Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, burnishing his environmentalist credentials before a receptive crowd at the South-by-Southwest festival in Texas, announced he would sue American oil companies for “first degree murder” over their role behind “global warming.”
Interviewed by Politico, Schwarzenegger pontificated, “This is no different from the smoking issue. The tobacco industry knew for years and years and years and decades, that smoking would kill people, would harm people and create cancer, and were hiding that fact from the people and denied it. Then eventually they were taken to court and had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because of that.”
He continued, “The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study that there would be global warming happening because of fossil fuels, and on top of it that it would be risky for people’s lives, that it would kill.”
Schwarzenegger threatened, ““We’re going to go after them, and we’re going to be in there like an Alabama tick. Because to me it’s absolutely irresponsible to know that your product is killing people and not have a warning label on it, like tobacco. Every gas station on it, every car should have a warning label on it, every product that has fossil fuels should have a warning label on it. I don’t think there’s any difference: If you walk into a room and you know you’re going to kill someone, it’s first degree murder; I think it’s the same thing with the oil companies.”
This is all very interesting, especially as the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2006 that Schwarzenegger was not shy about taking contributions from Big Oil, citing his California Recovery Team collecting $500,000 apiece from independent oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens and Vail Drilling Co., plus $250,000 from Chevron Corp. and $50,000 from Shell Oil. Chevron gave $44,600 to Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign in late 2005 and early 2006.
Schwarzenegger also waxed eloquent about the #MeToo movement, despite his own alleged history of sexual harassment, lecturing, “It is about time. I think it’s fantastic. I think that women have been used and abused and treated horribly for too long, and now all of the elements came together to create this movement, and now finally puts the spotlight on this issue, and I hope people learn from that. You’ve got to take those things seriously. You’ve got to look at it and say, ‘I made mistakes. And I have to apologize.’ … We make mistakes, and we don’t take it seriously. And then when you really think about it, you say, ‘Maybe I went too far.’ You’ve got to be very sensitive about it, and you’ve got to think about the way that women feel — and if they feel uncomfortable, then you did not do the right thing.”
Commenting on the new “Terminator” movie in which he is expected to star, Schwarzenegger said, “The T-800 model that I play, he’s traveling back in time to 2019 to get Trump out of prison.”
.