For Those Voting for Jill Stein, a Plea from Two Longtime Fossil Fuel Foes and European Greens

Pass these posts by Josh Fox and Jamie Henn to any progressive not voting for Kamala Harris

NEW Nov. 2: See the #SwapYourVote project below.

If you, like me, have friends and acquaintances who are not planning to vote for Kamala Harris for president because of their single-issue focus on stopping oil and gas extraction, please pass along the advice offered below by two longtime leaders in the fight against fossil fuels - Jamie Henn, one of the pioneering young climate activists behind 350.org and the founder and executive director of Fossil Free Media, and Josh Fox, the Pennsylvania-based activist, performing artist and filmmaker whose documentary Gasland played a role in New York State’s ban of that gas extraction technology. (See my recent Sustain What chat with Fox for more.)

We’ve disagreed on some issues in the past, but I couldn’t agree more with them about this - and particularly their focus on the electoral threat posed by “Green” Party candidate Jill Stein.

They were joined on Friday by a batch of European Green Party representatives, as The Guardian reported:

Green parties in 16 European countries from Portugal to Ukraine distanced themselves from their US counterparts in a statement on Friday, and called for Stein to withdraw from the race.

“We are clear that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House,” they wrote.

Henn posted his views in a valuable thread on X/Twitter (the reply by activist and essayist Rebecca Solnit is what alerted me to the news from Europe):

This is for anyone who cares about the climate and is thinking about voting for Jill Stein or RFK Jr. or sitting this election out. I get your frustration, but I'm asking you: please don't.

Here's why voting for Harris is the best move 🧵

I hear the argument: the Democrats aren't doing enough on climate, Kamala supports fracking, so I'm going to "send a signal" by voting for Stein, RFK or staying home. I feel you...I mean, I've organized protests and gotten arrested pushing Dems to do more on climate.

But guess what? Voting for Stein or sitting it out to "teach Democrats a lesson" or "strengthen the movement" doesn't work. Stein ran in 2016 when Clinton lost. That didn't result in Dems suddenly going big on climate.

It resulted in Trump.

And give me a break about Stein "building a movement." I've been organizing in the climate space for 20 years and the only time Stein has ever reached out is at the last second to demand to speak at a rally and hog the mic. She's out for herself, not our collective future.

What moves Democrats is electing progressive champions and then pushing Democrats to take the right positions.

We did this on KXL, LNG, & more.

Sunrise did this brilliantly with AOC and the Green New Deal, helping get the largest climate bill in history. We haven't done nearly enough on climate but we have made *real* progress.

Clean energy is booming. Trillions have moved away from fossil fuels into renewables. Our movement has grown enormously. And we've got to keep going.

Politics is only one piece of tackling the climate crisis: that's why we also go after banks, protest fossil fuel projects, fight disinformation, organize for clean energy deployment, put on mass mobilizations, and more, and more.

But voting is an important tool.

I fully expect that we're going to need to push Harris once she's elected.

We'll pressure her, criticize her choices, try and pull her in the right direction. We may even be sitting in at the White House again.

That's how we make change. I'm looking forward to it!

If Trump's elected, we'll of course do everything we can to keep up the fight -- but let's be real: we don't have time to lose another 4 years to this climate denying fossil fuel loving want to be dictator. Our frontline allies don't deserve another assault.

That's why I'm proudly voting and organizing for Harris, with the full expectation that I'll be pushing her administration on climate, Gaza, and a whole host of other issues to come. As Rebecca Solnit has said, voting is a chess move, not a valentine.

Make the right play.

The Nation just ran a related commenatary by Josh Fox: “I’m an Environmentalist. That’s Why I Can’t Vote Green.” Here’s Fox’s Instagram reel on Stein followed by an excerpt from his commentary:

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….

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.

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.

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.

Let me know what you think, and - above all - vote in a way that counts.

Update - A “swap your vote” tool

Via Sustain What commenter

Simon Shaw

below, I learned about the SwapYourVote.org project: “If you're in a swing state and agree to vote for Harris, we’ll find two people in a safe blue state to vote for the protest candidate of your choice. And we’ll match you within an hour of you signing up.”

SwapYourVote.org