Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that his next mission will be taking oil companies to court “for knowingly killing people all over the world.”
The former California governor, as well as one of the loudest global environmental activists, announced his plan on Sunday during a live recording of POLITICO’s Off-Message podcast, revealing that he’s in talks with several private law firms and preparing a public push around the effort.
“This is no different from the smoking issue. The tobacco industry knew for years and years and years and decades that smoking would kill people, would harm people and create cancer, and was hiding that fact from the people and denied it. Then eventually they were taken to court and had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because of that,” Schwarzenegger said. “The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study that there would be global warming happening because of fossil fuels, and on top of it that it would be risky for people’s lives, that it would kill.”
Schwarzenegger added that the timeline for filing is still in process and it will probably be revealed at the major environmental conference which he will host in May in Vienna.
“We’re going to go after them, and we’re going to be in there like an Alabama tick. Because to me, it’s absolutely irresponsible to know that your product is killing people and not have a warning label on it, like tobacco,” he said. “Every gas station on it, every car should have a warning label on it, every product that has fossil fuels should have a warning label on it.”
Politico also reported that Schwarzenegger hopes that at the very least, this would raise awareness around fossil fuels and encourage people to look toward alternative fuels and clean cars. During his speech, Schwarzenegger also accused the oil companies of committing first-degree murder by hiding the truth from the public.
“I don’t think there’s any difference: If you walk into a room and you know you’re going to kill someone, it’s first-degree murder; I think it’s the same thing with the oil companies,” he said.
Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger responded to President Donald Trump’s latest attack of him, which was delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, for having “failed when he did the show,” a reference to the former governor’s rocky one-season stint as the new host of “The Apprentice” on NBC last year.
“I never know really why the Russians make him say certain things,” Schwarzenegger said. “It’s beyond me. Why do you think he says those things? He’s supposed to be very busy.”
Later in the interview, he got back to slamming Trump, joking that the script of the new “Terminator” movie, which Schwarzenegger is set to start filming in June and is expected to be released next year, had to be rewritten to include Trump.
“The T-800 model that I play, he’s traveling back in time to 2019 to get Trump out of prison,” Schwarzenegger joked.
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