At left, Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger and his pack of bodyguards enjoyed an afternoon on Sacramento’s excellent bike trails, showing that our national parks are our greatest pride and treasure.
At right, one of the governor’s five Hummers that he and his posse used to get there.
The planet thanks you for your patronage, Time Magazine’s Hero of the Environment 2008.
(Props to reader Ryan for the tip!)
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Schwarzenegger has been driving Humvees for 25 years and one of the reasons Time Magazine cites him as a “Hero of the Environment” is that “He’s had one Hummer tricked out to run on biofuels, and another on hydrogen.”
Do you have to drive a Toyota Prius to be a “Hero of the Environment”?
What about all the celebrities who drive to Van Nuys airport and hop on a Gulfstream IV that burns 510 gallons per hour? (http://www.sterlingaviation.com/Group/PopularAircraftPDFs/Gulfstream_IV_specs.pdf)
Schwarzenegger appears to have been nothing but good for California, and the state in general, would probably be better off it had listened to him back in 2006 when he predicted Califoria’s 2008 bankruptcy.
Thing is, Schwarzenegger lives in Brentwood — 380 miles from the governor’s office in Sacramento. Guess how he gets to work?
http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/green%20group%20upset%20by%20schwarzeneggers%20jet%20commute_1061889
Hey, you don’t mess with the Terminator! And it’s like someone else said, do you have to only drive a Prius to be good for the environment? That’s why I have a bicycle!
They need to put him in a tube like on “The Running Man”.
great post simon! and holly i was also gonna say he “commutes” to work by plane. did anyone else see his video from yesterday about the budget cuts when he had a huge ass knife in his hand? i was like ummm wtf?
To be fair, I can’t really call him out on this one. I love to hike, camp, rock climb, kayak, ect. Know how I get there? Big ass Chevy Blazer. Know why? If you’ve ever tried to strap pretty much any of the things necessary for the activities listed above onto the roof of a passenger car, or even tried to get said car out to the necessary places where these activities take place without getting stuck or snapping an axle, then you know damn well why I require a huge SUV.
Point is, being an outdoor guy requires the right vehicle regardless of your views on the environment – and a Prius sure as hell ain’t gonna hoof it up that mountain. What’s the point in saving the environment if you can’t even get out there to enjoy it? Then again, that small step in common sense there is the reason I’m a conservationist and not an environmentalist.
Well, that and I bathe.
Keep the hummer Arnie. Guess who drives more,gets more tickets and has more insurance claims? Hybrid owners. According to a group called Quality Planning, hybrid owners drive 25% more than regular car onwers. This clearly offsets any fuel savings. The group is suggesting that insurance companies offering hybrid discounts ditch those offers as hybrid owners are costing insurance companies more to cover. Self righteous drivers are bad drivers – go figure.
When is the last time you saw Al “We are all going to die” Gore riding a bike enjoying nature? How about taking a walking into town?
Scott – you are so right. There is no way to fit 4+ bikes on a car and have everything working when you get there.
Yeah, I should’ve included the whole quote.
Arnold’s point is you don’t have to “live like monks” to be walk lightly on the earth.
“Guilt doesn’t work”, and you can have a Jetski burning fuel on your holidays or be a Diet Coke drinker creating mounds of aluminum cans every month, or be a Humvee lover for 25 years, and still enjoy everything you do, while still being more “environmentally friendly”, if not “environmentally sacrificing”.
I’ll stop before I start to sound too much like Gordon Gekko.
For the record, the governor may own five Hummers, but only one was used to transport himself and his posse.
The horizontal bumper sticker (obscured by the front tire of his red bike), says “vegetable oil”, so this is Arnold’s Hummer that runs on Vegetable Oil (per 60 minutes at
http://www.sling.com/video/show/99880/99/Arnold’s-%22Green%22-Humvee
Picture of bumper sticker:
http://i26.tinypic.com/264l16e.jpg
How many other Governors do you know who pay their own commute costs and refuse a salary, much less spend a couple hundred thousand of their own money to underwrite the costs of converting their own vehicles to Hydrogen?
I’d say this hypocrisy was busted.
25 years of Humvee driving, and spending hundreds of thousands trying to make his habits more environmentally friendly is just not hypocrisy.
We can agree to disagree, Fortunate Son. I don’t see what paying his own commuting costs has to do with whether it’s green to commute to work by private jet in the first place. Simon’s frequently criticized Al Gore for the same thing, and buying carbon credits is akin to paying indulgences to the Pope, in my opinion. My point isn’t that you need to drive a Prius to be an environmentalist, but if you’re set on “living large,” your chief concern isn’t really your carbon footprint.
I still think Al Gore is a bigger hypocrite as he has done even less than the Govenator and he is suppose to be the spokesperson for WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE! At least Arnold exercises
Agreed, but Schwarzenegger’s point is that even if you are “living large”, you can be concerned about treading lightly on the earth, and we’ll also have to agree to disagree again on the validity of one’s “Carbon footprint” as a measure of that, as the whole carbon offsets market pushed in Congress in 2005 has pretty much been exposed as a complete scam.
Its easy to be green if someone else is paying the bill.
Take Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings, who used your taxdollars to pay $25,000 a year to lease a Lexus LS Hybrid, which costs $43,672 more than the non-hybrid version of the same vehicle.(http://www.lexus.com/models/LSh/features/pricing.html).
That decision was pilloried in the media, and had Schwarzenegger used taxdollars to make a Hybrid Humvee, I wouldn’t be defending him right now.
As GM no longer exists and Humvee has now been sold to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd., I’ll look foward to your “Arnold… Patriot, or sleeper agent for the Red Chinese” post. (kidding).
He’s emitting a lot of that poison, carbon dioxide, while riding that bike.
FS, What a great conspiracy theory “Arnold… Patriot, or sleeper agent for the Red Chinese”. If I wasn’t so paranoid, I might buy into that one!
They’re either hypocrites or they’re not. Why drive even one Hummer at 8-10 mpg just to pretend like you’re saving the environment by biking around?
Yeah I’d give him a pass too if he said… “Hey whatever, I’ll drive what I want and do what I want, and you can do the same.” But you know he wants to do what he wants, and limit what YOU do. How do I know this? Because he’s a politician. Well that and my enormous brain.
I think I read an issue of Esquire where he buys carbon credits for his commute to Sacramento.
Huh. So I just spent two weeks dry camping. Other than our cells, we were off the grid.
But it was 4.5 hours in a Chrysler Aspen to get there, another 6 home (don’t ask, it involved a camper battery, a rabid squirrel, and a brake cable).
So do I need to purchase carbon offsets or does my stay in Canadian hell cover me?
Who’m I kiddin? Of course I need the offsets, because everything requires offsets.