Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined Governor Jerry Brown in San Francisco at the signing of an extension to the state’s cap-and-trade law on Tuesday, warning Republicans to “stop lying to the people” on climate change.
“Don’t those conservative Republicans get the message? And can’t they just think about it for a second and say, ‘maybe we should stop lying to the people.’ Stop lying to the people. Stop it,” he said, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Schwarzenegger originally signed AB 32 in 2006, which critics say has done nothing to help the climate, while raising energy costs for businesses in the state, and enriching politically-favored “green” companies. That law was set to expire in 2020.
Thanks to Brown and to eight defections by Republicans in the state legislature, the cap-and-trade system will last until 2030.
Brown was dramatic in his description of the new law and the climate change challenge: “If we don’t do something about it, it is the end of the world as we know it,” he said, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Schwarzenegger hailed the new law as a symbol of bipartisanship, the Mercury New reported: ““We have a functional government here in California where Democrats and Republicans work together. … This is a very important message for Washington, where both of the parties cannot work together — I hope they learn something from this.”
He added that although President Donald Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, that withdrawal applied to Trump alone and not to the rest of the country.
“America is fully in the Paris agreement. There’s only one man that dropped out,” Schwarzenegger said, as quoted by Southern California Public Radio. “America did not drop out.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.