Just days after protesting a pipeline project in Minnesota, Jane Fonda joined CNN’s Brianna Keilar to address President Joe Biden’s climate policies.
Fonda joined thousands of people in northern Minnesota this weekend for the Treaty People Gathering, an event meant to protest the advancement of the Enbridge Line 3 replacement project.
“You have been incredibly outspoken on this issue of this pipeline project,” Keilar said to the activist on Tuesday’s New Day. “It’s a project that former President [Donald] Trump had approved during his last days in office, but still President Biden, the Biden administration, has remained silent on this issue, despite what is his clear position on climate.”
Fonda called for the Biden administration to ask the Army Corps of Engineers to halt construction on the pipeline, adding that Enbridge’s permit should be re-examined, as “it was rushed through.”
Fonda noted that a sufficient study on the pipeline’s environmental impact was never conducted, later explaining the negative impacts Enbridge’s project will have on the environment:
It’s bringing very destructive tar sands under 200 bodies of pristine water, but look at the big picture — we are barreling toward a true catastrophe, an existential catastrophe, which is the climate crisis. Climate scientists are universally telling us we have to cut our emissions in half and we can have absolutely no new development of fossil fuels. No new mining. No new fracking. No new drilling if we’re going to achieve this. We have to keep warming it 1.5 degrees celsius. No higher than that. We can’t even burn what we already develop, much less new, so this pipeline is threatening what science is saying. It’s threatening the climate crisis. This is going to affect everybody. Not just the tribal nations whose sovereign rights are being broken here in Minnesota but the whole world. We cannot afford this.
Fonda went on to praise Biden for stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline and putting an end to the drilling of arctic national wildlife, yet called on him to “raise a ruckus” regarding the Line 3 replacement project.
“Clearly you’re happy with some things, but how do you think that he is doing, and is it enough to make progressives like yourself feel that he is delivering for what you voted him in for?” Keilar asked Fonda of Biden.
“Well, it’s nice to be hopeful again, and it’s much better to push a moderate than to fight a fascist, right?” Fonda cracked. “We’re very, very grateful for what he’s been doing. He’s done a lot of very good things. But not enough. Not bold enough. And not fast enough. We’re up against time. 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.”
