Not to mention gloriously ignorant of the nation’s current fiscal and economic woes, as Inhofe reminded Hertsgaard:

When you ask that question “what if you’re wrong?” Stop and think about it. What if you are wrong and we pass the largest tax increase in the history of America to do something that is not justified. I remember, and I use this in testimony. In 1993… the Clinton/Gore tax increase was the largest tax increase at that point in history. All marginal rates, gasoline, everything went up. That was a total of a $30 billion tax increase. This would be ten times that great. This would be somewhere between $300 and $400 billion tax increase. That admittedly, now listen to this very carefully, according to the director at the EPA would not have any effect on emissions because that would only be in the United States. As jobs went to places like India and China and Mexico and maybe places that they don’t have any emissions requirements and actually increase emissions. So should we do that when we know and you know and everyone out here knows that it would not reduce worldwide emissions? Period. We all know this.

Watch the whole interview here:

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And as Tim Blair spotted, that botched ambush came hot on the heels of this unfortunate moment in January:

“CANCELED: HOT—Mark Hertsgaard in Conversation with NASA’s James Hansen — Due to snow storms in New York City, this event has been canceled.  Please check back again for a new date and time.”

Add that to the Politico distancing themselves from a would-be ambush journalist, and all in all, not a good couple of months for Hertsgaard or for the more doomsday-obsessed segment of environmentalism. But then, when you’re obsessed that the world’s going to end in a decade (as Al Gore said half a decade ago), it must always feel like the roof is about to cave in.