A star not named Arnold Schwarzenegger discussses climate change. (He is
not actually the President.)

It’s a big green week for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s on the cover of Newsweek magazine’s save the planet issue, is the keynote speaker of the magazine’s global environmental leadership conference in Washington, and addresses the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And the British Conservative Party chose the week of his Newsweek cover status to announce that he will headline their annual party conference this fall.

Here’s a link to the brand-new Newsweek and its special environmental issue, featuring Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover. And, no, I’m not sure how he got the world to balance on the tip of his finger.

The colorful Newsweek cover story touches on Schwarzenegger’s tepid relationship with and quite different environmental stance from President George W. Bush — Schwarzenegger had a much closer relationship with the first President Bush — and emphasizes his approach of mixing a baseline of regulation with the flexibility of the market and technological innovation. (The carbon trading system ramping up in Europe has some problems that need to be fixed for American application.) It also posits Schwarzenegger as providing a sunnier ecoglobalism than that of former Vice Presidenti Al Gore. Nevertheless, Schwarzenegger is an admirer of Gore, privately touting his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, last spring, later dropping in on a Gore bookstore appearance to congratulate him.

This kicks off a big week for the former action movie superstar on the environment, which I revealed on Friday. It comes also on the immediate heels of the more than sobering Phase II report by global climate scientists on the greenhouse effect, which spells out likely effects around the world. I’ll have full reports during the week.

After starting off the week with private meetings in Los Angeles, Schwarzenegger travels East. He’s the keynote speaker for Newsweek’s conference in Washington, which includes Intel Corp. chairman Craig Barrett and other technology figures among its speakers. Then the former action movie superstar goes to New York, where he addresses the nation’s leading private forum on foreign policy and geopolitics, the Council on Foreign Relations, on climate change and other global environmental issues.

The week is also big on greenery for Schwarzenegger for another reason. State regulatory bodies are taking up a proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal, which would be located 14 miles off the California coast between Malibu and Oxnard. LNG has been controversial in California for a long time, since then Governor Jerry Brown tried to bring it nearly 30 years ago. A few accidents decades ago couple with concern that it might blunt the drive for renewable power as conventional natural gas — the dominant power plant fuel in California, selected by the Brown Administration as the cleanest-burning fossil fuel bridge to a renewable future — runs short in the U.S. Several of Schwarzenegger’s former associates are lobbying for the project, while almost his entire LA social set, following the lead of former 007 Pierce Brosnan, is opposed.

Schwarzenegger’s emergence on the global stage as a leading environmental figure would have appeared confounding not all that long ago. Even when I predicted in 2002 that he would be the next governor — in 2006, not having anticipated the recall of Gray Davis before he was actually re-elected — this did not appear to be on the menu. Though it was logical, since even then Schwarzenegger was talking privately — and in his campaign of 2003, quite publicly — about his desire to do more than others were doing to combat the greenhouse effect and promote renewable energy.

Yet, even though he made major environmental moves in his first two years as governor, early last year he was rated no more highly by California voters than Bush on the environment. That’s because his previous political team did nothing to promote any public awareness of what Schwarzenegger was doing. So he got no more credit than anyone else with the Republican brand. Something which was repeatedly pointed out and then quite dramatically turned around last year.

So his going to Britain in the fall makes perfect sense. Schwarzenegger will deliver the keynote address at the British Conservative Party conference in October. The annual conference of Britain’s opposition party, which now styles itself as “centre-right” rather than strictly conservative, will be held at the Winter Garden in Blackpool.

Schwarzenegger was selected because of his role on global environmental issues. The new leader of the Tories, 40-year old David Cameron, is moving his party into the British consensus established by Schwarzenegger’s friend, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the leader of the Labor Party — who participated by live satellite TV hookup last fall in Schwarzenegger’s signing in San Francisco of California’s landmark global warming bill — around the need to combat the greenhouse effect and consequent climate change.

A product of Eton and Oxford, Cameron changed the Conservative Party’s logo from a torch to a tree. Cameron sometimes bicycles to work, though in an early episode London journalists observed a car shadowing him carrying his stuff. He was first elected to the British Parliament in 2001. Polling in Britain indicates that he has a pretty good chance of becoming the next prime minister after Blair steps away.

Britain has great sentimental value for the former bodybuilding champion. Schwarzenegger’s first plane trip, at age 19, was to London, for the Mr. Universe contest, in which he finished second. He returned to Britain the following year where he won his first Mr. Universe title.

He didn’t speak much English then. (Some critics say he doesn’t speak all that much now.) But he was always struck by how friendly the English were to him. And that first Mr. Universe title was the key element to his master plan. “First I win Mr. Universe, then I come to America …” So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Britain figures prominently in Schwarzenegger’s life once again.