Endless forecasts of impending climate peril built on floods, fires, droughts, pestilience, and rising sea levels as favored by “climate action heroes” are “wearing the public out,” former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned Thursday.
The Hollywood actor was addressing attendeees who had flown in from all over the world to be at the Austrian World Summit, a climate conference he co-hosted with Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen in Vienna.
The annual event, launched five years ago by Schwarzenegger, aims to highlight “concrete solutions and measures from global decision-makers” in response to the challenge of “climate change.”
He told those present to avoid “constant alarm which cannot be sustained” and instead build a “ground-up movement” that shone a light on pollution, including fossil fuels, as the globe’s single biggest threat.
He argued activists need to zero in on one message: “Pollution is enemy No. 1 … it is the very thing that causes climate change.”
Watch below:
Schwarzenegger warned that with the onslaught of news coverage of potential flooded cities, burning forests and rising seas, “Is it any wonder people are confused or tuned out?”
He said the barrage of warnings have provoked “constant alarm which cannot be sustained’’ among the general public, before continuing his theme:
We should build a ground-up movement and educate the public so they know about the dangers that lie ahead. It’s nothing to do with politics – it is that we should get rid of pollution – because that kills people.
[…]
If pollution is created by humans, it can be solved by humans, we can kill it.
Those who heard his ministrations included a long line of politicians, business leaders and activists, as well as Greta Thunberg and Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon remotely via video link, Austria Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, UK government minister Alok Sharma, and Ford chief executive Jim Farley.
The Terminator star’s words built on previous climate warnings, including one delivered in 2017 that demanded a “grassroots revolution” after President Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, as Breitbart News reported.
He has also never backed away from offering his passing observations on the political climate in general.
This year’s summit is seen as a step on the path to the United Nations climate change conference, known as COP26, which will be held in Glasgow later this year.
Sky News reports India and China, two of the world’s biggest polluters, were not present in Vienna.
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