Jane Fonda Demands Biden Shut Down Trump Pipelines

Jane Fonda on Tuesday urged President Joe Biden to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline and all other pipelines that former President Donald Trump “okayed as a lame-duck president.” 

Fonda a day earlier joined protesters in the march onto a construction site in Minnesota operated by Enbridge, the Canadian company behind the Line 3 pipeline which will cross from Canada into northern Minnesota and carry oil across sensitive waterways as well as tribal lands.

Some demonstrators strapped themselves to heavy machinery. 

The protesters were led by Native American women. Fonda, actress Catherine Keener, and other celebrities joined them, according to The Washington Post.

“President Biden has done many, many good things, stopping Keystone XL, stopping the Arctic National Wildlife refuge drilling,” the actress and activist told CNN’s “New Day.”  “He’s done a lot and we’re really grateful. But the crisis is too severe to do a few good things here and then not do anything where bad stuff is happening.”

None of the pipelines Trump approved, she added, “are following the proper permit guidelines.”

Fonda Tuesday called on the Biden administration to ask the Army Corps of Engineers to halt the pipeline’s construction and to reexamine its permit. 

“It was rushed through,” she said. “There wasn’t a proper environmental impact study done. There are a lot of reasons why line three from the Enbridge Canadian oil company is bad. It’s bringing very destructive tar sands under 200 bodies of pristine water.”

She also insisted that the pipeline is just part of a larger picture and said it’s imperative that action happen fast. 

“We are barreling toward a true catastrophe, an existential catastrophe which is the climate crisis,” Fonda said. “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 at 1.5 degrees Celsius, no higher than that. We can’t even burn what we already develop much less new.”

The new pipeline, she added, 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.”

She insisted that the protests must continue so that Enbridge is forced to stop construction. 

Enbridge said in a statement it respects the right to protest, but that trespassing and destruction are not acceptable. 

“The project is providing significant economic benefits for counties, small businesses, Native American communities, and union members, including creating 5200 family-sustaining construction jobs and millions of dollars in local spending and tax revenues,” Enbridge said. 

But Fonda insisted that oil companies always take the same actions and make the same claims.

“They do their drilling and fracking in areas where people are economically depressed,” she said. “They create child care centers and recreational parks and they build schools and they try to buy them off. But we, again, are confronting an existential crisis. It’s not just the tribal nations here. It is the globe. We have to stop all new oil development. We cannot allow this to happen. It’s not just for us living today. It’s for our grandchildren and our children.”

But Biden is not taking action that is either “bold enough” or fast enough, said Fonda. 

“The scientists say we have less than nine years to cut our emissions in half,” she said. “Line three 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.”

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