White House as chief of staff, to talk about energy and climate change policy. If there were any Republicans in the audience, they were keeping their heads down.

His subject was climate change and what Mr. Waxman characterized as willful Republican ignorance and denial on the topic.



He opened his remarks saying he intended to speak “as bluntly as possible,” and he did not disappoint. He recalled earlier battles on environmental policy with Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney. They did all they could to roll back the nation’s environmental and health laws on behalf of their corporate backers, Mr. Waxman said.

“But I have never been in a Congress where there was such an overwhelming disconnect between science and policy,” he said. “The Republicans in Congress have become the party of science deniers, and that is profoundly dangerous.”

Mr. Waxman has served in Congress since 1975.

He said that Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, the new chairman of Energy and Commerce, had joined Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in sponsoring a bill to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that heat-trapping gases endanger public health and the environment. Mr. Inhofe has repeatedly referred to climate change as a hoax perpetrated by an incestuous coterie of climate scientists unwilling to consider contrary evidence.

“The new Republican majority in the House has a lot of power to write our nation’s laws, but they do not have the power to rewrite the laws of nature,” Mr. Waxman said. “Republicans in Congress can’t cure cancer by passing a bill that declares smoking safe. And they can’t stop climate change by declaring it a hoax.”

Despite their minority status, Mr. Waxman and his Democratic colleagues on the committee were able to get the majority to agree to a hearing on the basic atmospheric science underlying the consensus that carbon dioxide and other substances produced by human activity are causing a rise in global temperatures, with a variety of attendant ill effects. That hearing is scheduled for Tuesday morning. It will feature several of the nation’s leading climatologists, as well as two scientists who question the extent of human influence on the climate.

“I have never been in a Congress where there was such an overwhelming disconnect between science and policy.” — Henry A. Waxman

Later in the week, a subcommittee of Energy and Commerce is expected to mark up the Upton-Inhofe bill. The Republican majority is likely to approve it, just as the Democrats approved the sweeping climate change and energy bill that Mr. Waxman sponsored two years ago when his party controlled the committee. That bill, co-sponsored by Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, eventually died in the Senate.

“I have to face the reality that it will be hard to stop legislation with which I disagree,” Mr. Waxman said. “We will lose the vote in committee, we may even lose vote on House floor, but I will continue to be making the argument for the Senate, the administration and the American people.

“Passing a bill out of committee, even out of the House, does not produce a law,” the veteran lawmaker said. “That’s something I learned last year and the Republicans are going to learn this year.”

Mr. Waxman concluded his remarks by comparing the climate change issue to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

“We are at a pivotal time in which every member of Congress will decide whether they will be on the right side of history or the wrong side of history,” Mr. Waxman said. “Civil rights in the 1960s was a moral issue, and there was a right side and a wrong side. Climate change is an environmental issue. It is an economic issue. But it is also fundamentally a moral issue.”

He warned that if policy makers do not recognize the seriousness of the threat of climate change and fail to act, “history will not judge us kindly.”