Actress and activist Jane Fonda has a message for wealthy Californians who oppose Proposition 30, a November ballot measure that would hike taxes on millionaires to subsidize electric vehicles and fund wildfire response and prevention:

“People who would choose to get rich and stay rich, as opposed to helping create a livable future, have to really seriously examine their priorities.”

Fonda, who acknowledged that her own taxes would go up if voters approve Prop. 30, shared her stance on the controversial ballot measure for the first time in an exclusive interview Monday.

Fonda spoke with me on Zoom from Los Angeles in between trips to Michigan, New Mexico and Texas to stump for candidates endorsed by the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, an organization she founded this year to help elect leaders who “care about people and the planet and the environment and the future more than corporations.”

The PAC has so far directly contributed $60,800 to 29 California candidates at the federal, state, county and city level, said Ariel Hayes, the PAC’s executive director and former national political director for the Sierra Club. Hayes said the PAC is still determining how much more it plans to invest before the Nov. 8 election.

• Those figures don’t include money contributed to “independent expenditure” committees — which don’t coordinate with the campaigns they’re trying to help — or money raised through online or in-person joint fundraising drives, Hayes said.

The PAC is just the latest climate endeavor for Fonda, 84, a two-time Academy Award-winning actress with a decades-long history of activism. Although Fonda announced in September that she had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, “this f—–g cancer is not going to keep me from doing all that I can,” she told me, adding that the climate crisis makes her “so scared I can’t sleep.”

After the November election, the PAC plans to zero in on California and the Gulf states, where the oil industry holds significant sway, Fonda said.

Other key takeaways from my interview with Fonda:

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1 COVID emergency to come to an end

California plans to end its COVID-19 state of emergency on Feb. 28, 2023, nearly three years after Newsom first declared one to help curb the spread of the virus, senior administration officials announced Monday. Here’s a closer look at some of the public health and political ramifications of the news, via CalMatters’ Kristen Hwang and Ana B. Ibarra:

2 Reports raise concern over greenhouse gas emissions

Monday greeted Californians with a mixed bag of climate news:

3 How politics influence the ‘California Exodus’

Ah, the California Exodus: The myth that keeps on giving. A Monday report from the Public Policy Institute of California was the latest to take a crack at the much-discussed and much-debated phenomenon through the lens of political ideology. A few particularly interesting findings:

• Asked if California’s high housing costs have led them to seriously consider moving out of state, 26% of very liberal respondents said yes, compared to 39% of those who self-identified as middle-of-the-road, 45% who described themselves as very conservative and 56% of those who disapprove of Newsom’s performance of governor. And 51% of Californians who said they pay much more than they should in taxes answered in the affirmative, compared to 23% who don’t think they pay too much.
• But, although 1 in 3 Californians has thought about leaving the state, only about 1 in 10 actually did so from 2016-20, according to the report.
• The takeaway: “A large share of Californians feel like they want to live somewhere else, and dissatisfaction with the state’s politics is at least part of the reason why. This dynamic probably pushes a few who might otherwise stay to leave the state. The result may be a politically skewed departure that nudges the state’s politics ever so slightly to the left.”

And personal finances may matter just as much, if not more, than political ideology. As income inequality gaps grow, the Public Policy Institute of California has found that people leaving the state are less wealthy than those moving in — including from Republican-led states such as Texas. And although new U.S. Census data showing a drop in median household income in metropolitan areas such as San Francisco suggests that wealthy Californians are leaving, many may simply be moving to cheaper regions within the Golden State. Indeed, the San Francisco Chronicle found that a growing share of city employees live in other Bay Area counties.

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