‘TERMINATOR’, US GOVERNOR, INVITED: PM
Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama says he is inviting the ‘Terminator’ Arnold Schwarzenegger and Californian Governor Jerry Brown to Fiji in October. That’s when the Pre-COP gathering will take place in Nadi before the COP23 climate change summit in November in Bonn, Germany. Mr Bainimarama is the incoming president of COP23.
Speaking to leaders of Pacific Small Islands Developing States (PSIDS) at the United Nations in New York, he said both men were part of widespread rebellion in the United States against President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US away from the Paris Agreement.
He said dozens of state governors and city mayors were banding together with leaders from the private sector, civil society groups and ordinary citizens to redouble their efforts to meet this challenge. “While the Trump Administration may have abandoned its leadership on climate change, the American people haven’t,” he said. “Next week I will go to California to meet the Democrat Governor Jerry Brown and sign up to the climate action initiative that he is spearheading.
“I am also in contact with his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who shares Governor Brown’s commitment. The point is on both sides of American politics, we have friends who are standing with us in this struggle. “And I am inviting both Governor Brown and the famous Terminator to come to our Pre-COP gathering in Fiji in October, where we hope they will join us in a gesture of solidarity with the vulnerable just before COP23 itself in Bonn the following month.”