Al Gore is one. So is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And even though she doesn’t go to school much, Greta Thunberg is, apparently, one.
And now, Jane Fonda declares she’s one, too.
“I’ve been a climate scientist for decades and decades,” Fonda told ABC News in an interview in Washington, D.C., shortly before she was arrested Friday during a protest at the Capitol.
Yup. The star of “Barbarella” who hated U.S. servicemen who served in Vietnam is also a climate scientist.
Fonda said she has been spurred by 16-year-old Swedish protester Greta Thunberg, who launched the “Fridays for Future” climate strikes in which Fonda participated.
“It was Greta Thunberg, this little Swedish girl holding her sign every Friday in front of the Swedish parliament — that’s why I’ve chosen Friday, too — and all the student strikers all over the world who have really risked a lot and given up a lot in order to say, wake up old people, how come you’re not standing with us?” she said.
She said she plans to go to the Capitol “11 o’clock every Friday morning” and invited people to “come get arrested with me or choose not to it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m going to be here through Thanksgiving, and Christmas, sleet, rain, whatever it is,” she said.
“I think every single human being has to say, ‘What can I do to put this at the forefront?'” she said. “[With] everything that’s going on in the news, well, we have to fight our way through that and find ways to get climate change in people’s minds.”
“What we’re facing is so important and so urgent, it doesn’t matter. Those — those things don’t even matter,” Fonda said. “This is the future. This is whether we’re going to survive.”
Saying she’s been inspired by Greta Thunberg, Jane Fonda tells @ABC she’s going to hold a weekly protest in DC on climate change: “I’m moving here. I’m going to be here through Thanksgiving, and Christmas, sleep, rain, whatever it is.”
“This is a crisis.” https://t.co/57QJ2Xbx51 pic.twitter.com/k1Z2IC5aYu
— ABC News (@ABC) October 11, 2019
Fonda joins the ranks of Ocasio-Cortez, who says climate change will lead to melting glaciers, which could release ancient diseases infecting the world’s population.
“There are a lot of diseases that are frozen in some of these glaciers, um, that scientists fear that there is a potential that a lot of diseases could, um, escape these melted glaciers, things that were frozen for thousands of years, and that they’re going to get into our water,” she said during a live video session on Instagram.
AOC is also an entomologist.
“Um, even if there are no diseases frozen at all in these glaciers, you have diseases that are spread by mosquitoes, and now mosquitoes are starting to fly further north that carry diseases like malaria, and, um, a whole slew of other things,” she said.
“And, uh, and there are, you know, parts of the United States and things are moving much farther north that we’re going to have to contend with, diseases that we haven’t had to contend with in parts of the world before. Um, so there’s disease,” Ocasio-Cortez said.