Thursday, April 12, 2007

Schwarzenegger urges greenies to get 'sexy'

energy


California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has told environmentalists they needed to stop nagging and make their cause sexy, likening it to bodybuilding's evolution from a weird pursuit to mainstream.
"Bodybuilding used to have a very sketchy image", the former bodybuilding champion told an environmental forum at Georgetown University.
"It had fanatics and it had weird people, but we changed that ... it became sexy, attractive," he said.
"Like bodybuilders, environmentalists were thought of as kind of weird and fanatics also, you know, the serious tree huggers," Governor Schwarzenegger said.
He said those pushing for limits on greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution were not on the fringe, but in the centre of the debate on global warming, adding that the environmental movement needs to get to the point where it "is no longer seen as a nag or as a scold".
"We have to make it mainstream, we have to make it sexy, we have to make it attractive so that everyone wants to participate," he said.
In Washington to meet with the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein of California, the Republican Governor said politicians who oppose acting to curb greenhouse gas emissions will endanger themselves.
"Your political base will melt away as surely as the polar ice caps," he said.
"You will become a political penguin on a smaller and smaller ice floe that is drifting out to sea. Goodbye, my little friend. That's what's going to happen."
-Reuters
Print Email

No comments: