Harrison Ford has said that Donald Trump’s assault upon measures to address the climate crisis “scares the shit out of me” and makes the US president among the worst criminals in history.
In a blistering attack upon the president, Ford told the Guardian that Trump “doesn’t have any policies, he has whims. It scares the shit out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. [Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.”
The legendary Star Wars and Indiana Jones actor, who is 83, added: “It’s unbelievable. I don’t know of a greater criminal in history.”
In his second term as president, Trump has set about dismantling climate and clean air protections, halted clean energy projects, urged oil and gas companies to “drill, baby, drill” for the fossil fuels that are overheating the planet, fired hundreds of scientists while deleting their work, and even banned mentions of “climate change” and “emissions” within government.
Trump, who has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, has also targeted other countries’ climate policies, pressing the UK to tear down its “ugly” wind turbines in favor of more oil drilling and demanding that the European Union roll back its climate rules and purchase more American oil and gas.
Climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, Trump said during a speech to the United Nations last month. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
Ford, a longtime environmental advocate, said Trump’s dislike of wind turbines was because “he has just not seen a gold one” and that the president’s legacy on the climate crisis would be “a clear expression of ignorance, of hubris and purposeful subterfuge”.
The world – including the US, the second largest carbon polluter – continues to lag in the effort to slash planet-heating emissions to curb the sort of disaster suffered this week by Jamaica, which has been lashed by a category 5 hurricane that scientists say was probably accelerated by a warmer atmosphere and ocean.
Earlier this year, Ford himself had to be evacuated from enormous wildfires that engulfed parts of Los Angeles (and were made more likely due to global heating), although his home in Brentwood was spared destruction, unlike those of many other celebrities.
Rising global temperatures are wreaking havoc beyond spectacular disasters such as Hurricane Melissa and the LA fires, too, with a major study this week finding that excess heat is now killing one person a minute around the world.
“I knew it was coming, I have been preaching this stuff for 30 years,” Ford said of these climate-fueled disasters. “Everything we’ve said about climate change has come true. Why is that not sufficient that it alarms people that they change behaviors? Because of the entrenched status quo.”
However, the world is increasingly embracing cleaner forms of energy, albeit at a slower pace than required to stave off escalating climate impacts, and Ford said he was hopeful that Trump’s fossil fuel-dominated vision would not prevail.
“He’s losing ground because everything he says is a lie,” Ford said. “I’m confident we can mitigate against [climate change], that we can buy time to change behaviors, to create new technologies, to concentrate more fully on implementation of those policies.
“But we have to develop the political will and intellectual sophistication to realize that we human beings are capable of change. We are incredibly adaptive, we are incredibly inventive. If we concentrate on a problem we can fix it most times.”
Ford spoke to the Guardian shortly before he was given a conservation leadership award at a ceremony at Chicago’s Field Museum on Wednesday evening. The award was bestowed by the foundation of the late biologist EO Wilson, who coined the term “biodiversity”. Wilson, a myrmecologist, became friends with Ford after they worked on conservation campaigns together and named a species of ant after the actor.
Wilson proposed that half of the planet be protected for nature, to stem ruinous losses to species and ecosystems, an initiative that his foundation, and Ford, continue to support. Worldwide, more than 100 countries have pledged a more modest 30% of land and seas to be preserved by 2030, and although progress has been made in the past year, barely half of this goal has been met, a new report by Wilson’s foundation shows.
“We are teetering on the edge,” Ford said of the ongoing loss of nature via deforestation, pollution and other human-caused destruction.
“Indigenous people are the stewards of much of the remaining standing forests and contain the hope that these precious places can be preserved. The science has proved the value in their preservation but that does not keep them from encroachment, and the protection they are granted is tenuous in some of the countries these assets exist in.”
