I’m paraphrasing, albeit only slightly. Not that he has many fans left among grassroots conservatives, but in case there are still one or two, this ought to finish them off:

The California governor has become an environmental standard bearer for the Republican party, which is split on the merits of curbing emissions. Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, has attacked cap and trade and questioned any link between man-made emissions and global warming.

“You have to ask: what was she trying to accomplish?” said Mr Schwarzenegger. “Is she really interested in this subject or is she interested in her career and in winning the [Republican] nomination [for president]? You have to take all these things with a grain of salt.”

Actually, Palin-hater Eugene Robinson filled the better part of a column today with evidence of her interest in the subject as governor. If she’s all about pandering to tea-partiers, she could have declared that she’s “seen the light” and retracted her prior statements about the reality of climate change and the possibility that man is contributing to it. Instead, she’s apt to end up as something of a centrist on this issue in the GOP primaries, where Huck, Mitt, T-Paw a player to be named later will declare that the whole subject’s a fraud.

She came up in his interview with Stephanopoulos this morning too, mere hours before he told Copenhagen that he has his fingers crossed for “planetary transformation.” Click the image and skip ahead to -2:14. He seems to suggest that she’s an out-and-out climate-change denier, but it’s hard to tell since he doesn’t refer specifically to her in that part. It’s worth watching anyway, though, if only for the claim that environmentalism and economic growth can co-exist based on the happy economic example of, um, California. Exit question: This guy’s going to end up as The One’s climate-change czar as soon as he’s out of office, isn’t he?