Film star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has released an impassioned video reaction to President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, revealing total ignorance of the content of the agreement.
After watching Schwarzenegger’s video, in fact, it becomes immediately evident that the actor and former politician has never read the Paris climate accord and has no idea what it says.
BREAKING: Arnold Schwarzenegger has a blunt message for Donald Trump. #ParisAgreement pic.twitter.com/YI8fcxEeox
— ATTN: (@attn) June 2, 2017
“President Trump says he’s pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. My message to you, Mr. President, is that as a public servant, and especially as a president, your first and most important responsibility is to protect the people,” Schwarzenegger begins.
He then proceeds to chronicle the negative effects of pollution in the United States.
“Two hundred thousand people die every year in the U.S. from air pollution, and half of our rivers and streams are too polluted for our health,” he says.
“We can’t sit back and just do nothing while people are getting sick and dying, especially when you know there’s another way.”
Schwarzenegger goes on to suggest that without the Paris accord, we will face a “dirty energy future with asthma, emphysema and cancer.”
The trouble is, President Trump would heartily agree with Schwarzenegger’s point (while perhaps debating the exact statistics). According to President Trump, clean air and water are exactly the issues that the EPA should be dealing with.
But this has nothing to do with the Paris climate accord.
Nowhere does the 25-page agreement deal with battling air pollution or cleaning up rivers and streams. It deals specifically with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), with the stated objective of combatting “global warming.”
Carbon dioxide is not a toxic gas. No one is dying from CO2 “air pollution,” or from rivers and streams polluted with carbon dioxide. Some climate scientists, in fact, have argued that more carbon dioxide, not less, would be beneficial to the environment and to humanity. Growers regularly pump it into their greenhouses to achieve healthier, heartier plants.
Everything Schwarzenegger mentions in his short video—from air pollution to clean water to asthma, emphysema and cancer—is completely unrelated to the President’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord.
So maybe the next time he decides to criticize the decision to get the U.S. out of the Paris accord he should read the document first.
Meanwhile, he should probably think about terminating that video.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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