Actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio, whose own carbon footprint arguably rivals those of entire small communities, has joined forces with actor Mark Ruffalo to launch a campaign for clean energy.
Page Six reports the pair launched “100%” on Thursday, which is a campaign aimed at making renewable energy sources both affordable and available to everyone.
DiCaprio, who has come under fire for his travel habits in recent years, told a crowd at the community garden in New York City the clean energy movement is no longer about politics, but is a problem for all humanity.
“This is a grassroots people’s movement, but the ambition of this movement is absolutely revolutionary. Clean energy grows local economies,” he said.
Ruffalo, a self-avowed activist for female rights and the co-founder of the campaign, also called access to renewable energy a “serious issue.”
“This is really mankind’s greatest threat, and it should take some serious problem solving on all of our parts,” he said, per Page Six. “And we don’t really have to give up anything to do it.
Ruffalo added, “We will be collecting the sun and the wind that falls on us every single day” before challenging California Governor Jerry Brown to keep up with the state of New York’s environmental efforts.
“I just came in from Los Angeles, where I was doing some press, and they think they’ve got something on us concerning renewable energy,” he said. “They’ve got nothing on us. We are coming for you, Governor [Jerry] Brown.”
DiCaprio has been a vocal advocate for clean energy and lowering carbon emissions for years, despite an affinity for crisscrossing the world by private jet.
Last September, the actor addressed the United Nations about climate change, where he said:
I believe humankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that climate change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away. … None of this is rhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. It is fact.
Wikileaks released documents obtained during last year’s Sony hacking scandal in April, which allegedly showed that DiCaprio took six round-trip private jet flights during April and May 2014 alone, which were all paid for by Sony.
The trips reportedly included cars for the actor and his friends and cost the studio hundreds-of-thousands of dollars.
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