Hollywood stars team up for stunning video revealing dirty secret about where their money is going: 'We are literally forced'

Hundreds of celebrities have a "dirty secret" that they're revealing in a new video — and you may share the same one.

In a new social media campaign and public letter of protest, over 200 actors are banding together to share the secret many of them weren't even aware of until recently — that their union's pension fund is investing in oil and gas companies, with poor returns for their retirement money.

And if you have a retirement account, you're probably in the same boat. In fact, 99% of people with retirement savings are invested in fossil fuels, most without even knowing it.

Actors like Danny DeVito, Jane Fonda, Don Cheadle, and Ted Danson are speaking out as part of the "Retire Big Oil" campaign coordinated by activist group Stand.earth to pressure their union — the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) — to divest from fossil fuel investments.

SAG-AFTRA represents about 160,000 workers, with about 65,000 pension participants. Until this campaign, many of these actors, including longtime climate activist Jane Fonda, didn't even know the union's pension fund was investing in Big Oil — to the tune of $100 million of their $5 billion joint fund, according to publicly available documents analyzed by the climate-friendly investing company Sphere.

But about a year ago, Fonda met Alex Wright-Gladstein, Sphere's CEO and founder. "She was shocked and appalled," Wright-Gladstein told The Cool Down. "And she said, let's do something about it."

That led Wright-Gladstein to reconnect with Todd Paglia, executive director of activist organization Stand.earth (whom she had met at the Sun Valley Forum), to help start the campaign to divest from Big Oil. In an interview with The Cool Down, the pair shared the backstory of their year-long effort to persuade the SAG-AFTRA pension managers to make the switch, as well as the duo's decision to ultimately go public with the fight this week.

"We're all proud members of SAG-AFTRA, but we are literally forced to give our money to Big Oil," the actors say in the YouTube video.  

"They're really pissed," said Paglia of the celebrities participating to make the change.

Why is this important

"Fossil fuels have been the worst performing sector of the stock market," Paglia explained. "The fossil fuel sector has been the most volatile of the S&P 500 for the past decade." In fact, historical data from the S&P global sector index return data shows that investing in oil and gas over the past 10, 15, and even 20 years has the worst returns of any sector of the economy.

In addition, fossil fuels are contributing to the warming of our planet, so money invested in oil and gas ends up funding pollution instead of climate solutions. The more investment funding these oil companies have, the more well-positioned they are to continue drilling, for instance, and feel as though they do not need to diversify their business pursuits into other forms of energy to stay profitable.

Big institutions like the University of California, three of New York's City's pension funds, and the Rockefeller Foundation have already divested pension funds from oil and gas — not just to make more responsible investing choices but because oil and gas have just plain been a bad financial investment anyway.

In Hollywood's case, Paglia and Wright-Gladstein crunched the numbers on the SAG-AFTRA pension fund performance, which showed poor returns on oil and gas, and they took that historical and future trend data to the CEO of the union's pension fund and its consulting firm.

"We've shown them how much more money their members will have if they invest in non-fossil fuels," Paglia told The Cool Down.

"What we assumed is that once we brought the facts and members became vocal, that the SAG-AFTRA pension would get rid of 'Big Oil' because it was a bad investment. The financial case is impossible to get past — the fund managers have lost money with investments in Big Oil," he said.

"Instead, they have doubled down," he explained. "We went public with this as a last resort. … They haven't really listened, and we don't take 'no' for an answer."

Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, who signed the letter, put it this way: "It's 2025. Investing our union's pension in fossil fuels is like betting on Blockbuster in a Netflix world. It's not just financially outdated; it's environmentally dangerous and morally indefensible.

"We know a bad script when we see one, and continuing to bankroll fossil fuels is one story that's headed for a disastrous ending. It's time to change the narrative and invest in a future that's actually worth celebrating."

A spokesperson for the SAG-Producers Pension Plan told Bloomberg Green in a statement that climate change "can indeed be a factor influencing investment performance, and our professional active investment managers and consultants integrate these considerations into their risk and return analyses." The statement added that "we continue to work with our professional advisers to ensure our investments are both financially sound and responsibly managed."

What you can do if you don't want to fund Big Oil

Not only do the Retire Big Oil campaign organizers hope the union will divest from fossil fuel funds, but they also hope the very public campaign — amplified by an aggregate 250 million social media followers across the 200 celebrities supporting it — will inspire people around the world to understand the problem and the solution.

"We're going to reach billions of people who have not known that they are invested in Big Oil or how to get out of it," Paglia said.  

"The celebrities are just as excited about the impact of the campaign to spread the word about this cause and help everyone understand that they can move their money," Wright-Gladstein added.

Supporters can sign the campaign at RetireBigOil.com, and they can also take action in their own lives.

Sphere's online tool AtmosPhere will let you search your company's 401(k) to see what your company is investing in, and you can look into specific funds in your 401(k) at  FossilFreeFunds.org.

You can also ask your company to add a climate-friendly investment fund to its portfolio. For example, Sphere has launched the first climate-friendly index fund with low fees on par with a classic S&P fund that can be integrated into anyone's 401(k) plan.

Wright-Gladstein wants to make it easy — and profitable — to support climate solutions, instead of funding pollution, and her fund consistently outperforms oil and gas investments.

Some large corporations are already taking part on behalf of their employees. For example, Google recently added a climate-friendly fund from Parnassus to its 401(k) options for employees. An analysis by AsYouSow showed that Google employees could have earned an estimated $1.15 billion in additional returns, and that their retirement plan holdings could have been 9.15% higher, if the company had divested from the oil and gas industry 10 years ago, on an absolute and risk-adjusted basis.

According to Retire Big Oil's campaign data, when you stop investing in Big Oil, it has a larger climate impact than installing solar panels, driving an EV, reducing air travel, or planting 100 trees. Changing your investments could effectively lower your CO2 emissions contribution by 9 tons, whereas solar panels would reduce CO2 pollution by 6 tons.

What happens next?

If SAG-AFTRA agrees to switch pension funds or requires its existing pension funds to exclude oil and gas, then "Big Oil would lose $100 million, which begins to drain the financial viability of the industry," Paglia argued in a discussion at this year's Sun Valley Forum.

According to Sphere analysis of data from the Investment Company Institute and As You Sow, $1 trillion is invested in oil and gas in just U.S. retirement funds alone. That's one-seventh of the market cap of the fossil fuel industry, so shifting that out of fossil fuels, and even just some of it toward companies representing solutions instead, would have a massive impact.

"This is the very beginning of a major revolution in how pensions are managed that will lead to your and my pensions getting rid of Big Oil," Paglia predicts. "Within the next 1-2 years, it's going to be completely plug-and-play to push your pension managers to do this. It is 100% fixable."

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This article first appeared in The Cool Down here.