Al Gore testified before Congress today to beat the drum on the global warming issue. The former Senator and Vice President is getting a lot of press coverage on his issue after receiving an Oscar for the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" which warned about climate change.

However, both he and his advocates in the Democratic Party are ignoring the elephant in the room, namely the toxic combination of America's skyrocketing population growth and our above-average consumption of the earth's resources. By rapidly increasing the number of Americans, Washington makes the United States an even bigger engine of pollution and greenhouse gases. Immigrants don't come for the better recycling opportunities: they want a high-consumption American lifestyle.

Washington liberals exhibit the same monumental denial that we Sierra Club members who are also population realists confronted when we tried to return the organization to its earlier position of US environmental responsibility, i.e., maintaining a population level that correlates with the land's available resources. Instead, the Stalinist Sierra Club jabbers about sustainability but supports open borders as passionately as Bill Gates.

Citizens who care about the environment should support responsible development in home countries using programs like microlending, rather than going along with the continued immigration-fueled domestic population explosion.

Washington can't have it both ways. It can work to lower emissions in this country, or it can open the border to millions more immigrants who want a resource-consuming American lifestyle.