The Green Giant

"Pimp My Ride" isn't the sort of television program one watches for a lesson in eco-consciousness. Each week on the MTV reality show, one lucky teenager's old clunker is transformed into an outrageously appointed dream car (imagine: a Ford Pinto with 600 horsepower, blinding chrome and hydraulic suspension that's the envy of every lowrider in your 'hood). Galpin Auto Sports in Van Nuys, where the cars are tricked out, is filled with row upon row of gleaming, vintage muscle cars—here a 1970 Ford GT two-seater (13mpg/city), there a 1968 Shelby GT 500 KR convertible (15mpg/city), each bearing a six-figure sticker price and a "gas-guzzler tax" of $1,300. For today's episode, "Pimp My Ride" has invited a man who knows a thing or two about muscle. Peering under the crimson and white hood of a pimped-out '65 Chevy Impala, Arnold Schwarzenegger all but caresses the new 800-horsepower engine, which has been overhauled to run on biodiesel for a special Earth Day episode of the show. "You can have an engine that's fast and furious and still reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 to 40 percent," Schwarzenegger declares for the cameras. "This is the future."

Once pilloried for driving his Hummer (he now has hydrogen and biodiesel models), Schwarzenegger is out to prove that environmentalism and hedonism can coexist. "That was the point of doing the show," he says later, over lunch. "To show people that biofuel is not like some wimpy feminine car, like a hybrid. Because the muscle guys, they have this thing: 'I don't want to be seen in the little, feminine car'."

That kind of talk might not sit well with the typical socially liberal environmentalist who belongs to the Sierra Club. But Arnold doesn't care. Re-elected and popular again in the polls thanks to his newfound "post-partisan" style, the Republican governor is peddling feel-good, consumer-friendly environmentalism that resonates not only with fluorescent-light-bulb-worshiping hybrid drivers, but also with big business and those who think "green" is a synonym for "Chicken Little." His faith in the power of technology and free markets to slow global warming is neither depressing nor polarizing. As a Republican, Schwarzenegger says, his environmentalism is easier to sell in some quarters. "I can pick up the phone and talk to a CEO and say 'You don't want your guys to fight that' easier than if I was someone known for going around talking about 'I want to protect this tree' or 'There's a fish I want to save.' They are not so suspicious."

His approach is a world away from Al Gore's alarming climate lecture, captured in the Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." (For the record, Schwarzenegger says he's deeply impressed with Gore's work: he even popped into a Beverly Hills book-signing not long ago with his teenage daughter to tell the former vice president so in person.) If Gore is the nation's environmental conscience, Schwarzenegger is its environmental pitchman, making the fight against global warming accessible, palatable and relatively painless to big-living Americans, who generate more greenhouse gases than any citizenry on earth. "It's no different than what we tried in 'Pumping Iron'," Schwarzenegger tells NEWSWEEK, referring to the 1977 documentary that made him a celebrity. "It was all about ways of getting in and making body-building hip. You create a whole new conversation."

Imagine if Jimmy Carter had donned a heat-saving skullcap instead of his cardigan—or Gore had tried rapping his PowerPoint presentation. As governor of the nation's most populous, wealthiest and most environmentally progressive state, Schwarzenegger has extended the conversation well beyond California—where last year he signed first-in-the-nation legislation to reduce California's greenhouse-gas emissions across every sector of the economy. In the absence of clear guidelines from the Bush administration, Schwarzenegger has emerged as the nation's de facto carbon ambassador, carrying the green banner across the nation and the globe. "Washington has been stone-cold silent on this issue," says Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican, who has consulted with Schwarzenegger on ways to apply California's greenhouse-gas model in his conservative, coal-producing state. "Arnold is a Teddy Roosevelt for our generation. He's captured some very important political real estate in a thoughtful and articulate way."

Unable to run for president himself, the Austrian-born Schwarzenegger makes no bones about "filling the vacuum" on climate-change policy left by George W. Bush, with whom he's had a tepid relationship over the years. While Bush acknowledges that climate change is real—even if he has wavered on whether human activity is solely to blame—he has refused to impose mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions similar to those that Britain and other industrialized countries adopted under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Bush has consistently argued that any global agreement must include the rapidly growing economies of India and China, which so far are unfettered by any international climate restrictions. China, said Bush in defending his position after last week's Supreme Court ruling that the federal government was responsible for regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars, "will produce greenhouse gases that will offset anything we do in a brief period of time."