Cosmwasm environment setup error: "first path segment in URL cannot contain colon"

Question

I'm trying to go through the Cosmwasm docs and I'm stuck on the "Setting Up Environment" step.

I'm on Ubuntu so when I put the parameters under #bash in my .bashrc script along with saving "tcp://0.0.0.0:26657" to the $RPC environment variable, and "cliffnet-1" for the $CHAIN_ID environment variable, then restart terminal, and then try wasmd query bank total $NODE.

I get the following error below.

Error: couldn't get client from nodeURI: parse "--node tcp://0.0.0.0:26657": first path segment in URL cannot contain colon
Usage:
  wasmd query bank total [flags]

Flags:
      --denom string    The specific balance denomination to query for
      --height int      Use a specific height to query state at (this can error if the node is pruning state)
  -h, --help            help for total
      --node string     <host>:<port> to Tendermint RPC interface for this chain (default "tcp://localhost:26657")
  -o, --output string   Output format (text|json) (default "text")

Global Flags:
      --chain-id string     The network chain ID
      --home string         directory for config and data (default "/home/j/.wasmd")
      --log_format string   The logging format (json|plain) (default "plain")
      --log_level string    The logging level (trace|debug|info|warn|error|fatal|panic) (default "info")
      --trace               print out full stack trace on errors