Is Global Warming and Climate Change an important enough issue that there should be a special committee of the House of Representatives to deal with it?

Not according to incoming Republicans.

At the New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer reports that a spokesman for Republican Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) says they will kill the committee. Boehner will be Speaker of the House in January.

Slightly missing the point of what could be the single most important issue facing humanity in the coming century, spokesman Michael Steel (not Steele – he’s the head of the Republican National Committtee) said “The Select Committee on Global Warming was created by Democrats simply to provide political cover to pass their job-killing national energy tax.”

It’s almost as if he was reading the Onion, which reported (satirically) last month (via):

While several years have passed since global warming was considered the most pressing issue facing mankind, recent studies from the Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and basically any scientific report available on the issue confirmed that it is not only still happening, but might also be worth stopping. “Global warming, if you remember correctly, was the single greatest problem of our lifetime back in 2007 and the early part of 2008,” CGD president Nancy Birdsall said. “But then the debates over Social Security reform and the World Trade Center mosque came up, and the government had to shift its focus away from the dramatic rise in sea levels, the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, and the imminent destruction of our entire planet.”

These days, politics is almost beyond satire.

For more background on climate change and global warming: