Arnold Schwarzenegger to sue oil companies for ‘first-degree murder’

Arnold Schwarzenegger said Sunday that he plans to take big oil companies to court for “knowingly killing people all over the world.”

“I don’t think there’s any difference: If you walk into a room and you know you’re going to kill someone, it’s first-degree murder; I think it’s the same thing with the oil companies,” the actor and former Republican governor of California said during a live recording of a Politico podcast.

Mr. Schwarzenegger said he’s already in talks with several private law firms in preparing a lawsuit.

“This is no different from the smoking issue,” he said. “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.

“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,” he said.

Mr. Schwarzenegger said he’s still working on a timeline for filing, but revealed that the goal is to compel “every product that has fossil fuels” to include a warning label about its environmental impact, similar to health warnings on packs of cigarettes.

“We’re going to go after them, and we’re going to be in there like an Alabama tick,” he said. “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.”