Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Jane Fonda, center, and others protest against climate policies as part of Fire Drill Fridays, November 8, 2019, in Washington.
On December 20, for the 11th consecutive Friday afternoon, actor and activist Jane Fonda brought together more than 300 demonstrators for action on the climate crisis in front of the U.S. Capitol. Fonda started Fire Drill Fridays, gatherings where experts and activists give speeches about the dangers of climate change leading up to a planned act of civil disobedience that ends with Fonda herself and many other demonstrators getting arrested. Since the kickoff, she’s brought more attention to the climate crisis and drafted more celebrities to join her movement. This week, the protest featured activists focused on climate change and health, as well as co-founder of the United Farm Workers union Dolores Huerta, feminist author and activist Gloria Steinem, and minister and founder of the modern Poor People’s Campaign the Reverend William Barber II.
Each week of Fire Drill Fridays is different: There are always new speakers, another government building to occupy, and a fresh celebrity sighting. But what remains the same is the political condition of relative indifference about the climate crisis, which Fonda means to change.
“Our politicians are in total denial about what’s going on,” Huerta said to the crowd. “It’s all about power. It’s all about profits. It’s not about people. It’s not about health.” Despite an increase in severe hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, there is a disconnect between these occurrences and the advancement of climate policy. The implementation lag has been felt mostly in the United States following the California wildfires and deadly hurricanes in Puerto Rico, Texas, and Florida, as well as record flooding in the Midwest—all sites where immediate financial aid has been slow to materialize and long-term planning to prevent future disasters has been completely absent.
“Puerto Rico showed us, we’re not ready. And the wildfires showed us. Our resources are super thin and we really need to step up our game,” says demonstrator Adrienne Wald, a professor at Mercy College with more than 40 years of medical experience. She traveled to D.C. with more than 60 other nurses in the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. Wald says there’s no system in the body not affected by climate change, and that our health care system is unequipped to handle the shocks from extreme weather, which increases the rates of chronic diseases, like asthma, or the spread of infectious diseases, like the Zika virus.
The Fire Drill Fridays demonstrators are calling for the adoption of a Green New Deal, legislation proposed by lawmakers Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). Fonda and her fellow speakers carried a banner from the Capitol lawn to the Hart Senate Office Building that read, “Women for a Green New Deal.” The banner was then laid out on the atrium floor of the Hart Building for Senate staffers to see. Some staffers opened their office shades to watch Fonda get arrested, but the building mostly carried on with business as usual. If the Green New Deal was brought to a vote, the Republican-controlled Senate would surely strike down the resolution for green-industry growth and federal carbon-neutral goals; and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the resolution the “Green Dream or whatever” in an interview with Politico, adding, “Nobody knows what it is.”
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After a fall mostly consumed with impeachment, there hasn’t been much bandwidth left for people to focus on climate change. Meanwhile, agencies like the EPA are being gutted by the Trump administration. Recognizing these facts, many speakers made clear that the efforts to pass climate legislation and bring back clean-air regulations would not end at the protest site.
“We have to make [the politicians] act because they’re so bound up by the fossil fuel industry,” Barber told the Prospect while marching alongside Fonda. “There are so many people getting elected in racist voter suppression that they’re the same people that disregard these issues. We’ve got to change the political calculus and keep building a movement.”
Presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren shared the same sentiment as Barber, the night before on the Democratic debate stage in Los Angeles. “The biggest climate change problem we face is the politicians in Washington,” Warren said. “[Politicians who] take money from the oil industry, continue to bow down to the lobbyists, to the lawyers, to the think tanks, to the bought-and-paid-for experts.”
As many as 29 U.S. senators and their spouses have investments in the fossil fuel industries, according to an analysis from Sludge. Their collective $14 million investments cast a shadow on the climate crisis’s urgency and stunt action in Congress.
“It’s cowardly,” says demonstrator Matt Oberhoffner, of Congress’s inaction. “There’s a crisis that’s visible to anyone who cares to see it. The evidence is overwhelming and they’re not doing anything about it.” The 38-year-old D.C. resident brought his 16-month-old son to the Capitol, and he says he worries for his son’s future every day.
Oberhoffner says climate change will be a big issue for him the next time he’s at the ballot box. And according to a recent Gallup poll, it’s extremely/very important for 53 percent of voters as well.
Fonda will leave D.C. in a few weeks, but her Fire Drill Fridays speakers set out a call to action for the mobilization to continue. For some, that will mean focusing on voters’ rights in the 2020 election cycle, and for others there will be many more demonstrations.
“Some legislators want to do this. They’re putting bills forward and legislation forward and they’re being stymied,” Wald says. “We need to do more of this. We need to be in the streets. We need to say that we’re not going to elect people who aren’t going to move this agenda forward. We don’t want to hear any more excuses … I was down here [at the Capitol lawn] in the ’60s during the Vietnam War, we had this whole place covered. There were thousands of people. Take it to the streets. Raise your voice wherever you are, whatever you do, make your voice heard.”
