Why the Terminator is wrong to chide those who whine about the environment

Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to the land of his birth last week. He stood before an audience of dignitaries at the Austrian World Summit in Vienna and told them to stop whining about the US Government’s irresponsible position on environmental issues.

I caught a newsclip of the speech on TV and wondered why his words had such an impact. For the friends that forwarded me clips, perhaps the youngster in them felt called out personally by the legendary hero of the Terminator and Total Recall. To those like me, who’d never been given to the hero worship of make-believe, he-men, perhaps it was something deeper. There’s something belittling about having your moments of frustration challenged by a guy who overcame the odds of a thick Austrian accent and what some doubters in Hollywood considered an unpronounceable surname, to become one of the most well-known actors in the world and the elected governor of the richest state in the United States.

It felt as if we’d been jabbed in the chest with a finger as he sneered, ‘You can’t just sit around and make excuses because one guy in a very nice White House on Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t agree with you!”

Yet in the face of the environmental scepticism of the most powerful government administration in the world, it is not unreasonable for those who feel strongly about environmental issues to feel dispirited.

We whiners know that the task of averting environmental degradation may demand nothing less than a fundamental change in the way our global economic system with all its networks of production and its supply chains, work. It must therefore to be government led. We cannot rely on well-intentioned individuals dotted around the world. The job demands nothing less than the concerted efforts of all governments to influence their citizens to make sacrifices in the interest of future inhabitants of the planet. Given our human natures, this will be a challenging undertaking. And it is already late. In all this, the ambition of the most influential leader in the world, the individual with the most leverage in international trade deals, really does matter. The fact that he believes that ‘climate change is a hoax and oil and coal is the future,’ is reason for serious concern.

His belief has already given rise to executive orders that have rolled back federal climate initiatives. In less than six months in office, Blackrock, one of the three largest asset managers in the world, scaled back support for ESG shareholder proposals with its CEO declaring that the very term ESG had become politically weaponised. Wells Fargo has scrapped its goal of achieving net zero emissions across its financed portfolio by 2025.

Major US financial institutions such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have withdrawn from net zero climate initiatives, and the contagion has spread to European and Canadian banks as too many of them they have begun to re-examine their position.

The influence the President exerts in shifting institutional behaviour, shaping public sentiment and on putting an untimely brake on the hard-earned momentum achieved in the environmental space, cannot be overstated.

We whiners recognise that the climate sceptic utterances of the most influential political administration will now find fertile ground. High inflation and the increased anxiety about the global economic outlook make even the ordinary people that Arnold Schwarzenegger exhorts to persevere with their activism, less willing to accept the remedial steps to avert environmental disaster. They are real people with real anxieties. And straightened economic circumstances will deter them from making the sacrifices necessary to transition to a new, less environmentally rapacious economic system. It will seduce the well intentioned among them to the passive play of continuing on the destructive path while simply praying for that cheap technological solution to our energy problem.

All this would reduce the most powerful optimist to whining.