Suddenly, there may be a solid link between two of the greatest American political debates of the past decade — illegal immigration and climate change.

“Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” – Julius Caesar, 62 B.C.

In the midst of the fall election-season headlines, the single best California budget move of the last few years got almost no public attention.

The scene was the waiting area for a flight to Los Angeles from what was then called Houston Intercontinental Airport (the airfield had not yet been renamed for ex-President George Bush pere). The date was mid-2000, before most Americans had heard of either Osama bin Laden or Barack Obama.

For most of this century, Republicans running for high office in California have proclaimed that only they can stem the tide of jobs and businesses leaving California, a phenomenon they blame on the Democrats they often say have controlled state government for decades.

Arnold Schwarzenegger made many promises while running for governor in 2003 and kept one. He made many more during the more than seven years his smoking tent sat outside his office in the state Capitol’s “horseshoe” suite of executive offices – and kept virtually none.

Cynics derided him as Gov. Moonbeam, reviving the tag applied in 1977 by the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko, who later apologized for it. They said he was too old at 72 to become governor again. Jerry Brown’s critics said he waged too passive of a campaign and didn’t hire enough campaign staff (when the going got serious around Labor Day, he had all of 12 paid staffers).

A lot of the folks who supported Prop. 23, the soundly defeated plan to suspend California’s climate change law, insisted they were doing so at least in part to preserve the state’s stature as a leader in a variety of industries, from computer chips to gasoline refining.

There is no doubt that Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has acted at least somewhat more responsibly in the wake of the September natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno than BP, the former British Petroleum, did after its springtime offshore oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Who knew how high feelings now run on the possibility of expanding use of nuclear power in California? But no column in this space during the last 30 years has drawn the impassioned response of one published last spring, which argued that atomic power is not a viable answer to the problems of either global warming or our dependence on foreign oil.