Jane Fonda Floats ‘Halting’ Governments If They Don’t Fight Climate Change

Appearing Monday on CNN, actress and left-wing activist Jane Fonda said she is prepared to “get arrested every Friday” in the wake of her arrest on Capitol Hill during a climate change protest last week and floated the idea of bringing governments to “a halt” if they don’t fight so-called global warming.

A partial transcript is as follows: 

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Watching those pictures of you with the handcuffs just brought back a huge amount of memories and a huge amount of history. You have devoted so much of your adult life to this kind of activism. What specifically, and at what moment, did you trigger into this action, where you get up from your home in California and move to Washington to do this?

JANE FONDA: I can tell you exactly. It was Labor Day weekend and I was reading Naomi Klein’s new book called On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, and I was hearing Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate striker, and it really hit me how urgent this issue is and that I wasn’t doing enough. I drive an electric day, I recycle, I’ve gotten rid of plastics, but that’s a good starting place, that’s not a good finishing place. This is a collective crisis that required collective action, so I decided to use my celebrity to try to raise the sense of urgency, and I moved to Washington and I’m going to get arrested every Friday.

AMANPOUR: I think you mentioned this is a new type of arrest, for example, these plastic ties you were arrested with are very different from the metal handcuffs that you endured during previous protests. You are 82-years-old and it’s kind of difficult to navigate into the back of a police van without your arms.

JANE FONDA: That’s the least of it. You’ve been talking about the Syrian crisis and the terrible situation that’s happened there. That war, I’m told, began because of the terrible draught that happened there. There is so much going on in the world and over it all is this ticking time bomb. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Crisis told us last year we only have 12 years left. Now it’s 11 years left. We have 11 years left to try to turn this fossil fuel disaster around so that we don’t completely pass the tipping point and it becomes untenable to govern, untenable to have a stable economy, or any kind of human rights or anything. There’s just going to be one disaster on top of another. But we do have time. We have time and it’s going to require people in every country all around the world organize and mobilize and, if necessary, bring governments to a halt if we can’t make them do the right thing.