Arnie drives a Hummer. And not just one. At one time the governor had a fleet of eight of the brutes to ferry him from photo op to photo op. He also has a private jet, which can be seen whooshing over the beach at Santa Monica as it takes him from his Los Angeles home to his office in Sacramento, 650km to the north.
Arnie does do his bit for the environment. At weekends he rides a motor-cycle. But this being Arnold, it is no enviro-friendly Vespa. His mount of choice is a gas-guzzling Harley, which — until it emerged that he didn’t have a licence — he liked to ride up and down Pacific Coast Highway.
But this is California. Forget the reality. Dig the artifice. Arnold has made an announcement, showing ”extraÂÂordinary” leadership, as his new pal Tony Blair put it. The seventh-largest economy in the world, the 12th-largest source of greenhouse gas, will put its muscle behind an initiative to fight the effects of climate change.
This, obviously, is a good thing. CaliÂÂfornia, for all its reputation as a freeway-strewn, car-happy state, is the home of American environmentalism. The state has a Scot, John Muir, to thank for its environmentalist heritage, a beardy, tweedy type who championed the then-untamed wildernesses of California, bequeathing the nation the splendour of Yosemite and founding the leading environmental organisation,the Sierra Club.
Since Muir’s death in 1914 California has grappled with the contradictions of its love for the environment — they are truly serious about their hiking here — and its love of aggressive expansion. The state’s colonisation of wilderness and desert has created some of the greatest national parks in the country, from the splendours of Yosemite to the Sierras, to the rugged northern coastline. The flipside is the enormous environmental cost: poisoned lakes, dry rivers and flooded valleys are all casualties of the creation of the seventh-largest economy in the world.
Equally importantly, the environment is a potent political issue. For Arnold, as with Blair, the environment also provides him with some easy political points, enabling a Republican governor facing a re-election to distance himself from an unpopular Republican president. — Â