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.
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:
[youtube 1vmoErFbHao]
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.
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