SOUNDING OFF:Harman's enviro thinking is backwards

On June 27, California State Senator Tom Harman of Huntington Beach threw a barbecue in Sacramento for a little-known, pernicious group of California activists who call themselves "Republicans for Environmental Protection," or "REP" for short.

REP fashions itself as the "green" wing of the Republican Party, citing Teddy Roosevelt (also a eugenics proponent who at one point quit the party), Barry Goldwater (a "conservationist" not a "preservationist") and Richard Nixon (not exactly a paragon of domestic conservatism) in an attempt at historically qualifying Republican support for the latest fad of environmental extremism being propagated by Al Gore and the American Left.

I say "environmental extremism" because we all -- myself included -- hope for a prosperous, clean, healthy environment, but most of us don't seek to achieve it by turning back time, exporting jobs, seizing private land, and worse. Unfortunately, that is precisely what REP — and their favorite State Senator, Tom Harman — advocate.

Given that they are private citizens, under most circumstances this wouldn't be a problem. However, because they exploit the political party I have been quite active in and they weaken its resolve in defense of ethical economic progress, I must protest.

As expected, while surfing REP's website, I found some of the group's latest press releases praised the widely discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) recent "report" on alleged anthropogenic global warming and Gov. Schwarzenegger's signature last fall of Assembly Bill 32, a measure that made California one of the most business- and consumer-hostile places on Earth.

In response to the former, REP furthers the erroneous assertion that, "the human role in global warming is 90 percent certain," and, "must prompt strong action by Congress and the administration." This, despite leading climate scientists, like University of Copenhagen's Bjarne Andresen, calmly explaining, "It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth."

Buddy Burke, president of the California Chapter of REP, praised AB 32 by alarmingly declaring the group was, "fully confident that California can lead the battle against global warming," in spite of the fact that while California is the world's sixth to seventh largest economy it is only responsible for about 1% of the so-called "greenhouse gases" emitted into the atmosphere.