Arnold Schwarzenegger has four words for the oil industry, and they’re not quite, “Hasta la vista, baby,” but they’re close: “See you in court.”
Action-movie star and former California Gov. Schwarzenegger told Politico in a podcast Sunday that he’s planning legal action against oil companies for “knowingly killing people all over the world.”
While Schwarzenegger did not have a concrete timetable for the legal action, he said that he’s spoken to a number of law firms about the prospect.
“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 were 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.”
While the actor-turned-politician was short on details about the potential filing, he said, “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…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.”
Schwarzenegger was an advocate for environmentalism during his tenure as governor, signing the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, and has continued to tout environmental efforts since leaving office in January 2011.