Climate Change: 5 Celebrities Making a Difference
Celebrities are joining the fight against climate change.
These 5 famous faces are wielding their clout and their fortunes to bring about real and lasting reform to help fight climate change and preserve our planet for generations to come.
Leonardo DiCaprio: At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting held in held in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland this past week, Academy Award nominee DiCaprio gave an impassioned speech stating that “We simply cannot afford to allow the corporate greed of the coal, oil and gas industries to determine the future of humanity.” Always one to put his money where his mouth is, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundations started in 1998 has given millions to help “ensure the long-term health and well-being of all the Earth’s inhabitants”.
Robert Redford: Hollywood Icon and lifelong environmental activist, Robert Redford has been on the front line of environmental issues long before he started The Redford Center, whose mission is to make films that tell relatable stories inspiring positive change. Covering topics from disappearing water sources to clean air, the Center’s latest film Happening chronicles the beginning stages of the US’s clean energy economy and will premiere on HBO in 2016.
Emma Thompson: Back in September 2015, Shell Oil made the decision to cease exploration for fossil fuels in the Arctic. They said it was because preliminary findings showed the region to be too challenging to explore, but Oscar winner Emma Thompson and her friends at Greenpeace are happily taking the credit after protesting Shell’s London HQ for a solid week and acquiring over 7 million signatures for the “Save the Arctic” campaign.
Mark Ruffalo: Founder of both The Solutions Project and Water Defense, Ruffalo has been an outspoken environmentalist who has no problem raising his voice for a “…brighter, cleaner more hopeful future for all of us.” A champion for renewable energy, the Avenger’s star has even called out President Obama for his lack of understanding the problem. “When you have the president saying that climate change is absolutely for real and we must do something about it, and then in the next breath he says we must start drilling in the Arctic Circle even, there’s a huge disconnect, a cognitive dissonance.”
Ed Begley Jr.: He’s stared in hundreds of films and TV shows, but Ed Begley Jr. has made a name for himself as the “greenest” celebrity in Hollywood – and way before it was trendy. He lives in a custom built, LEED-platinum certified “green” home complete with a 10,000-gallon rainwater tank for watering his homegrown veggies. He’s hosted TV shows on climate change, written books, and created a line of natural cleaning products – and if all that isn’t enough to convince you how hard core Ed is, there is a rumor going around that he and good friend Bill Nye (yep, the Science Guy) are in a competition to see who can leave the smallest carbon footprint.