Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger believes the messaging that went into making body building all the rage in the 1980s can also be used to make environmentalism cool, too.
Activists should be focusing on how pollution affects public health and less on the global warming aspect of environmentalism, Schwarzenegger, a former body builder who made it big in Hollywood, told attendees Monday at climate summit in Bonn, Germany
“In fitness, in bodybuilding it took me decades, but now there is a gymnasium everywhere, every hotel in the world has a gymnasium, every military station, every university, every school,” Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said about his decade-long goal of making body sculpting a favorite pastime.
“Everyone has weight rooms because we penetrated through and told them why weight training is important, and the same thing will happen with the environment movement,” he added, noting that the same message used to hype up fitness can be used to warn people about pollution.
Schwarzenegger also noted the increasingly insular nature of environmentalism – activists and academics stuck inside a bubble know what carbon emissions are and how they affect the environmental, according to the Terminator actor, but ordinary folks get lost in the weeds.
“You talk about climate change, it sounds good, a lot of people know about it within this bubble, but the majority of people, ask them in a poll, they don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Schwarzenegger said.
He got some grief during the presidential election from Republican circles for supporting Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s presidential bid, because of their shared belief that man-made global warming is an imminent threat.
Kasich, a Republican, repeatedly used his belief in climate change during the campaign to create a potential point of difference between himself and Trump, who once called climate change a “hoax” created by the Chinese.
Schwarzenegger told reporters earlier this year that he did not vote for President Donald Trump because of the former real estate mogul’s pro-coal power campaign position.
“The reason why I didn’t want to vote for him is simply because just along the issue that he wanted to bring coal back,” he told CNN host Van Jones in April. He could not square his environmental advocacy with then-presidential candidate Trump’s promise.
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