Alongside a contingent of other stars earlier this month, actor and environmental activist Mark Ruffalo launched a Hollywood super group to pressure California Governor Jerry Brown to move the state away from using fossil fuels and exclusively toward renewable energy.
Ruffalo, a vocal opponent of fracking, has urged fans and others to hold Gov. Brown “accountable” for allowing “contaminated wastewater” from the oil extraction process to be used on California farms in recent months.
“Tell him [Brown] that he needs to stop irrigating our crops with contaminated water. Tell him that he needs to stop relying on increasingly destructive fossil fuel extraction processes, and start making the transition to renewable energy immediately,” the actor wrote on his Tumblr page in October.
Ruffalo also said that Brown’s policies on fracking might be guilty of “endangering the public health and welfare,” despite the governor’s stance in support of climate change science.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ruffalo is now gathering other entertainment figures to help him lead a charge against the state’s energy industry.
The actor held a press-free meeting at United Talent Agency headquarters in Beverly Hills on Nov. 4 to launch Hollywood United for a Healthy California.
Hollywood figures, including Channing Tatum, Sony’s Michael Lynton, and producer Norman Lear and his wife Lyn, were present during the showing of a 20-minute anti-fracking documentary titled Dear Governor Brown, which was directed by Jon Bowermaster (Dear Governor Cuomo).
“Our industry generates billions of dollars in revenue for the state of California and for too long Governor Brown has put the fossil fuel industry above all others,” Ruffalo tells THR of the meeting. “
“We are standing up to tell Governor Brown that fossil fuels are bad for the state of California, and if we want to grow a vibrant economy, we need to keep oil in the ground. Building out all the solar in the world means nothing if California keeps extracting and dumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere.”
Hollywood United for a Healthy California urges Brown to “keep oil in the ground” on its website.
“California is the third-largest oil producing state in the nation. We produce over 200 million barrels of oil each year. Every day fossil fuel production is polluting our clean water and food with toxic chemicals, emitting carcinogenic pollutants into our neighborhoods and pumping our atmosphere with more climate-altering greenhouse gases,” the group states.
The group of actors, writers, directors, producers, executives, lawyers, agents, and others, also laments the “immense political power” held by the energy sector and demands an end to all drilling both inside California and off-shore.
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