Of the world's countries, the climate change denial industry is most powerful in the United States.[23][24] From 2015 to 2017 (after having already served from 2003 to 2007), the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works was chaired by oil lobbyist and climate change denier Jim Inhofe, who had previously called climate change "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people" and claimed to have debunked the alleged hoax in February 2015 when he brought a snowball with him in the Senate chamber and tossed it across the floor.[25] He was succeeded in 2017 by John Barrasso, who similarly said: "The climate is constantly changing.