Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Schwarzenegger household green plan: short showers, hydrogen Hummers
Here’s some advice for Californians who think Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate change policy goes too far: just be happy you’re not his kid.
Before he became a body builder, before he was the Terminator, and before he turned into the Governator, it turns out that Arnold was the youngest in a family that had no running water and relied on an outhouse. That’s what he told fourth graders who innocently asked about how he spoke to his kids.
“I have major fights with my kids,” he responded, quickly segueing into the difference between post-World War European poverty and the Golden State.
“We had kind of a system where we carried the water from 200 yards away from the well, to our house upstairs to the second floor where we lived, and then my father would wash himself first, and then my mother would wash herself, and then my brother would wash himself in the same water, and then I would wash myself, and it was all dirty, because I was the youngest. So that’s how I grew up because conservation was big in Europe. Especially since I grew up after the Second World War. There was no food, there was little electricity, there were blackouts left and right, there was nothing. After the war was worse than during the war. So we had absolutely nothing,” he said.
California gas stations defy new pollution rule
Wednesday is the deadline for California’s gas stations to install sophisticated nozzles and hoses to control vapor emissions at the pump, and the Los Angeles Times reports that some one in five station owners are in open defiance of the new state order.
Gas station owners say that the new equipment is so expensive that buying it during the worst economic slump in decades would put them out of business.
