Jane Fonda demands fossil fuel industry be held accountable ‘like at Nuremberg’

Celebrity climate activist Jane Fonda has demanded that fuel companies be held responsible for their actions “like at Nuremberg.”

The Barbarella actress made the apparent reference on Tuesday to the millitary trials that saw Nazi war criminals brought to justice in the German city of Nuremberg between 1945 and 1949.

Fonda, who moved to the US city to spearhead the fight against climate change, spoke to BBC Two’s Emily Maitlis on Newsnight from Washington DC, as countries meet in Madrid this week for the UN’s climate summit known as COP25.

“Just like crimes against humanity have been put on trial at Nuremberg and elsewhere, the fossil fuel industry will hopefully be held accountable,” Fonda told Maitlis.

When asked whether she believed the climate emergency was comparable to “Nuremberg,” Fonda replied: “I think it’s worse. I think that much more harm has been done because of the fossil fuel industry.”

“Nuremberg was about the Holocaust, about wilful genocide. Is that what you’re accusing companies of now,” Maitlis asked the actor.

To which, Fonda replied: “I think that when a company is told by the scientists that it has hired that what they are doing can cause irreversible, irreparable damage to the globe and to many parts of humanity, and the executives who hear that continue to do what they are doing anyway, I don’t know the names you want to call that, but I think it’s criminal.”

“Hundreds of millions of people are going to be made into climate refugees, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Many of them will die. A lot of them come from the global south,” she added.

Speaking to CNN on Full Circle this week, Fonda, whose arrests at climate protests drew media coverage over recent weeks, said: “This is the first time that I have been arrested for civil disobedience, and it feels good.”