Arnold: Xtreme Green Muscle Machine
“The muscle guys, they have this thing: ‘I don’t want to be seen in the little, feminine car’.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Arnie spoke to Newsweek magazine recently about muscling in on the environmental bandwagon. He was on shaky ground with the environmentalists before his Hummers went green. Now he runs his muscle cars on biofuel and is on shaky ground with right-wing American shock-jock, Rush Limbaugh. Asta la vista, Rush. Post-partisan politics is a whole new ballgame. Arnie’s commited to guilt-free conservationism and says it’s easy being green.
“We don’t have to take away the cars from the people. The SUVs, the Hummers and the muscle cars. No, that formula is a formula for failure,” he said to the Council on Foreign Relations Thursday. “Instead, what we have to do is make those muscle cars and those SUVs and those Hummers environmentally muscular.”
According to a CNN report, the California League of Conservation Voters is pleased Schwarzenegger is putting his money where his mouth is. He’s still driving Hummers, but has converted them to hydrogen fuel
“The environmental movement across the country… [and] in the state of California is grateful that he’s taking this issue on and being so visible about it,” a league spokesman said.
The former bodybuilding champ and Hollywood icon knows something about being visible. Perhaps the Austrian-born governor’s knowledge that he will never take Capitol Hill has motivated Arnie to take the role of Al Gore’s, ahem, right hand man, and perhaps he sees a key role for himself in Washington on an environmental platform. Either way, Arnie’s set to become the next environmental heavyweight.
In an effort to demonstrate environmentally sound options for even the most muscle-bound American cars, he recently collaborated with rapper Xzibit on MTV’s reality show, Pimp My Ride, to convert a gas-guzzling Chevy Impala into a mean green muscle machine that runs on biodiesel with a 800 HP engine, the same one in Arnie’s magic hummers (premiers April 22). That there are environmentally sound options for even the most muscle-bound American cars is a message guaranteed to cross the partisan divide.
“You have to make it sexy. You have to make it attractive so that everyone wants to participate,” Schwarzenegger said in an address at Georgetown University.
The Austrian Oak said tree-huggers should take a lesson from bodybuilders.
“Like bodybuilders, environmentalists were also kind of thought of as weird, strange and fanatic and kind of serious tree-huggers, as you know. Environmentalists were no fun.”
In addition to travelling green himself, the Governator has muscled in on the conservation issue by signing two first-in-the-nation laws in California, one to radically curb emissions and the other to cut carbon content in transportation fuel. He warns other politicians to get on the environmental bandwagon, or else.
“Your political base will melt away as surely as the polar ice caps — I can guarantee you of that,” Schwarzenegger said. “You will become a political penguin on a smaller and smaller ice floe, drifting out to sea. Goodbye, my little friend.”
Good to hear Ah-nold’s still got the gift of the gab.
