As we noted on Wednesday, global warming doomsday activist Mark Hertsgaard’s ambush interview of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) went so badly, that Inhofe uploaded the complete video of his exchange to his own Website. But watch the start of the clip, where Hertsgaard identifies himself as being with Politico.com.

At the time, that struck us as being a bit odd. Politico frequently toes the Democratic party line, and has had several members associated with the leftwing JournoList that colluded with then-Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. But I can’t recall it going all in on the global cooling/warming/climate change/climate chaos (or whatever it’s called this week) issue. Based on Hertsgaard claiming on-camera that he was associated with the Politico, I thought perhaps that had changed with his hiring, where’s he’s contributed at least one rather strident op-ed.

At the Daily Caller, Caroline May writes that the Politico is pushing back from Hertsgaard’s on-camera claim that he was with that news outlet:

The best way to get the attention of a lawmaker: Say you’re from a legitimate news outlet and proceed with your questioning.

A great way to discredit yourself: Lie about your affiliation with a news outlet and proceed with your questioning.

Climate activist Mark Hertsgaard, it appears, failed to get a memo containing the second piece of wisdom. In recently released footage of Hertsgaard’s ambush of Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe this week, the activist gets Inhofe’s attention by claiming to be with Politico.

The problem? Hertsgaard is not with the D.C. insider publication at all.

Dan Berman, energy editor at Politico, told The Daily Caller that while Hertsgaard has written one opinion article for them, he was not and is not affiliated with Politico.

“Mr. Hertsgaard is not a POLITICO reporter or employee and we have asked him not to portray himself as one,” Berman wrote in an email to TheDC.

Well, that’s good to see.

Hertsgaard lives in Northern California; his wife is a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission vice president, according to this Website. On February 12, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Hertsgaard was planning to jet from California to DC to challenge what he calls the “climate crooks,” the “politicians, propagandists and fossil fuel companies that have funded a misinformation campaign,” the Chronicle quoted him as saying.

(The gushing piece in the Chronicle is also a reminder of how that paper could ignore the headlines of the year then-Senator Obama calmly dropped in their lap three years earlier, when he told that he’d bankrupt the coal industry and “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”)

Bryan Preston noted at the Tatler that Hertsgaard’s crusade seems like something out of the pre-Hide the Decline past, not to mention, as we noted, rather hypocritical in the wake of the eco-doomsday crowd’s puritanical paranoia in recent years of excessive jet travel.