Actress and climate-change activist Jane Fonda said Tuesday the planet is “barreling toward a true catastrophe” and that President Biden hasn’t done enough to address it.
During an appearance on CNN’s “New Day,” Ms. Fonda called on the Biden administration to halt construction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline and to “stop all new oil development” in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“What they need to do is ask the Army Corps of Engineers to halt construction and to reexamine the permit. It was rushed through,” she said about Line 3, which runs from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin.
Ms. Fonda said Mr. Biden had done “many, many good things” to address climate change, including revoking the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline project and stopping oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But she said he hasn’t been radical enough.
“Look at the big picture, we are barreling toward a true catastrophe, an existential catastrophe, which is the climate crisis,” she said.
“We’re very, very grateful for what he‘s been doing,” she said, referring to Mr. Biden as a “moderate.” “He‘s done a lot of very good things. But not enough. Not bold enough and not fast enough.
“We’re up against time,” she continued. “The scientists say we have less than nine years to cut our emissions in half. Line 3 is going in the absolute opposite direction. And the news every day is telling us emissions are going up, not down. So we have to put our bodies on the line and do whatever we can to get our administration to call a halt to these permits.”
“I think we’re facing multiple crises,” she added later. “This is a confluence of crises, unlike anything that humanity has seen. And the climate crisis, like Russian nesting dolls, there’s the climate crisis and then inside of that the health crisis, democracy crisis, so many other crises. And the climate crisis exacerbates all the other ones. So we have to deal with all of them at once by becoming organized and uniting together — Black, Brown, White, young, old, across all diversities. We have to come together and demand that the government do the right thing. If there’s enough of us doing that, we’ll win.”
On Monday, Ms. Fonda marched alongside hundreds of protesters and Indigenous activists who entered a construction site operated by the Canada-based Enbridge and strapped themselves to heavy machinery.
“Biden has taken a very clear and very beautiful position on the climate crisis,” Ms. Fonda told The Washington Post at the protest. “But we are really facing a potential catastrophe, and the science is very clear: it’s not enough to do something good here – like shutdown Keystone XL, shut down drilling on the Arctic national refuge – and then allow Line 3 to go through.”
“We can’t do this in bits and pieces,” she said.
Paul Eberth, Enbridge’s director of tribal engagement in the U.S., told The Post that construction of the pipeline “largely has proceeded as planned” despite the protests and that Line 3 had “passed every test” in six years of regulatory and permitting review.
“We recognize people have strong feelings about the energy we all use, and they have the right to express their opinions legally and peacefully,” the company said in a statement. “We hoped all parties would come to accept the outcome of the thorough, science-based review and multiple approvals of the project.”
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