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Jane Fonda on US Election: 'The Future of the Planet Is at Stake'
Republican nominee Donald Trump "wants to do away with all regulations and open up the floodgates for the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear industry," she said. "So the choice is very clear."
Sep 23, 2024
Actor and activist Jane Fonda took aim at Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and his climate-wrecking plans in comments published Monday from her wide-ranging conversation with CBS News, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone.
The interview with Fonda, which took place in California earlier this month, was coordinated by Covering Climate Now and is set to air on "CBS Saturday Morning" on September 28. It comes as she travels the country to support climate champions including Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats taking on Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) in the November election.
Trump "invited all the CEOs of the fossil fuel industry to Mar-a-Lago" and promised to roll back the Biden administration's progress on the climate crisis for just $1 billion in campaign cash, Fonda highlighted, warning that "the future of the planet is at stake."
"This is a collective crisis, and it requires a collective solution," she continued. "[Trump] wants to do away with all regulations and open up the floodgates for the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear industry. So the choice is very clear, do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?"
"We have the solution to the climate crisis, why don't we employ it, instead of allowing a bunch of rich people to destroy everything that's been created by humankind?"
The longtime activist, who is taking time off from acting to focus on this year's elections, acknowledged that some voters who lean toward Democrats, particularly younger people, are angry with Harris, especially over U.S. support for Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip. However, she argued, "to sit this out or to vote for a third-party candidate, is to allow fascism."
"That will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States," Fonda stressed. "Vote for a voice if you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice so that you can do something about it, and then be ready to turn out into the streets by the millions and fight for it… If the young people stay home, we're going to lose."
"Every candidate has issues. Nobody's perfect, but the Harris-Walz ticket is the ticket that will allow us to fight, to get the solutions that climate scientists are saying we need," she said. "They give us a chance, at least, to fight. They give us a platform on which we can try to pressure."
In addition to backing the Democratic presidential ticket—including by knocking on doors in Michigan, a key swing state—the 86-year-old is working to elect candidates endorsed by the Jane Fonda Climate Political Action Committee (PAC), which she founded in 2022, after she was arrested five times during Fire Drill Fridays, a protest series she started with Greenpeace USA a few years earlier.
The PAC is now supporting over 100 candidates at the local level, "where the really robust work is being done on climate," according to Fonda. The group only endorses candidates who don't take money from the fossil fuel industry, which she said has a "stranglehold over our government."
"We've had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry," she noted. "It's very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy."
"We are being killed with cancer, heart diseases, because of the burning of fossil fuel," Fonda said. "We have the solution to the climate crisis, why don't we employ it, instead of allowing a bunch of rich people to destroy everything that's been created by humankind? We've got to rise up."
"You need millions of people in the streets," she said, also emphasizing that "you need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands."
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Climate Experts Rebuke Musk Over 'Dumbest' Interview With Trump
"Why is Musk doing this?" asked 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. "My only conjecture is that he hopes the world will become barren enough that we simply have to pony up for his big trip to Mars."
Aug 14, 2024
Elon Musk thinks he knows more about climate issues than the entire staff of a major international newspaper, but on Wednesday, experts on the planetary emergency offered the billionaire businessman a reality check.
Responding to a Guardianarticle critical of Monday's glitch- and lie-laden interview of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Musk's X social media platform, Musk proclaimed that "my little fingernail knows more about climate issues than the entire staff of The Guardian."
Bill McKibben, who co-founded the climate action group 350.org, is quoted in that article calling the Musk-Trump interview "the dumbest climate conversation of all time."
Responding to Musk's diss, McKibben said Wednesday on X that he would "be pleased to debate you (or your little fingernail) at any point about why we don't, in fact, have a century to spare in solving this crisis."
Climate scientist Michael Mann, who calls Musk a "climate denier" in the Guardian piece, also weighed in, telling Musk on X that "if you've got a beef, take it up with me."
Some X users noted that once upon a time, Musk—who is the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla—acknowledged the urgency of the climate crisis. In 2018, he said: "Why not go renewable now and avoid [the] increasing risk of climate catastrophe? Betting that science is wrong and oil companies are right, is the dumbest experiment in history, by far."
