“You are hurting future generations”: Mark Ruffalo’s message to people profiting from fossil fuels

AMY GOODMAN: More than $5 trillion worth of investments are now pledged to be divested from fossil fuels. The analysis, issued Monday, details how nearly 700 institutions and nearly 60,000 individuals from across 76 nations have committed to divest their assets from the fossil fuel industry. This is Mark Ruffalo, speaking at a news conference in New York City.

MARK RUFFALO: I want to read a Hopi quote from the Hopi Nation of Native Americans. “Banish the word ‘struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Now, I think the one thing that’s become perfectly clear after today’s comments is that if you keep your money in the fossil fuel industry, you are hurting your children, you are hurting the future generations, and you’re hurting yourselves. You can’t say that you care about your children or your grandchildren and keep pouring money into this system.

We now have the technology, clearly, to move forward. I want to thank the fossil fuel industry for a hundred years of concentrated carbon fuel to bring us to this place and, through the technological revolution, to give us the technology today to move forward and away from burning carbon, which is killing our planet and our people.

This is a twofold approach that you’re seeing unfold in front of you. It started with the students. Of course it did, because the students are a moral authority. They haven’t been corrupted yet by the influence of money, and so their voices and their hearts are pure. They know what’s happening, and it’s terrifying to them. And so you have a giant social movement starting to blossom in the world today, because children, the young people, know that their lives are at stake, their futures are at stake. All the money in the world doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if the world is burning around them, if they don’t have water, if the air isn’t clean and if the sun and the elements and the weather become their constant enemy.

So, you have beautiful people in the business sector who hear the call, whose moral vision hasn’t been so clouded, that they understand that now is the time to make a move forward to our future. And it’s a very beautiful future. It’s a future that excludes geopolitical strife. We won’t be fighting trillion-dollar wars over energy assets. It’s a future that keeps our energy dollars here in the state. It creates 3.5 million net gain of jobs, from the jobs we lose from the fossil industry. It allows people to stay home. They don’t have to go to extraction sites and put their lives in danger and put communities in danger, with the crime that comes with it, with that fossil fuel extraction.

Lastly, we have a cultural movement that’s arising. And we will keep fighting. What you see happening at DAPL is only the beginning. The 500,000—the 500,000 people that showed up for the climate march is only the beginning. And we are going to keep putting pressure on you businesses and you banks—Citibank, Wells Fargo—to stop poisoning our people and stop financing climate change. And we’re not going to stop. If you have your money in fossil fuel industry, you’re going to lose it. That’s the message coming out of today. That’s the message coming out of our youth. That’s the message coming out of our technological movement and leaders. Get your money out now, while you can.