Yesterday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took a well-deserved shot at Sarah Palin for her ditzy Washington Post op-ed denying that climate change is caused by human beings:

“You have to ask: what was she trying to accomplish?” Schwarzenegger, in Copenhagen for the international climate change summit, told the Financial Times. “Is she really interested in this subject or is she interested in her career and in winning the (Republican presidential) nomination? You have to take all these things with a grain of salt.”

Schwarzenegger won’t say it outright, but I will — she’s pandering to the tea party base, and spouting climate change denial nonsense because she knows it’s what they want to hear from her.

Today, Palin is firing back in that inimitable (read: dishonest) way of hers: Sarah Palin: Greener Than Thou? | Facebook.

Why is Governor Schwarzenegger pushing for the same sorts of policies in Copenhagen that have helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? Perhaps he will recall that I live in our nation’s only Arctic state and that I was among the first governors to create a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with climate change. While I and all Alaskans witness the impacts of changes in weather patterns firsthand, I have repeatedly said that we can’t primarily blame man’s activities for those changes. And while I did look for practical responses to those changes, what I didn’t do was hamstring Alaska’s job creators with burdensome regulations so that I could act “greener than thou” when talking to reporters.

Eugene Robinson pulls up Palin’s record (oopsie!) to show that she’s not telling the truth about what she “repeatedly said:” Palin’s own ‘Climate-gate’.

Sarah Palin is such a cold-eyed skeptic about the Copenhagen summit on climate change that it’s no surprise she would call on President Obama not to attend. After all, Obama might join other leaders in acknowledging that warming is a “global challenge.” He might entertain “opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” He might even explore ways to “participate in carbon-trading markets.”

Oh, wait. Those quotes aren’t from some smug Euro-socialist manifesto. They’re from an administrative order Palin signed in September 2007, as governor of Alaska, establishing a “sub-Cabinet” of top state officials to develop a strategy for dealing with climate change.

Back then, Palin was the governor of a state where “coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires, and other changes are affecting, and will continue to affect, the lifestyles and livelihoods of Alaskans,” as she wrote. Faced with that reality, she sensibly formed the high-level working group to chart a course of action.

“Climate change is not just an environmental issue,” wrote Palin. “It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans.”