NEW HAVEN -- Declaring the "environmental revolution" will be the next great change in the world's history, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urged people to carry that revolution forward with passion and energy.

"You can feel things are about to happen," Schwarzenegger told a packed crowd at Yale University's Woolsey Auditorium in New Haven on Friday, as he gave the final speech of a two-day Conference of Governors on Climate Change, hosted by Yale University. "Things are moving our way."

The conference -- modeled after one at Yale in 1908 when President Theodore Roosevelt hastened the creation of the national parks and forest system -- brought state and provincial leaders from throughout North America to Yale, as well as environmental scientists and Nobel Prize winners.

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Schwarzenegger said the environmental revolution is already under way in his state.

Rather than harming California's economy, he said, it's creating "green-collar jobs" as research scientists sit down with venture capitalists to devise ways of creating new businesses.

Industrialists and conservative Republicans have come around on the ideas that these changes are going to happen as well, he said.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said, the environmental revolution will not be owned by either Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals.

"No one can be set in the old ways," he said to the enthusiastic audience, made up in large part by college students. "Don't accept the old ways."