In the wake of ex-husband Ted Turner’s death, Jane Fonda had plenty of reasons to cancel her Thursday speaking commitment at Tom Steyer’s campaign stop.
But the Hollywood legend had a bigger call to action.
“The world is facing two existential crises: democracy and climate,” Fonda said at the campaign event in Los Angeles.
“They are completely interconnected, and they have to be solved together,” Fonda continued, emphasizing that “the climate clock is ticking.”
Dressed in a cerulean blue suit, the actress-turned-environmentalist smiled and shared friendly shoulder brushes with Steyer as members of the United Domestic Workers of America and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees shared their endorsements of the Democratic candidate for California governor.
But the light moments and calls to action intermingled with grief. Fonda shared 10 years of marriage and environmental work with Turner, the media mogul who founded CNN.
“I loved Ted with all my heart. I see him in heaven now with all the wildlife he helped bring back from extinction,” Fonda wrote in an Instagram post Wednesday.
Turner and Fonda worked together and separately on environmental fronts to foster a cleaner Earth.
They established separate nonprofits that worked toward land preservation and educating business leaders on environmental literacy.
But on Thursday, Fonda, who has been arrested a number of times during pro-climate fights—gave her case for why Steyer is the right candidate to lead California.
Related | A conversation with California governor candidate Tom Steyer
“What billionaire stands on the side of working people?” Fonda asked. “I personally was very skeptical, as I’m sure many of you were. But then you have to ask yourself, if he is standing for people like himself—billionaires—then why are billionaires trying to elect his opponent?”
Fonda ventured a guess.
“It’s because they know the big money interests that are funding his opponent know that he will not kowtow to them. They know that he will stand up to Big Oil and make California healthier and safer for Californians,” she said.
Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund manager floating around the top four of California’s crowded gubernatorial race, has his own history of environmental pursuits.
In previous years, Steyer funded his own super PAC, NextGen Climate. Now NextGen America, the progressive political action group works to address climate change. Steyer gave a reported $270 million to the PAC. But his investments behind politics also caught plenty of attention.
Both before his gubernatorial run and presently, Steyer has thrown millions of dollars behind causes he believes in. For his campaign alone, Steyer has forked up a hefty $132 million as of April.
Some of this money, according to multiple reports, has been linked back to investments in fossil fuels as well.
According to The New York Times, Farallon—the hedge fund Steyer previously ran—has profited immensely from its dealings in coal. Steyer’s team told the outlet that his “passive investments” in the company are no longer linked to coal, payday lending, or private prisons.
And while this has been wielded as a weapon against Steyer’s campaign—primarily by Democratic opponent Xavier Becerra—the billionaire argued that it’s not his past investments that matter, but rather that “Big Oil” is presently backing Becerra.
“One of the reasons that so many of our elected officials don’t stand up to Big Oil is because they take money from Big Oil, and that’s what we have to fight now,” Fonda argued.
Related | In California’s governor race, an afterthought surges to the top
Similarly, Steyer told Daily Kos in a previous interview that people just needed to “follow the money.”
Chevron has donated $39,200 to the former Health and Human Services Secretary Becerra’s campaign.
Daily Kos reached out to Becerra’s team for comment.
Regardless of finger-pointing and funding questions, no clear front-runner has emerged in the California race despite mail-in ballots already arriving in voters’ mailboxes ahead of the June 2 primary.
Daily Kos has not endorsed any individual candidate in the California governor’s race.
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