Award-winning filmmaker and director of Gasland Josh Fox on why he will never vote for Jill Stein.
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is jill-stein-portrait-getty.jpg Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein waits to speak at a news conference on Fifth Avenue across the street from Trump Tower on December 5, 2016, in New York City.(Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Milanville, Pennsylvania—Progressives can truly win in this election, even though we have a moderate Democrat on the ticket. And it’s not by voting for Jill Stein. But first, a little history…
Not long ago the entire upper Delaware River basin in Pennsylvania—one of the most beautiful areas in the country, in the watershed for New York City, southern New Jersey and Philadelphia—was on the chopping block for fracking.
A 75 mile stretch of the Delaware River could have become a toxic oil field. Fracking is an environmental apocalypse: millions of gallons of toxic fracking fluids, radioactive waste, underground water contamination, hundreds of thousands of truck trips, air pollution, land scarring, massive public health crises, and depleted water supply. Everything about the practice is toxic; it is inherently contaminating in the long and short term.
Our community was quick to understand the threat and organize and mobilize against it. Every little town along the Delaware across New York and Pennsylvania had a mom-and-pop anti-fracking group spring up. My film Gasland, on HBO, was part of this campaign, and our Gasland tours went from town to town, Johnny Appleseed–style, fostering our new movement.
Amazingly, we won. We banned fracking in the Delaware River basin and in New York State, saving the water supply for 16 million people. One of the greatest achievements of the environmental movement in this century.
We did this by convincing the Democratic governors of New York and Delaware and the president at the time—Barack Obama—to ban fracking here. These were all moderate Democrats. Not exactly Bernie Sanders, if you know what I mean.
I consider myself far to the left of Andrew Cuomo and Barack Obama. But I know that if those moderate Democrats hadn’t been in office, there’s no way we would have won.
Republicans would have just said no. This whole place would have been completely fracked to hell. We would have lost. And the whole gorgeous, life-giving national treasure of the Delaware River would have been a toxic fracking zone.
Our victory against fracking kept more carbon and methane in the ground than almost any other single environmental win in history—making it a huge win for the climate as well.
Here is the key point: I’m not in love with Kamala Harris’s positions on fracking. I find it utterly infuriating when moderate Democrats think that they need to pay lip service to a toxic destructive climate monster of an industry to win Pennsylvania. I don’t actually think that is true, because studies have shown that 70 percent of Pennsylvania residents want fracking either banned or much more tightly regulated.
But I don’t need to be in love. I need to be able to vote strategically.
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Hundreds of thousands of people showed up to protect this place and to hold moderate Democrats accountable, and that was the key to victory here.
You know who didn’t show up for this place? Jill Stein. She doesn’t show up for these frontline battles. Ever.
Stein says she’s against fracking, but Stein has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the oil and gas industry. Did you know that? Did you know that she actually profits off of the oil and gas industry, that she has had investments in the Keystone XL pipeline and multiple fracking companies?
Did you know that she has investments in Raytheon, that she’s had investments in ExxonMobil? Did you know that she has investments in Home Depot—one of the most rapacious companies in the world, guilty of horrific deforestation throughout the world?
How is it that the Green Party candidate hasn’t divested her own personal fortune from fossil fuels? It’s sheer hypocrisy. And so is the strategy of running for president every four years but never showing up for battles like this.
In 2016, Stein defended these investments by saying they are mutual funds and indexed retirement funds.
But that, plainly speaking, is bunk.
Her claims are a slap in the face to the entire fossil fuel divestment movement. It is easier now than ever to have investments that are fossil free; doing so is a huge plank of the environmental cause. Hundreds of real activists were arrested this summer in New York City calling for Citibank to divest as part of the Summer of Heat campaign. For Stein to ignore all this and still attempt to call herself an activist is beyond hypocrisy, it is political malpractice. Shame on you, Dr. Stein! Shame on you for profiting from fracking and oil drilling.
I’m not in love with Kamala Harris’s positions—on fracking, and on some other issues. But I will tell you what I am in love with. I’m in love with our movements.
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I’m in love with what we can do. The entire history of progressive progress in this country is of movements pushing moderate presidents. It happened with FDR and the labor movement. It happened with LBJ and the MLK and the civil rights movement. It happened with Obama and Biden and the movement for gay marriage. We organize and push them—and that’s how we get what we want. That’s our progressive history in America.
But in order for us progressives to do our jobs and fight effectively for a more just and equitable world as a movement, we need to have Harris in office. If we have Donald Trump in office, there’s no chance in hell that we’re actually going to advance an environmental agenda.
So I urge you to please believe in us as a movement. Love us. Believe in our power. We have done this before—and we can do it again with a moderate Democrat in office. Which is the only choice we’ve got right now.
If everyone in who voted for Stein in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan had voted for the Democrat instead, Trump would never have been the president.
We have the true power. It comes from the bottom up.
And I believe in us.
A vote for Harris is a vote for us, a vote for our movements to have a fighting chance for change. Progressive politics and advancing our agenda in this country is not something that happens every four years when you vote, or every four years when a toxic egomaniac like Stein (or Trump, for that matter) runs for president. It is a daily commitment. So vote for Kamala Harris. Join the movement—and I’ll see you on the front lines.
Josh FoxTwitterJosh Fox is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker whose latest film, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change, is now available on HBO Now and HBO Go.