In an opinion piece published Tuesday by Common Dreams, McKibben noted that after Musk—who endorsed Trump and created a pro-Trump super political action committee—the former president's biggest funder may be fracking billionaire Harold Hamm.
"He took Trump up on his offer that for a billion dollars he'd give the oil industry whatever it wanted, and he's been working the phones ever since," McKibben wrote of Hamm.
Trump returned the favor by calling Hamm "so boring to be with... because all he wants to talk about is oil and gas."
During his first White House run, Trump infamously called climate change "a Chinese hoax." He staffed his administration with climate deniers and rolled back previous administrations' climate policies under the "drill, baby, drill" mantra popularized by former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
"Why is Musk doing this?" McKibben asked. "Who knows? After all, the success of Tesla has been mostly driven by government subsidy that grows out of the effort to slow the growth of carbon in the atmosphere."
"My only conjecture," McKibben added, "is that he hopes the world will become barren enough that we simply have to pony up for his big trip to Mars."
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200 Private Jet Owners Burned as Much CO2 as 40,000 Brits
The planes tracked by a new Guardian report belong to celebrities, billionaires, CEOs, and their families, among them the Murdoch family, Taylor Swift, and the Rolling Stones.
Nov 21, 2023
The private jets of just 200 rich and famous individuals or groups released around 415,518 metric tons of climate-heating carbon dioxide between January 2022 and September 22, 2023, The Guardian revealed Tuesday.
That's equal to the emissions burned by nearly 40,000 British residents in all aspects of their lives, the newspaper calculated.
The planes tracked by the outlet belong to celebrities, billionaires, CEOs, and their families, among them the Murdoch family, Taylor Swift, and the Rolling Stones. All told, the high-flyers made a total of 44,739 trips during the study period for a combined 11 years in the air.
"Pollution for wasteful luxury has to be the first to go, we need a ban on private jets."
Notable emitters included the Blavatnik family, the Murdoch family, and Eric Schmidt, whose flights during the 21-month study period released more than 7,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The Sawiris family emitted around 7,500 metric tons, and Lorenzo Fertitta more than 5,000.
The Rolling Stones' Boeing 767 wide-body aircraft released around 5,046 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is equal to 1,763 economy flights from London to New York. The 39 jets owned by 30 Russian oligarchs released 30,701 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
For comparison, average per capita emissions were 14.44 metric tons in the U.S. for 2022, 13.52 metric tons in Russia in 2021, and 5.2 metric tons in the U.K. the same year.
Taylor Swift was the only celebrity or billionaire in the report whose team responded to a request for comment.
"Before the tour kicked off in March of 2023, Taylor bought more than double the carbon credits needed to offset all tour travel," a spokesperson for the pop star told The Guardian.
Swift appears to have responded to public pressure to reduce private jet use. Her plane averaged 19 flights a month between January and August 2022, when she received criticism after sustainability firm Yard named her the celebrity who used her plane the most. After that point, the plane's average monthly flights dropped to two.
The Guardian's investigation was based on private aircraft registrations compiled by TheAirTraffic Database and flight records from OpenSky. Reporters calculated flight emissions based on model information found in the ADSBExchange Aircraft database and Planespotters.net and emissions per hour per model found in the Conklin & De Decker's CO2 calculator and the Eurocontrol emission calculator.
The report was released the day after an Oxfam study found that the world's richest 1% emitted the same amount as its poorest two-thirds. Given their high carbon footprint and luxury status, private jets have emerged as a rallying point for the climate justice movement.
"It's hugely unfair that rich people can wreck the climate this way, in just one flight polluting more than driving a car 23,000 kilometers," Greenpeace E.U. transport campaigner Thomas Gelin said in March. "Pollution for wasteful luxury has to be the first to go, we need a ban on private jets."
In the U.S., a group of climate campaigners is mobilizing to stop the expansion of Massachusetts' Hanscom Field, the largest private jet field in New England. An October report found that flights from that field between January 1, 2022, and July 15, 2023, released a total of 106,676 tons of carbon emissions.
"While plenty of business is no doubt discussed over golf at Aberdeen, Scotland, or at bird hunting reserves in Argentina (destinations we also documented), this is probably the least defensible form of luxury travel on a warming planet when a Zoom call would often do," Chuck Collins, who co-authored the Hanscom report, wrote for Fortune on November 14.
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