OK, this is mostly off-topic, but the Washington Post has an excellent feature on The Onion. Did you know The Onion has “160 full-time employees nationwide.” I didn’t think so!

Be warned — the article is relatively serious journalism and not that funny. So, if you want Onion humor you’ll have to go to “Wildfire Somehow Rages Back Into Control” or “Ford Reintroduces Model T Line That Made It Great,” which has the following great figure:

In a weekend interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) talks of the impact of global warming on California’s wildfires. Climate change is lowering snowpack in the Rockies and increasing droughts, heat waves and lightning strikes, stoking more intense fires over a longer season:

Through global warming, we have now fire season all year round. We used to have fire seasons only in the fall, but now the fire seasons start in February already, so this means that we have to really upgrade, have more resources, more fire engines, more manpower and all of this, which does cost extra money.

Watch it:

By May of this year wildfires were raging at levels traditionally seen only in July. After California’s driest spring in 114 years of recordkeeping, 1700 wildfires set a record 840,000 acres ablaze from June to July, costing the state more than $200 million. Fires in the past month, the worst in the Los Angeles area in four decades, have destroyed over 1000 homes. “Through last week, 1.24 million acres burned in California, the most since 1970, when consistent, modern records were first kept.”

Last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called for the Bush administration to end delays in assistance, saying, “As the climate warms and wildland fires become bigger and more intense, a rapid response is critical to prevent the spread of fires.”

Yes, I understand that Shellenberger and Nordhaus are desperate for any media attention they can get, which is why they go after Democrats and not Republicans, see “S&N go after Obama by recycling GOP talking points.”

And everybody understands S&N don’t get global warming at all ever since Nordhaus made his amazing admission on this blog, “We have argued for five years now that efforts to build the clean energy economy needed to be centrally defined around energy independence not global warming.”

So of course it really isn’t a surprise that they have attacked Al Gore for the umpteenth time (see below). It is a bit of a surprise that they write “cap and trade regulations, which would cap greenhouse gas emissions and allow companies to trade reductions, cannot work in the U.S.” It’s not a surprise they believe that, only that they have admitted it in print (see “What exactly is the difference between Lomborg and Shellenberger & Nordhaus?“)

Yes, I know that everyone thinks too much ink is wasted on these publicity hounds. Me, too. That’s why I respond to them only when some mainstream outlet publishes their nonsense, in this case the once respectable New Republic, which decided to print S&N’s purely fictional reimagining, “A New Inconvenient Truth: Al Gore just updated his prescription for fighting climate change. Now other environmentalists have to follow his lead.”

Huh? Updated his prescription? Did you miss something? No. S&N made up something. Gore, you may recall, recently wrote an excellent op-ed laying out his specific vision for an “emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis” (see Gore lays out his energy and climate plan, disses “clean coal”).

Gore repeated his long-standing argument for aggressive investment in clean technology. And he repeated his long-standing plea for a carbon price and cap & trade system:

Fifth, the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world’s efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty that caps global carbon dioxide emissions and encourages nations to invest together in efficient ways to reduce global warming pollution quickly, including by sharply reducing deforestation.

Dog bites man, really. But not to S&N, who spin Gore’s gold into straw:

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The WSJ blog reprints an incredibly dumb “You can’t handle the truth!” memo from uber-peaker Robert Hirsch.

Yes, the author of the seminal 2005 study funded by the Bush Energy Department on “Peaking of World Oil Production” has written a memo “To The Peak Oil Community,” recommending that group “minimize its effort to awaken the world to the near-term dangers of world oil supply.”

Well, I’m not on that distribution list, so instead of endorsing Hirsch’s inanity, I’ll endorse his original conclusion:

The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.

So why is a guy with such foresight now urging temporary blindness? Read his dopey memo and see if you can figure it out:

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Considered one of the most “brutal and bitter” bouts in the history of boxing politics, the epic struggle of the stinging bee and floating butterfly ends this week. E&E Daily expalins [OK, interesting Freudian typo, which I'm going to leave in -- heck, it might become my preferred spelling]:

House Democrats will select their leader for the Energy and Commerce Committee this week following an intense two-week lobbying battle between two of the party’s most senior members, Reps. John Dingell of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California.

OK, maybe it’s not one of the greatest fights of all time:

Both Ali and Frazier fought to their absolute limit and maybe beyond. Joe’s eyes were still shut hours after the fight. Ali’s body showed conspicuous signs of the battle, with hematomas and bruises and swellings everywhere, as a result of “punches that would have knocked down a house” as Joe later put it. Ali is supposed to have told Angelo Dundee yet during the fight that this was “the closest to dying” he had ever been.

But either Dingell or Waxman is leaving with a losin’ bruisin’. Here is the rest of the story:

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The Global and Mail reported last week:

Less than 24 hours after the election of Barack Obama, Canadian cabinet ministers begin calling for a pact that would keep emissions down while protecting Alberta’s oil sands projects

This is Canada’s version of “Two tens for a five?”

Seriously, Canada, just a couple of days into his transition, and already you’re trying to play our Prez by getting him to high five (fist bump?) the “biggest global warming crime ever seen”? Back off, dudes!

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is proposing to strike a joint climate-change pact with president-elect Barack Obama, an initiative that would seek to protect Alberta’s oil sands projects from potentially tough new U.S. climate-change rules by offering a secure North American energy supply….

A Canada-U.S. climate-change pact could tie those issues together by adopting common standards and mechanisms such as a market-based emission trading system, while acknowledging the important contribution the oil sands make to North American supplies and the need to adopt technologies that would reduce oil sands emissions.

What the Obama team has acknowledged to date is the important contribution the tar sands make to global warming.

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